I was watching Barry Schwartz speak recently on the paradox of choice. Of the 20-odd minutes he was presenting, one line from his talk struck me - "you really want to get your decision damn right, if it is for all eternity".
He was talking about how "more choices" paralyzes people into inaction and was citing some research done on retirement fund savings at Vanguard. Anyway, I do believe in the paradox of choice. Is the world really becoming a better place by having more choices? Cars, cellphones, monthly internet plans, Heck! even getting a simple sandwich is tough - Blue cheese , Ranch or Italian? Wheat, white or rye? There is an explosion of choices available to all humans today.
Are we better off?
An important question, however, this is not the question that I am interested in or even going to attempt to answer. That's for learned psychologists and economists to worry about. I would like to explore things we DON'T choose in our lives.
I feel that knowing this is crucially important as well - and yet, there is very little discussion on this. Apart from few proverbial chestnuts like, 'we don't choose our friends' etc. there is little explicit discussion on things that we don't or can't choose - and especially regarding things that matter. In someway, I feel that unearthing the things that we don't choose would be liberating and hence might hold the key to happiness.
Someone once told me that there are three things that profoundly affect
all of our lives. The 3 things are:
1. Which family we are born into?
2. Who do we spend our lives with? or Who is the love of our life?
3. What our kids do when they grow up? or How our kids lead their lives?
As I look at these 3 things - the fundamental factors, which determine how happy we feel over our lifetime - I came to a realization that we have very limited choice in these matters. Its astounding for me to realize that the things which give us the most amount of happiness are the very things that we are completely incapable of affecting in anyway. Whatever
delusions of control we might carry about how we lead our lives are quickly swept away by this realization.
It is arguable if the 3 things above are indeed the right set of items. What about wealth? power? fame? etc. Don't these things contribute to our happiness? Well, ofcourse yes. But the factors which enable us to get into a position of achieving wealth, power and fame, directly germinate from whether or not we had a 'decent headstart' and a 'happy and stable family'. While the first point on the list refers to the headstart, the other 2 are about having a happy and stable family.
Now, my father was a genius - a small town blue collar engineer who rose from poverty, went on to graduate from one of the best schools in India, was brilliant in academics, and had an infectious passion for cricket, music, arts and life-in-general. My mother had 4 college degrees, taught science in a school, and was an incredible beacon of compassion, love and strength. I am not sure if I would have tread the same path in life if I were born to a different set of parents. Infact, I am significantly under-achieveing given the headstart I have had. But thats a different subject. I have had my share of roadblocks. But, coming back to the point, I sometimes wonder about being born in a village in Mozambize or into a broken family etc. So did I have a choice in this matter [where I was born]? The answer, which I hope you will all agree, is No! And yet, did this [where I was born] affect my life in profound ways? Absolutely yes!
Therefore, in some way, outcome of our lives is a product of this decent or underprivilidged (as the case might be) headstart that we get from being born into a particular household. Having said this, I must mention that there are some remarkable people who do overcome this with great gusto - for most people (the 80%, content to be well inside the bell curve) the headstart matters. And what they go on to achieve during their lifetime is determined in a significant way by which household they were born into. I sadly don't have any statistical research on this, but I know some research from the field of corporate performance (see the Strategic Management Journal) where researchers have often found a significant 'residual' (unexplained factor) when they attempt to unearth what really drives corporate performance. I call this luck.
Now, here is my main contention or my central thesis - If I don't have any control whatsoever on the things that affect my life profoundly, they why do I worry at all? Why do I carry this delusion of control? and, Why do I fret about relatively insignifant problems in life?
Coming to other things, and again, I don't have statistics to convince you, but I hope you will agree that over a long-term (a lifetime) our achievements are built on a platform of a happy and stable family. Or forget about achievements for a second (who needs them! hah!) just think about being on your death bed, with clear certainty of death in the next few minutes. At that time, I am sure you won't be bothered with your bank balance or your position in the corporate hierarchy - what would matter would be the people around you and how much they care for you.
So do I really have a choice in who do I spend my life with? My life's experience says No! Love just happens. I am grateful that it has happened to me, and that I am able to nurture the incredible feeling of heightened senses and pure joy. More importantly, I didn't plan to fall in love with say person X - it just happened - moreover, the fact that I may or may not end up being with that person is still uncertain. We come back to the same question - Do I have a choice in this matter? No! And yet, over the long-term, will this [ending up with the person I love] affect my life in profound ways? Absolutely yes!
Same thing applies to kids - they can be a source of incredible joy, and yet we have little control over the outcome of their lives or whether they end up even liking their parents or not. At best we can do our best at raising them, teaching them and imparting certain values via examples. But we can't profess any control whatsoever about how they turn out to be, later in their lives. Yet 99% of the parents carry an incredible
delusion of control about the fact that they can affect the outcome or control what their kids will
think or do.
We have just established that we have no choice on the most important things in our lives, which contribute most profoundly towards a happy life. Yet we worry, or feel stress everyday or strive to be happy. Whats the point? Why do we wrestle so much with this delusion of control?
I don't know. I just know that I feel a little more liberated each time I realize the things we don't choose.
Coming back to choices, and the explosion of alternatives on offer today - which is where our discussion started. Barry Schwartz claims that more choices end up making us even more dissatisfied in life. He feels that
having too many choices presents us with too many imagined alternatives that induces us to regret the choice that we have made and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction we ought to get from the decisions we make, even if, at the time, it was a good decision. Hence, and I agree with him, that we end up more dissatisfied when presented with more choices than we would have been, if we had lesser 'imagined alternatives' to choose from.
Why do I bring this up again? The reason being that we can't talk about happiness without understanding 'regret', 'satisfaction' and 'expectations'. We all know that
low expectations = happiness. But have you ever achieved any meaningful happiness by having low expectations? Its just an impractical idea. So where does this old impractical belief leave us? and what is low expectation anyway? Can we even control the amount of expectation we feel? I guess not. In fact I hope not! Because it would amount to dampening of senses. What I mean is that I feel that we can't live our lives by going through it via a dampening muzzle (like a silencer of a gun). We need to live it with a bang! We deserve to live it fully by feeling all the senses that we feel. Yet, we are told to manage our expectations. Its just not possible. Would you like to dampen your senses during sex just to convince yourself later that you really enjoyed it? Its absurd.
I prefer a more rational route of realizing happiness through the deeper understanding of choices (or lack thereof), regrets and (dis-) satisfaction. Understanding that regret is born from imagining alternative choices we could have made and knowing that dissatisfaction is born from our heightened expectations and thinking about pleasant attributes of those alternative choices is fairly important. We can't dampen our expectation each and every time we confront a glowing moment in our life. That would be living a very muted - or a shock absorbed life. Instead, if we well and truly realize that we can't really
choose to be happy, then where does this leave us?
I think in a great position. We only need to do 2 things in life:
1) Keep an open mind
2) Go about doing the best in everything that we set out to do
and hope that the so called "big" things, which are totally out of our control anyway, will fall in place - Hence we have no reason to worry at all - which leaves me quite a happy person :-)
What about you?
