Posted 3 years, 10 months ago mid-afternoon by oso
Freedom
A couple days ago I wrote that “these days” we have too many choices and that, perhaps, those choices impede our happiness because each decision carries the heavy uncertainty of all the other options we ruled out. From the thoughtful and meaningful emails I received afterwards, it appears that the idea resonates with a lot of people.
Of course, I’m far from the first person to talk about the oppressiveness of choice. It seems like every modern anthropologist and sociologist works the theme into their contemporary talking points. Not long ago, UTNE Reader had a fantastic issue dedicated solely to the study of choice. It was also one of the “thinking democrats’” main arguments against Bush’s social security reform. (Giving Americans choice in how they invest their social security would cause them anxiety that they were making the wrong choices, went the argument.)
Going back even further, Sartre – in the middle of the 20th century – said that humans are too free. They, as in you and me, as in right now, can do absolutely anything the physical properties of the world allow for. And that limitless freedom is so terrifying that we invent boundaries and rituals, rules and commitments to convince ourselves that we are not really so free. “I must live here, I must finish school, I must keep this job, I can’t sleep with more than 10 people, I need to get married,” we tell ourselves because, frankly, life is a lot easier and a lot more comforting when we are told what we must do.
Even further back, Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Return essentially implied that we are free of responsibility for our actions – the choices we choose – because there is no way to know, in the grand scheme of things, which choice was “the best.”
But now, like never before, our lives are inundated with more choices than Nietzsche or Sartre could have ever foreseen. Just imagine if you were born 100 years ago in a rural Guatemalan town of 2,000 people. Imagine the choices you would have had to make throughout your life and compare that to your life today. What we study, our interests, our 13.2 careers, who we date, where we live, what we eat, the music we listen to. the way we dress, who we marry, who we divorce, who we remarry, what car to buy, how many kids we choose to have, our computer operating system, the languages we speak, our friends, our enemies. Choices we don’t even think about because if we did, our heads would explode.
Instead we use a faculty of the brain or body – what’s the difference? – which doesn’t even exist: intuition, or “the gut.” When we choose a career and when we choose to get married, it’s not because we know that we want this job or that person more than all others for the rest of our life. That’s impossible to know. It’s because we believe we’ll be happier if we eliminate the very possibility of choice from here on out.
Familiarity
There are three cafes here in Caracas where I have my morning coffee, palmera or cachito de jamón, and read the newspaper. They are: Coma, el CELARG, and the plaza of el Museo Bellas Artes. I go to these places because they are, by now, familiar. I know what to expect.
But every morning that I return to these three places I also realize that I’m not giving a chance to the other hundreds or thousands of cafes around Caracas. So this morning I chose choice over familiarity. I hopped on metro line 3 and got off where everyone else did – Ciudad Universitaria as it turned out – put on my iPod, and started walking until I found a cafe I liked. Coming out of the metro station, I was faced with a red and yellow mural of Che. Below his iconic portrait were the words “the university doesn’t belong to anyone.” And opposite the mural were about five or six booths – surrounded by Levis-wearing students – selling pirated copies of the latest DVD’s from Hollywood and CD’s of American pop music.
45 minutes later I was still walking. By this point I passed two busy McDonalds and a number of crowded indoor mini-malls. But I couldn’t find a single mom-and-pop’s bakery or cafe. I was reminded of a conversation I had with Luis Carlos just a couple days ago. We had met at one major shopping mall in Chacao only to take motorcycle taxis across town to another major shopping mall where we met with a group of bloggers on our way to a party.
Walking through the second mall’s main corridor Luis Carlos said, “you know, all these malls, they’re all new. They didn’t even exist a couple years ago. Centro San Ignacio, Sambil, el Recreo, this one, all of them are new.”
I commented on how crowded they always were.
“Yeah, because they’ve replaced the plazas and the small stores and the markets. People come here because they’re safe, and clean, and … because everyone else comes here.”
And, because they are familiar. Every mall in Caracas has the same stores with the same layouts. The same restaurants with the same menus. The same food-courts with the same combo meals. You go to a mall, any mall, and you know what you like and what you don’t. There’s no anxiety of whether you should order the pasticho de pollo or filet de atún at some hole-in-the-wall restaurant because you already know that the combo #4 super-sized is for you and you know that it will taste exactly the same every single time. There are no “bad days” at McDonalds.
Or as Megan McArdle puts it:
Standardization reduces volatility. I won’t have the highs – I’ll never have the really great meals at Olive Garden, but I also won’t have a really bad meal.
She said that on a brilliant episode of Christopher Lydon’s Open Source podcast. This particular show, “The End of Free Will,” was named after Clay Shirky’s recent fascinating essay, and deals in part with why we have abandoned independent cafes, restaurants, boutiques, and bookstores in favor of Starbucks, the Cheesecake Factory, Forever 21, and Barnes and Noble.
