The Road Not Taken

Perhaps the importance of "which road
do I take" is not the decision but the fact there
are at least two roads (WSJ/Carole Hénaff)

In unhappy situations where we tell ourselves that there's no other option (e.g., staying in a bad job or marriage), we really do have a choice. It's just that we are unwilling to face the consequences of that choice. [bold added]

But the truth, though it often makes people indignant to hear it, is that it’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honor a commitment, answer an email, fulfill a family obligation or anything else. The astounding reality—in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died in 1999—is that you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.

Consequences aren’t optional. Every choice you make comes with some sort of consequences, because at any instant you can only pick one path, and must deal with the repercussions of not picking any of the others. Spending a week’s holiday in Rome means not spending that same week in Paris. Avoiding a conflict in the short term means letting a bad situation fester.

Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice—that’s never an option. It means realizing that nothing can stop you from doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs. Unless you’re being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you “have to” do it just means that you don’t want to pay the price of refusing to do it. After all, it’s perfectly possible for you to quit your job with no backup plan. You could book a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro, or rob a bank, or tell your social media followers your honest views.

The economist Thomas Sowell summed things up by saying that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The only questions to ask about any choice is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.

The benefit of the I-really-do-have-a-choice perspective may have an effect on one's psychological well-being.

If a path you’d love to take is genuinely likely to leave you destitute, or seriously harmed in some other way, then you probably shouldn’t take it. But for most of us, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences, so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed that there’s a secret comfort in telling yourself you’ve got no options, because it’s easier to wallow in feeling trapped than to face the dizzying responsibilities of freedom...

Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom—not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs—because there will always be trade-offs—and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.

Thanksgiving will soon be here, and, although circumstances stay the same, changing our viewpoint toward life is a glass half full instead of a glass half empty makes all the difference in our feelings about the world.