We usually take it for granted that choice is a good thing. Having no choice is rotten; having lots of choices is wonderful. It’s a principle that is pretty central to both democracy and capitalism, the two systems whose intersection (somewhat paradoxically) forms the reality of modern American life. And before we get too far here, let me just say that I am not really disputing it. Overall, I do think that having a lot of options to choose from is preferable to having only a few or having no choice at all.
But inherent to the very concept of choice is the idea of opportunity cost. When you choose something, that always means that you are going to miss out on something else. Or, realistically, many somethings else. (How often are we ever really just choosing between two things?) My point here is really that choice itself also has an opportunity cost associated with it. When we emphasize choice, when we construct a world in which people have a lot of choices we lose something in the process. And I think that is worth recognizing and maybe even lamenting.
I also think that, over the past twenty years or so, our culture has become more and more dominated by the principle of choice. This is especially true of the younger generation. Listening to the radio has largely been supplanted by listening to music from one’s own device. Watching TV has been replaced by Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, and podcasts. And I hardly know anyone younger than thirty who gets their news from a traditional source like a newspaper. Personally, I find out what is going on in the world from reading Twitter and Reddit.
Of course, choice has always been part of the equation. This is not an all or nothing thing. (As Jean-Paul Sartre would say, “choice and consciousness are one and the same.”) People living in the nineties were still making choices about which radio station to listen to, which TV channel to put on, which newspaper to purchase. But I think it’s indisputable that there were more constraints back then, more limits on what could be chosen. You could choose what you wanted to watch on TV, but you were only choosing from seventy or so options. Now, any time I decide that I want to sit down and watch something, I am always choosing from a practically infinite amount of possibilities. (Obviously, the library of Netflix contains a finite number of titles, but it certainly feels infinite when you’re scrolling through it.)
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One of the problems that comes with having so many choices is the one that Aziz Ansari has done a brilliant job exploring in both his TV show Master of None and his book Modern Romance. (Here, read this. It’s far shorter and more straightforward than anything I would ever write.) Having a lot of choices can actually lead to anxiety and dissatisfaction rather than greater happiness. And as that article mentions, there is actually research out there to back this up. With choice comes responsibility, a sense of ownership, and a heightened awareness of “the road not taken.” |
| "What the fork is a Chidi?" |
And there is another character from another staple of the millenial canon who illustrates the same idea, taken to an extreme: Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place. While Aziz Ansari’s Dev is punished for his indecision by arriving at a closed taco truck, Chidi is literally (spoiler alert) sentenced to eternal damnation because he is so indecisive that it hurts those around him. And yet he always operates with the purest of intentions: he simply wants to be sure he is doing the right thing before he acts.
So that is one of the things that led to my wanting to write this. Lately I have found myself feeling quite a bit like Dev or Chidi. On the days where I don’t have to work or have any other obligations, thinking about the number of options that I have can be overwhelming. Do I want to go somewhere? Do I want to listen to music? A podcast? Read a book? Play a video game? Make something to eat? And then each one of those questions, once answered, begets a million others; it’s like cutting off the head of a Hydra. I find myself longing for the days when there was a comfortable default, when you could just turn on the TV and watch whatever’s on. But now everything is on, all the time.
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If you know me at all, you know that I used to work at Subway. It’s something I jam into a lot of conversations, whether it is relevant or not. But here I think it is actually very relevant. Because the entire business model of Subway is choice. (And it must be working, since despite having a literal child molester as their spokesman for almost twenty years, it is still the largest fast-food chain in the world.) Burger King may have claimed the slogan “Have It Your Way” first, but Subway takes the notion of choice to almost absurd levels.
Now, I realize all this is starting to sound like what everyone’s curmudgeon of a grandfather would say is the problem with young people. Back in his day, they just did what they had to do and when it was time to make a decision, they just made one and that was that. None of this whining about how hard it all was. And he’s right - to an extent. Being able to worry about this stuff at all is a sign of tremendous privilege and fortune. And perhaps the reason it has only become an issue in my life recently is because only recently has my life really “come together.” I have a good, stable job that I enjoy, plenty of money, a reliable vehicle, a schedule that leaves me with a fair amount of free time - compared to a couple of years ago, when I was in grad school and working so much that I never really left “survival mode.”
But to this fictional grandfather I would reply two things: first of all, it’s not really us who are different so much as the world we navigate is objectively different. (Or, if we are different than our grandparents were at our age, that is because we have grown up in this different world.) And second, this isn’t just about my feelings. I think that living in a choice-centric culture has a real impact on the way society functions; the side-effects aren’t just personal, but social and political as well.
So that is one of the things that led to my wanting to write this. Lately I have found myself feeling quite a bit like Dev or Chidi. On the days where I don’t have to work or have any other obligations, thinking about the number of options that I have can be overwhelming. Do I want to go somewhere? Do I want to listen to music? A podcast? Read a book? Play a video game? Make something to eat? And then each one of those questions, once answered, begets a million others; it’s like cutting off the head of a Hydra. I find myself longing for the days when there was a comfortable default, when you could just turn on the TV and watch whatever’s on. But now everything is on, all the time.
