Life's Choices
Understanding choices, the importance of having a goal and how to not be lost
The great philosopher… err… comedian… err… actor. Actor, yes! The great actor Jim Carrey in one of his philosophical, yet comic, musings mentioned that every choice that we make can typically be bucketed into (a) choices made out of love and (b) choices made out of fear. While this may seem like a false binary, it kind of rings of truth as well.
For a moment, let's assume this to be true. Given this, if I look back at my life I have made a lot of decisions based in fear. But that alone doesn't make them bad decisions. I believe they were practical decisions. I believe that knowing what I knew about the choices that I had to make, I would always make the same decisions again. They might be rooted in fear, but that fear was real at the time.
For example, when I was choosing between pursuing a Masters in Management in India or in France, I chose India. This was because it was 2009, the recession era in the wake of the sub-prime crisis. How foreign policies would evolve, how stable the economy would be and how welcoming of foreigners taking jobs would France be were the uncertainties that I had no answers for. While France promised a life full of joie de vivre, India offered stability and assurance. At that point in time, being from a lower middle-class background, I valued the latter more. Especially given my goal of an early retirement to focus on writing, the assurance would imply that the certainty of attaining that goal is more.
I guess what I am trying to say is that as long as the decisions made out of fear are calculated ones, they are not necessarily bad decisions. But they do come with the added heaviness of you having to come through on the bargain you’ve settled for when not making the choice you could have made out of love.
The important thing, once you understand that you've made a decision out of legitimate fear, is to ensure that it empowers you to make decisions out of love in the future. In the case of the example above, if I am able to ensure that I retire early and pursue my passion, my fear-decision would play its part in helping me make my long term love-decision.
In a sense, the heaviness comes from having to ensure that you are constantly moving towards your goal. In my case, the goal of pursuing writing eventually, helps me work with a single-minded dedication towards it's attainment. In someone else's case, however, it's possible that there's no clear goal. What do you do in that case? The lack of a clear goal can pose a challenge in understanding why you made a decision out of fear. It's possible to feel regret around the decisions based in fear, if one doesn't know how it benefits them. A decision made out of love could clearly have at least afforded some joy — a spiritual gratification, if not material success.
One option is to be a casual and relaxed. Be the leaf in the wind that doesn't care where it lands. Go with the flow. If you can do that, there's nothing more relaxing.
If, however, if you are anything like me that Unbearable Lightness of Being simply doesn't work. You want to try and ensure that when you look back at the last five years (or ten, if you are old like me too) after your big fear-decision and feel like it somehow made sense. Right?
What then? It suddenly isn't enough to say, "I don't know what I want from life." While it's a natural reaction for most of us and there's nothing wrong in being a little lost, it's equally important to not give up trying. There are a plethora of articles out there that celebrate the lost and confused 20 and 30 somethings. While there's a need to feel comfortable about it, while there's a need to be okay with trying and failing in finding your purpose, it's definitely not okay to stop trying.
What then?
I believe there's a sphere of possibilities for everyone as to where they might end up in five (or ten) years. All that is needed is to start narrowing that down. Start with an elimination oriented approach to arrive at an increasingly smaller sliver of a life that you'd want for an older you.
In the diagram above, the goal is to keep increasing the red and yellow areas and reducing the green one. This process would help you make prospective calculated fear-decisions and make love-decisions wherever you can. It would also help you retrospectively analyse your fear-decisions and ensure that you are heading towards the green sliver — which at the very least, lends some sense to your fear decisions.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and I am sure we can have a spirited discussion on this with all of your inputs and life experiences.
