Choosing is freedom, choosing empowers us and our life is decided by destiny, chances and choices. Choices are, at the outset, just mathematical problems and are best made when all the options are evaluated and the most beneficial one out of them is chosen. While having too many choices is confusing, having too little makes you feel less powerful. While this scenario is true for most of the world, there are some outliers that act differently. This book covers both the majority and the minority, and shows how their cultures influence each of their decisions.
‘The art of choosing’ is a brilliant book on how choices are made, written by Sheena Iyengar. It emphasises how the very smallest of our choices depend on an aggregation of the smallest of events we have been part of, and the amount of exposure and involvement we have had in each of these events. Explained with vivid examples, this book is a deep dive into the psychology of decision making.
Sheena is an American of Indian origin. Her parents are conservative Sikhs who raised her in an environment that had a cultural belief familiar to them. Sheena looks at awe about how her parents were married overnight, with her father getting to meet her mother only on the day of the wedding. She emphasises how commonplace such weddings are, in Indian families. The compatibility of the families gets checked and the bride and the groom get married. While her Indian parents would believe that they couldn’t have found a better match if they were to choose someone by themselves, this idea could be horrifying for most of the readers. The question is how can one not choose whom they are going to spend the rest of the life with. But the answer is simple and that is, a couple wedded out of parents’ choice and another, out of their own, have the same goal. This goal is to run the family and raise children, AND the path chosen doesn’t really matter is what is her observation.
Her experiments find that happiness is directly proportional to the amount of control one perceives oneself to have. It’s not about how much control there is, but how much they believe they have. For different cultures, there are different goals. The East believes that to lose is to win, where the win is measured by the amount of sacrifice one has made for the welfare of the rest of the community. However, for an individual from the West, their well-being is of utmost priority. This clear distinction is backed by the example of an Olympic winner from the East and the West. While the one from the East would believe that he won due to the collective efforts of the family, the trainers and close friends, the one from the West would believe that his focus, determinant nature and practice attributed to the success.
Sometimes, the ultimate joy comes not from choosing, but from the result of the choice and the extent to which one can fulfil one’s duties.
It’s true that we learn out of our choices and others’ choices, and it is also utter irony how we believe we learn only in a formal educational institute. All the more ironic is when everybody believes that they are different from the rest of the crowd. A majority of the times, Robert Frost’s ‘The road not taken’ gets quoted in most of the school valedictorian speeches. If everybody takes the road not taken, who take the ones that are taken?
Our choices are guided by the autopilot brain that is responsible for making less important decisions and the reflective brain that governs the making of the more important ones. The more specific the requirement is, the easier does it become to choose. Hence, the art of choosing lies in having clarity and this clarity comes from what we learn out of the results of our own decisions. Thus the choice system is an important feedback loop and is a never-ending cycle.
When values clash in life, it could either turn into a battleground or a meeting place to make peace. The choice is ours!