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| The best work I ever did at Subway. |
Here is how Subway works, if you somehow don’t know. You choose what kind of bread you want; you choose which meat you want; you choose which cheese you want; you choose if you want it toasted or not; you choose which veggies you want; you choose which sauce you want. That means there are over 3 billion distinct possible sandwiches you can get when you walk into a Subway. I actually did the math once. And some customers want to get even more particular than that - requesting that ingredients be placed in a certain order, for instance, or even picking out the particular tomato slices they want. And as an employee, you are encouraged to grant all of these requests, no matter how silly they seem. Subway is about giving the customer exactly what he or she chooses. No more, no less.
But sometimes someone will come into Subway and say they just want a sandwich with “whatever comes on it.” The problem is that there is no “whatever comes on a turkey sandwich” at Subway - any more than there’s a “whatever’s on” on Netflix. And so that always drove me crazy when I worked there. It was just a fundamental misunderstanding of the system. And sometimes it seemed deliberate, like people just wanted to prove a point or start an argument or something.
(Like, there’s this part in one of Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently books where one of the characters, who is an American living in London, deliberately calls up a pizza place and asks them to deliver her a pizza, knowing they won’t do so because that just wasn’t a thing in London when the book is set. She does it for the sake of being able to argue with them and insist that the American way of doing pizza is the right way. I often felt like customers were doing the same passive-aggressive sort of thing at Subway whenever they said they wanted “whatever comes on it.” I mean, it's easy to picture Larry David - or Jerry Seinfeld, for that matter - doing that.)
But I do understand the desire. Sometimes you just don’t want to have to make a bunch of choices. Sometimes you just want someone to bring you a sandwich because you’re hungry and you don’t want to worry about whether it would be better with Provolone or Mozzarella cheese on it. You don’t want to have any personal stake in the sandwich, any sense of obligation to enjoy it. Whatever they bring you will be good enough.
But a world designed around choice doesn’t allow for “good enough.” It forces us to think in terms of “the best.” Because when you choose something, what are you doing but marking it as the best? (Philosophers Kant and Sartre have claimed this as well, arguing that we ought to treat each choice we make as though we were making it for all of humanity.) And there is a lot of pressure that goes along with that. And that is exactly what Aziz Ansari is saying - to the extent that he sometimes he starts to seem nostalgic for the days of arranged marriages, like the one his parents have. Wouldn’t life be so much easier if someone would just choose for us?
But sometimes someone will come into Subway and say they just want a sandwich with “whatever comes on it.” The problem is that there is no “whatever comes on a turkey sandwich” at Subway - any more than there’s a “whatever’s on” on Netflix. And so that always drove me crazy when I worked there. It was just a fundamental misunderstanding of the system. And sometimes it seemed deliberate, like people just wanted to prove a point or start an argument or something.
(Like, there’s this part in one of Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently books where one of the characters, who is an American living in London, deliberately calls up a pizza place and asks them to deliver her a pizza, knowing they won’t do so because that just wasn’t a thing in London when the book is set. She does it for the sake of being able to argue with them and insist that the American way of doing pizza is the right way. I often felt like customers were doing the same passive-aggressive sort of thing at Subway whenever they said they wanted “whatever comes on it.” I mean, it's easy to picture Larry David - or Jerry Seinfeld, for that matter - doing that.)
But I do understand the desire. Sometimes you just don’t want to have to make a bunch of choices. Sometimes you just want someone to bring you a sandwich because you’re hungry and you don’t want to worry about whether it would be better with Provolone or Mozzarella cheese on it. You don’t want to have any personal stake in the sandwich, any sense of obligation to enjoy it. Whatever they bring you will be good enough.
But a world designed around choice doesn’t allow for “good enough.” It forces us to think in terms of “the best.” Because when you choose something, what are you doing but marking it as the best? (Philosophers Kant and Sartre have claimed this as well, arguing that we ought to treat each choice we make as though we were making it for all of humanity.) And there is a lot of pressure that goes along with that. And that is exactly what Aziz Ansari is saying - to the extent that he sometimes he starts to seem nostalgic for the days of arranged marriages, like the one his parents have. Wouldn’t life be so much easier if someone would just choose for us?
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| Watch the local news sometime. It's enlightening in its own way. |
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Now, I realize all this is starting to sound like what everyone’s curmudgeon of a grandfather would say is the problem with young people. Back in his day, they just did what they had to do and when it was time to make a decision, they just made one and that was that. None of this whining about how hard it all was. And he’s right - to an extent. Being able to worry about this stuff at all is a sign of tremendous privilege and fortune. And perhaps the reason it has only become an issue in my life recently is because only recently has my life really “come together.” I have a good, stable job that I enjoy, plenty of money, a reliable vehicle, a schedule that leaves me with a fair amount of free time - compared to a couple of years ago, when I was in grad school and working so much that I never really left “survival mode.”
