Freedom from Choice
Thinking about relationships, work, and home
Last week I texted my ex girlfriend. When we broke up, I was excited to have more freedom. Now, after speaking to her again, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between freedom and making decisions.
Girlfriend = Less Freedom?
You give up certain freedoms when you commit to a girlfriend or boyfriend. For example, you can no longer pursue other prospects or fly away to another country without notice. There are now two people directly impacted by your decisions.
But on the other hand, you gain freedom from choice. After you choose to be in a relationship, you can stop considering your other options. You opt out of the dating game into a new game.
This is freedom because making decisions is hard. The paradox of choice means having too many options can sometimes be more stressful than if our choices were made for us, say in an arranged marriage.
That is not saying I want an arranged marriage, just that on some level, it would make things less complicated. Decision fatigue is a real thing. And more importantly, failure to settle on an option eventually results in having no options.
Time waits for no one
For example, if you never decide on a partner, you will eventually become too old and miss out on starting a family. This is also painfully obvious in career choice.
When you are 18, you are mostly free to pursue anything; you are nothing but potential. However, once you select a path, you can no longer take the others. To many, myself included, this feels like a paralyzing loss of freedom.
But ironically, if we never decide on a path, time will ultimately take all our options away from us. A 30-year-old Peter Pan has inherently fewer career options than a baby-faced 18-year-old.
So just like in the example of choosing a partner, picking a career sacrifices short-term freedom for long-term optionality. Once you have a career, you can build a life around that career. In that way, a second-order consequence of picking a career is long-term freedom.
For example, if you are between becoming a teacher and a clinical psychologist, it would be helpful to just fucking choose. Both are optimal to letting time decide for you.
Finding a home
Lastly, deciding where to live may follow a similar dynamic. You can keep jumping around from city to city, but if you never settle on a home, you will miss out on the chance to build strong community roots. Or as Seneca put it two thousand years ago,
“People who spend their whole life travelling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.”
I think this is slightly less true in a world with the internet, but still worth considering.
Freedom is still nice
This is what I have been thinking about. Of course, I still value freedom, but more and more I am realizing there is great meaning to be found in making decisions and accepting the trade-offs of those decisions.
Summary
Some choices reduce our freedom in the short term yet give us more freedom in the long term. Such decisions include our romantic partners, careers, and where we live. These choices are critical to consider well because they impact many future options, but any choice is usually optimal to letting time decide for us.