Have you ever hurt someone? No, not in that raw, visceral way, like what with a golf club across the head. But in that hellish way; paved with good intentions, lined with aspirations for good things to come? A word, an action, a turn of phrase; a decision that hurt someone you care about as surely as if you had stuck three inches of steel in between their ribs. That way that only your wayward agency can. Well, you’re human, you’re reading, I’m going to have to assume that you have.
Sometimes choices really fucking suck…
Which is a conclusion that runs contrary to our current dogma, ‘innit.
We’ve been lead to believe in the power of choice. We’ve been lead to believe that it is a tool with which the common person was meant to liberate themselves. A function through which we were supposed to affect change over our circumstances. A mechanism through which we were meant to learn responsibility.
Didn’t really turn out that way, did it though?
More money is spent to control and subvert our choices than is spent on curing cancer. The quality of representatives of our choice for affecting change keep spiralling downward into an argument of who is the least worst. And people as a general rule spend more time and effort rationalizing their bad decisions rather than sifting through the pain of them to find lessons worth learning.
Turns out this whole free-will thing, choice, is a double edged sword. And people aren’t very good at wielding it.
It’s easy to come to the conclusion that it’d be better to be rid of the whole notion. To just march along to someone else’s tune. We do that. A lot. We pick an ideal, an identity, an ideology, once, and just stick with it. One choice once to rule them all, never to be questioned or criticised again. We take up a place in a machinery, keep our head down, and don’t question it. We talk about Analysis Paralysis, and the crippling effects of overthinking. And some of the least mature of us have decided to quite frankly just not give a shit.
The coping mechanisms of the overwhelming burden of choice are legion.
Choices aren’t easy. To make, to bear, to stand by. We suffer for them. But, with the risk of sounding Buddhist, maybe that’s the point. Instead of a superpower, like what our golden calves of capitalism are prone to try and convince us it is, and manipulate us with, maybe our choices are a yoke. A burden to keep us grounded. Humble. For I know nothing as humbling as the pain left in the wake of my choices.
I’m not saying we should give it up. That we should rescind our obligations of agency. To make like Samson and beg our beloved Delilah to shear our hair off. I wouldn’t want that. No matter how much pain I’ve done unto others, or others have done unto me, or will continue to. Because whether we like them or not, whether we appreciate the responsibility inherent in them or not, our choices define us. Not just in the making of them, but how we live with them.
And who knows? Maybe one day, we’ll get it right, y’know? And wouldn’t that be nice?
/Sebastian Lindberg 26/10-2021
WastedWords 