Tag Archives: choice

Having choice

There are billions of people in our world that are constrained by not having enough choice.

How many people in the world don’t have a choice of what their next meal will be? How much they will get? How nourishing it is?

How many children must work, and do not have the opportunity to go to school?

How many children do not have a choice of more than one thing to wear? Or are forced to wear something for religious reasons?

How many people pray to an unjust and cruel God, for fear of the wrath of their own family or community, (and not God), to ask questions?

How many people are not given the chance to speak out against their ruling government for fear of imprisonment or death?

Basic human and civil liberties are something that have improved over the past 50 years, and simple metrics like reductions in poverty and in deaths by malnutrition tell us this. But in an ever shrinking world brought together by the internet, inequalities are far more visible. And the sensitive nature of some of these topics are such that people speaking out can face ridicule, harassment, and might even fear for their lives.

Some people are given less choice about how they get to live their lives: The language they speak, their geography, their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual orientation, their parents, their social and economic status, all these can in some way limit or privilege the choices a person has. But for many, they are not limited in their ability to see what others have, and even show off, that they do not have. Affluence and privilege is flaunted openly and excessively. This creates an even bigger divide, because the rich and the famous so obviously have choices that others do not. Agency feels relative when comparing those who have much of it from those that do not.

How important is the right to basic survival (food and shelter)?

How important is the right to a good education?

How important are civil rights and freedoms?

These are all vitally important when they are not available, and easy to undervalue when they are readily available. When we are given the freedom and choices others are not, what is our obligation to speak up and to help the less fortunate?

What obligation should the wealthiest people of the world, those with the most choice, have towards those with less choice?

If you earned $1,300.00 a day for 2,000 years, you still wouldn’t be a billionaire. If you spent $36,000.00 a day for 75 years, you still would not have spent a billion dollars. How is it that the number of billionaires in the world are growing? What does this small group of people need this much money for?

Inequalities are so blatantly obvious in our world today. Some of these are being addressed in amazing ways, but globally inequalities are being exaggerated. Geography, wealth, culture, and history matter significantly and these all factor into the choices people have and, in many cases, the choices people don’t have. I think the most powerful choice we can make is to choose what we value, and devote time, effort, and compassion to those with less choice than us… and not valuing fortune, fame, and financial affluence. This is a choice we can all make.

Too much choice

I’ve been thinking a lot about creative constraints recently. In the move to give students more choice and more freedom to explore their own passions and interests, we sometimes forget that constraints and limitations can help foster both creativity and work completion.

Tell kids to pick any topic to study and some will flourish while others will flounder. Tell kids they have a lot of time to work, some will engage and use it well, while others will squander that time. Tell kids they can present in any format they want, and some kids will be creative while others will choose the easiest path, (even if they love the topic they are presenting on).

We don’t always benefit from choice. 15 kinds of toothpaste to choose from doesn’t translate to us choosing the best toothpaste… and probably delays our selection time. Sometimes it’s easier if we have less choice or limits to how much time we spend on something. “Constraints aren’t the boundaries of creativity, but the foundation of it.”

When we put constraints on projects, limiting resources, time, scope, size, delivery, or focus, we might be restrictive and limit choice, but done with thought and purpose, we can also inspire creativity.

Choosing well

Some choices we make are hugely influential and others are not, yet we seldom make distinctions when we should. Or at least, we get lost in the importance of decisions that are not important, giving them too much value.

We can spend a couple minutes choosing the right cereal to buy in the store… but both of our choices result in bringing home a breakfast that is loaded in refined sugar.

We can spend hours watching a TV series that is less interesting than it was when we started watching, but we feel committed to finishing the season. We don’t allow ourselves the choice to stop watching. On that note, when was the last time you chose to walk out of a theatre because the movie was bad? You probable chose to stay until the end… but it likely didn’t feel like you had a choice. You think or justify, ‘It might get better’, but it never does.

We can spend hours making a big purchase like a car, then let a salesman talk us into features and add-one we don’t need. Our choice for the car is done, and suddenly we are more easily persuaded and less likely to exercise choice.

How many unimportant choices do we spend too much time on? How many times do we passively do something without giving ourselves a choice to do something different? And how many times do we delay important choices to the point that our choices diminish? For example, you can’t decide what to do, and 2 hours later one of your choices is eliminated because there isn’t enough time to do it.

‘To do’ lists can become not do lists. I will choose to do a few easy things on the list, but those big things will sit on tomorrow’s list. I will write down the things I’m choosing to do later instead of now. I will add more things to the list so that I don’t have to do those things already on the list.

We make thousands of decisions a day. Some are big, but most are small. We also make thousands of non-decisions a day, doing something without realizing we can do something else or choose to do the same thing differently.

What’s something that you can do differently today? What’s something that you can make a choice not to do, that you do out of habit? Where in your daily routine can you empower yourself with better choices?