Both Jim Leff and Clay Shirky place the blame not on the consumer, but rather, manipulative nuero-marketing and brand-awareness by major chains. Each day we need to make thousands and thousands of choices, more than our brains could ever handle, but when we see the familiar green mermaid of Starbucks or freckly face of Wendy’s we’re immediately drawn in, unconsciously, because our brains know, “here is a familiar place, a place where I know what to order, how to order, how to pronounce it.” And we choose the ease of familiarity – despite the mediocre food – over the risk of novelty and uncertainty and potential regret.
I can certainly understand their argument. When Baja Fresh first came out in San Diego – when it was still it’s own small chain – I was an immediate fan. Here’s a place with real grilled chicken, quality ingredients, fresh and unlimited salsa. It didn’t taste like fast food and yet, when I was in a hurry, I could run in, grab a $5 burrito, and run out 20 minutes later. Then, they suckered me. I see their logo and I go in, not because I really want a Baja Fresh burrito, but because I think I do. And they’re not $5 anymore. They’re about $7, which is more expensive than the lunch specials at a lot of really great independent Thai, Mexican, French, Vietnamese … hell, a whole slew of quality and independent restaurants around San Diego.
The third guest on the show, Megan McArdle, does more than just hold her own. By telling people that they are wrong in their choice of Burger King over their local french bistro, she argues, you’re making a value judgement. You may have different aesthetic or culinary preferences, but you can’t tell them they are wrong when they go to a fast food restaurant.
Passing by the second busy McDonalds as I heard this I wondered if she was right. Am I really choosing what is “best” or is my own preferred “brand” an independent cafe with the NY Times and the latest copy of the New Yorker? Furthermore, the “independent cafes” I used to love so much just 5 years ago now hardly exist. And where they do, they are mostly copy-cats of the big chains. I don’t see the same pride in quality of craftsmanship. What I see are plastic wrapped madeleines from Costco – because Starbucks consumers are familiar with them and because everyone is a Starbucks consumer – and a separate menu with more than a dozen kinds of frappuccinos.
Walking Down the Boulevard
Finally I reach – via my rambling, circuitous route – what appears to be a main thoroughfare of restaurants, bars, delis, and cafes. I spot one cafe/bakery with some good looking palmeras and a real espresso machine, but it’s absurdly dark inside and the tables are too close together. Another down the road has a comfortable ambience and air conditioning, but no espresso machine. Across the street is another with a bunch of college kids reading outside. It looks like a good choice and my stomach is starting to rumble with hunger. But eyeing further down the boulevard, I can’t help but wonder if something even better awaits.
And it occurs to me, isn’t this how we make all our choices? Aren’t we always walking down the boulevard, keeping our eyes out for what’s best while wondering if something even better might lie ahead? When do we decide to stop? When do we know that we’ve made a good choice based on all that we’ve seen and all that we haven’t?
Eventually I settled on a cafe that had both fresh palmeras and an espresso machine. My palmera was dry and too flaky, but my cafe marrón (a macchiato) was heavenly. I sat outside and started reading the newspaper, occasionally glancing over at the passerby. Bolivia and Venezuela have signed a military pact to construct military bases around the Bolivian border, the Chilean paper El Mercurio discovered. The “Social Responsibility” supplement had an article on a solar energy project in the Amacuro Delta. Maybe I’ll translate the article to English and post it on the blog, I thought to myself. And I wondered if the other cafe a few blocks back – the one with all the college kids hanging out in front – would have been a better choice.
Who knows. There’s no way to. I take comfort in that. I feel the caffeine take to my bloodstream. I open my notebook and I start to write.
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but humans aren’t cafes or malls — faith isn’t “belief” — humans don’t “believe” they will be happier, they have faith in it — humans don’t “eliminate all other choices,” rather they make choices, they make a conscious decision to stay happy when they are lucky enough to find it ~ how sad a thought to naively believe: “When we choose a career and when we choose to get married, it’s not because we know that we want this job or that person more than all others for the rest of our life. That’s impossible to know. It’s because we believe we’ll be happier if we eliminate the very possibility of choice from here on out.” — I think that was a recent episode of the Gilmore Girls.
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Usually, products of a broken home have your perception of love and/or marriage which usually continues the cycle of broken homes and hearts. It is so messed up that people would believe finding their mate or a good partner to share the rest of your life with is as easy or disposable as this utopic cafe you so believe to exist. Part of being married of finding your soul mate is to know that that person (‘your other half’) will be there for you for even when the newer mall opens up.
