Choices, choices, and more choices
An article about the distracted and sensitive society.
- What am I eating today? What to eat in the morning? How about at noon and the evening?
- Which show on Netflix am I going to watch this evening with my parents? That one gets a 7 on IMDB but I know I can find a better one. The one I watched last week got an 8. Let’s find a similar one because I want to see a fun one and if I choose a bad show, my parents might judge me.
- So which clothes am I going to wear today? Those pants suck. I don’t like that color... Why did I even buy that? What kind of loser am I?
- And I need some new shoes though, so am I going to check online? Maybe Nike. Yet I heard Adidas got a new collection. My friend who I don’t really like that much likes them so maybe I can impress him/her.
- *When looking at our phone every 5 min* What am I going to check? The Insta feed, or LinkedIn, or SnapChat or Facebook or whatever?
- We got a lot of choices on social media as well: who to follow, which photo ‘deserves’ my like, am I going to follow this person back?
The distracted society
I haven’t even talked about our life choices, but you can understand the mass of choices we have to make in our daily life.
The aforementioned choices appear as if we have freedom; the freedom to decide what to choose. You might get that feeling, but these choices only limit our freedom; the freedom to fully focus and spend our time to pursue something meaningful. Mark Manson has a very detailed description of this in his new book, so shoutout to him (the book gave me the inspiration to write this article).
The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life. — Mark Manson (Everything is fucked, p.206)
- If we limit ourselves to only use social media for 20 minutes a day in order to read more books, we create the freedom to get smarter.
- If we sacrifice/give up our bad habit of snoozing for 1 hour, we liberate our time.
- If we work out, we don’t have to choose what junk food to eat because we try to avoid eating that in the first place.
It’s a different type of freedom, and according to Mark, the only true form of freedom. And we fail to follow this type of freedom.
Today’s tyranny is achieved by flooding people with so much diversion, so much bullshit information and frivolous distraction, that they are unable to make smart commitments. — Mark Manson (Everything is fucked, p.210)
This diversion includes the millions of YouTube videos we can watch, products to buy, news to read, and much more.
If we concentrate on self-limitations and sacrifices, we can keep today’s tyranny in check, reduce distractions and encourage focus to commit to something meaningful and eventually find true freedom.
The sensitive society
If you make decisions based upon people’s reactions or judgments then you make really boring choices. ~Heath Ledger
We want validation to know if the clothes we chose to wear are indeed that cool. Or if we got the right deal on a car we just bought. Why? Because there are so many choices that the wrong one is likely one of them. And you know what happens when you make the wrong choice? You get judged. We don’t like being judged, so as a consequence, we spend way to much time thinking about choices, even after we’ve made them.
Our decisions are based upon people’s reactions and what should be done. About what your parents want you to do. About what the people around you will think of your choices. And if you do something different, this will cause reactions and judgment.
Lately, I’ve been delving myself into books and I also decided to give up porn. I would say that’s a decision that is quite dissimilar to what people normally do. And I received mixed reactions and judgment. Some made fun of it, but others were genuinely interested in why I did that. I also think that made me more of an interesting person. A few were even impressed that I had the courage to bring something so sensitive out in the open. This doesn’t mean it will always end that way, but you will only know if you try.
Don’t be afraid of these reactions and judgment. Start that YouTube channel, or the podcast you always wanted to create. Do that study about archeology, even though your parents want you to become a lawyer. It will make you more interesting and happy.
All in all. Don’t think the large amount of choices we have is something positive because it can be really distracting. Do you want to be less distracted and more focused? Concentrate on your sacrifices and limitations.
Do you want to do something different, but you’re afraid of people's reactions and judgment? Don’t be, because you will become more interesting as a person and you will be happier. Why waste time worrying over what people think of your life when they are worrying as much about their life as you do about yours.
In the end, we’re all a speck of dust in space and time and it won’t matter what you’ve achieved in your life. It matters that when you turn 80 years old, you feel okay with dying because you’ve lived a wonderful, challenging life without regrets.
I had a hard time writing this article because some ideas about freedom can be a bit hard to understand, but I’m glad how it turned out. Thanks for reading! Leave a comment with your thoughts or send me a message via Instagram. I’m always open for a conversation. Have a great day.