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eme,
I think faith is a good word. The second definition:
Much easier than constantly questioning if god exists is to insist that he does. There is no question that people who have faith are happier. Plenty of studies have shown that those who pray and go to church are happier than those who don’t. And, of course, Nietzsche ended his own life. But who are we to admonish him for his constant curiosity?
I should probably stop wondering these things and start watching more Gilmore Girls.
Kim Taylor,
I think you’ve misunderstood the post. What I’m talking about is where I choose to eat, not who I choose to spend the rest of my life with. It seems like you took the third part – “Walking down the boulevard” – as a metaphor for finding someone to spend the rest of my life with. That’s not it at all. Love isn’t something you just pick out on the grocer’s aisle. Hence the popular saying, “you don’t choose love, love chooses you.” Rarely do I write about love on this weblog, but if you’d like to see a post that does talk about love, you can find it here.
Back to food though. My whole point is that the “utopic cafe” does not exist. But how do we know when to stop looking for what most closely resembles it?
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You pick the cafe when you are hungry. Apparently you and Revaz never get hungry. Walking past 10 zillion cafes for the right one. The right one was any of them, when your belly was ready. The point is you seem to be obsessing about whether the choice “right” when you seem to aknowledge that that not only could you not know, but also that each choice, once made, is equally right to the choices made in a hypothectical parrallel yet distinct universe.
Also… THE MUSIC IS COMING I promise
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Naiveté strikes again here in this blog ~ you state, [regarding Faith] “Much easier than constantly questioning if god exists is to insist that he does.” First, if there is a God, it’s more likely “She.” More importantly, having Faith is much harder than constantly questioning anything and everything. Only people who are too afraid or lazy to have Faith in something think that’s the easy way out. Faith in your religion, if you have one, but also Faith in Yourself, in Others, in Love, in a damn good cup of coffee every morning at the same table ~ it’s much, much more difficult to feel out your Faith, to rely on it, to see it tested, to lose it, to get it back, and make it grow ~ sometimes all in the same day. Constantly questioning something is just spinning your wheels in the mud — all you’re left with is dried flecks of dirt clouding your decisions that you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to clean up. Faith doesn’t admonish curiosity, it opens a more profound door. Reaching a point where you believe in something doesn’t mean you stop wondering about it or kill its intellectual curiosity ~ it simply, or profoundly, adjusts the lens you use to see things. I think your lens is covered in flecks of dried dirt.
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The first thing that came to my mind after reading this post is algorithms (also, intelligence or artificial intelligence)… and I also had this mental picture of Neo saying “the problem is Choice”.
We humans can judge options and quickly disregard them,… perhaps this kind of ‘fast judging’ is what we call ‘common sense’; you can’t teach common sense… in a way it is part of our ‘do not overthink’ mechanism that prevents our brain from ‘hanging’ or rather exploding.
The toughest choices to make regard food: at restaurantes, I find it difficult choosing filete a la tampiqueña or pescado al mojo de ajo. However, I’m very brand conscious, or rather monopoly conscious (I avoid ‘familiar’, big, businesses; I kind of think that the future of small businesses depends on me spending the money on them).
Btw, Starbucks is like the plague… it even found its way inside my college! WTF!
Oh well…
Going out is another interesting topic that can be hard when you have to make a choice…
I have a close group of friends, and when we gather at a friends house… we have a hard time finding something else to do than play billiard. We know that we’ll be perfectly happy playing pool forever and ever. Perhaps it is something we do because we know that everyone will be happy doing it.
And so, in a way,… I understand other people’s need to find a safe haven (standardization?) for trivial activities, like food… etc.
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Aus Deutschland? Nein! Ich schreibe von Mexiko.
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I feel genuinely uncomfortable in a Starbucks. Like I’m walking in to a club to which I do not belong; and everybody knows it.
Its odd to me that you disparage having choices and options (if that is indeed what you are doing) because you seem to live in such a way as to maximize the choices available to you. At the same time, many of the choices I make are designed to keep options open in the future as well. Probably because my mom’s favorite admonition growing up was “don’t permanently close any doors,” by which she generally meant “get good grades and then if you don’t want to go to college, you can choose not to”. I think the most important thing is to be conscious of the fact that we have choices. Satre, if I remember from my limited undergraduate academic encounters, was concerned not just with the fact that humans have an infinite number of choices available to them, but more with the fact that people were generally unware or in denial of their own options. As you said, they make excuses to deny the fact that they had made a choice at all: “I had to cooperate with the Nazis or they would have killed me” is really just another way of saying “I chose to cooperate with the Nazis in order to save my own life”. While both statements amount to essentially the same thing, the latter statement is the more honest and healthy of the two. I think the surest way to unhappiness is to live in such a way as to deny that we had other options. Taking responsibility for our decisions is the first step to living an honest life.
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Sparsh,
I appreciate the laugh. For those of you who weren’t there, Sparsh, Revaz, Revaz’s sister, and Revaz’s sister’s roomate where all looking for a good place to find a cup of coffee. The scenario wasn’t too far off from the third part of this post and it was driving Sparshles crazy. He started pulling out his hair as he’s prone to do.
He just couldn’t understand how a group of people could be so persnickety about where they drink their cup of joe when it took valuable time away from looking at beetles at the natural science museum. Worse, he found a girl who liked to look at beetles just as much as he does and we were taking valuable time away from his beetle date. Haha, what a memory.
Don’t worry about the podcast brother – soon it’ll be summer here in South America and it will once again make sense to release a podcast of summer music.
Rolando,
Starbucks in el Tec!! No me digas! Then again, I’m not really surprised … you do go to the bonafide universidad de fresas. May I recommend that you and your friends play ping pong instead of pool? It’s way more fun. And after a couple beers, ufff.
I think I definitely need to update the table of IP addresses-to-countries. Supposedly I was from Germany last night too.
Abo,
Dude, totally. I’m not part of the club either. I ask for a medium coffee or a double espresso and it’s always, “you mean grande” or, “you mean doppio?” The way they say it, it’s like they’re junior high bullies making fun of me for having a lisp.
Anyway, I think that your comment – as they tend to do – really summed up in one paragraph what took me about three pages to not quite get right. Well said hermano. You’re using Opera these days?
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Ok so, I have nothing intellectual to say except..hahaha McMierda..lol..ahhhhh…ok I’m done.
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It all has to do with structure vs. agency, my friend. Again, you have to take one of my classes – only then will it all make sense to you.
Ah, the power of indoctrination.
This post made me think of an observation by an Italian columnist, Bepe Severgnini, who wrote, “McDonald’s cheeseburgers do not taste like cheeseburgers, rather they taste like McDonald cheesburgers.” Never underestimate the comfort and power of familiarity in this chaotic and unpredictable world.
A recent study found that infants could recognize corporate logos and their associated products before they knew numbers or letters. It is sad that they will think of the letter M as the one that looks like the McDonald’s sign.
As to the utopic cafe, you will never find it because it is different everyday. The best you can do is make the cafe you are in, the utopic one…even if it is the foreign/alien Starbucks. Actually the best coffee I have had recently was a delightfully creamy espresso at a bar in a Whole Foods store in Jersey.
And you know, this post made want a fish taco – one of the few things you can’t get in NY (at least a utopic one).
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[...] David Sasaki has an interesting post on “The Freedom of Familiarity” — or alternatively, the slavery of choice. He discusses the boundaries of freedom of choice, such that there is some point that so many alternative choices are available that either a person cannot simply settle on one thing or he may simply never be able to decide. The context in which he writes this is a very familiar scene: going to the cafe to read the newspaper and drink a cup of coffee. There are three cafes here in Caracas where I have my morning coffee, palmera or cachito de jamón, and read the newspaper. They are: Coma, el CELARG, and the plaza of el Museo Bellas Artes. I go to these places because they are, by now, familiar. I know what to expect. [...]
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beautiful post my friend. In fact it’s sending me out to Bluestock’s to see if they have a copy of Nausea. On the way I think I’ll stop at Mama Testa’s for some of Cesar’s tacos. Come to think of it, I like that *they* like Borders and Baja Fresca. Let them eat at The F’ing Cheesecake Factory and Starbucks! There will always be enough of *us* to keep the best of the indies going, and in fact their presence raises the quality of the indies by weeding out the worst of them. Kinda a natural selection process, if you will. And of course the big prize is that we get to polarize against them, you know? Hold our noses up in the air a bit, mano. Polarization, the way of the world. Us versus them. It’s unavoidable. Might as well have fun with it!
I really love the part about choosing a cafe. That’s such a solo traveller thing! I’ve spent hours looking for the right cafe in Paris, the right pub in London, the right noodle bar in Shanghai… happy hours, mind you, but anxious hours, cause let’s face it, it’s hard charging into some place unfamiliar when you’re solo and especially when you don’t speak the language and especially especially when you’re so far from, for lack of a better concept, your home tribe. Total primal thing. Walking into a foreign camp unarmed. So you get really picky, look for a place where the tables aren’t pushed too close together, etc… and then you find the place that logically should be perfect but something says Nah… and it’s onward, belly rumbling, feet aching, and most importantly thoughts bubbling out of your scull and you’ve gotta find somewhere to camp out and get’em all down but it’s gotta be the RIGHT place… yeah?
keep it real,