But to this fictional grandfather I would reply two things: first of all, it’s not really us who are different so much as the world we navigate is objectively different. (Or, if we are different than our grandparents were at our age, that is because we have grown up in this different world.) And second, this isn’t just about my feelings. I think that living in a choice-centric culture has a real impact on the way society functions; the side-effects aren’t just personal, but social and political as well.
Let's take the idea of “the news” as an example. What does it mean to get one’s news from social media rather than a traditional news outlet? Well, it means that I am hearing only those voices that I have chosen to hear. And this affects not just the opinions and perspectives I encounter, the “takes” I read on the major events of the day (significant in itself) - but also what counts as a major event. For instance, I follow quite a few prominent educators on Twitter. So I have been going through the past couple of days of my life with a vague, omnipresent awareness that the annual conference of the National Council of Teachers of English has been going on. That is a big deal within that particular community. It is news. But if I had not chosen to follow those people, I would not be hearing anything about it. I mean, MSNBC certainly isn’t reporting on it.
And this also means that I have the power to eliminate any individual voice that I am not pleased with for any reason. I have line-item veto power over the news. That was never possible with newspapers or television. Sure, you could decide that you weren’t going to read a particular journalist’s columns anymore, but they would still be there. You would still see their columns, be reminded of their existence from time to time. And we can't discount the impact that mere exposure has. Now, unfollowing a person on Twitter or unsubscribing from a subreddit makes it like that person or topic has ceased to exist for you.
Right now, there is a particular person who I follow on Twitter but have been thinking about unfollowing. Why am I thinking of unfollowing her? A couple of separate strikes. First, she has tweeted a couple of things that have made me think that she is too “extreme” of a feminist for my liking, that she is too much a member of the social justice orthodoxy, too much of a “purist” as opposed to someone with more nuanced views. Second, she has twice now tweeted criticism of someone I admire greatly and I found the criticism to be shallow and unnecessarily personal. So I have the power to remove her voice from the onslaught of voices that I am exposed to on a daily basis. Which means that I will no longer encounter her criticism of that person I admire or her feminist perspective - even though some of it in the future could be more substantial, even though some of it could be good or important for me to see. But I have that power as the result of getting my news from a medium that is built around choice.
And I think it is easy to see how this leads to the formation of social and political “bubbles” or “echo chambers,” where each person hears only the things he or she wants to hear. This has been brought up a lot since the 2016 election, especially as it pertains to liberals who were shocked by the fact that so many people voted for and supported Donald Trump. But I think it is a mistake to think that it is only young liberals who live in a bubble. Our society is becoming one where everyone can bubble themselves, because that is what we tend to do when we have so much choice over what we hear. Maybe it is our responsibility to force ourselves outside of our respective bubbles, to deliberately expose ourselves to the sort of things that we wouldn't normally choose. But maybe we were better off in some ways when that happened naturally, inevitably, just as a part of life.
I have always felt that homeschooled kids are sort of weird and socially awkward. Just
something about them, you know? Perhaps I’m not alone in feeling this way. Once upon a time, I espoused the hypothesis that it was because they didn’t socialize very much with other kids, which seemed like a reasonable guess to make. But I was corrected by a person who actually had been homeschooled. No, they told me. They actually spent a lot of time socializing with the friends they had made through the activities they participated in. Probably even more than I did, they concluded. (I don’t remember who exactly this person was, but I feel as though he or she was rather smug about the whole thing.)
So I revised my hypothesis, like any good scientist would. It wasn’t that homeschooled kids didn’t socialize enough; it was that they only socialized with people they chose to see (or who their parents chose for them, of course.) They met their friends through voluntary activities. And when you like the same things as someone else, I think there’s a better-than-average chance that the two of you will get along. (Though, of course, that’s not always the case, and one of the great bummers of life is finding out that someone you dislike loves something you love. Like, imagine
finding out that Mitch McConnell was super into Modest Mouse or something.) But even when that’s not true, an activity like horseback riding or painting class tends to be only a couple hours a week. Homeschooled kids are deprived of the important experience of having to spend all day, every day surrounded by people that you dislike - which is pretty much all public school really is.
(Speaking of which, I do think this issue has ramifications for the whole debate about "school choice" as well. But it would take a whole separate post to get into that and I have been rambling on for long enough here.)
So I think that we are all kind of becoming like homeschooled kids in this sense. We have so much choice when it comes to the content that we consume - and there is so much of it out there - that we never really have to deal with things we dislike or don't understand. Or we do have to deal with them sometimes, but we don’t do it on a regular basis so we are really bad at it when we do. We’re out of practice. I mean, imagine all the articles out there right now written by and for young progressives who have to prepare to talk to their conservative family members on Thanksgiving. Encountering someone we disagree with is an event now, instead of a normal part of daily life.
And another thing we have lost is the sense of there being something that is common to everyone in the culture. We have lost our lingua franca. There is nothing to talk about around the water cooler at work anymore because last night I was watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or something last night and my co-worker Susan was watching NCIS and my other co-worker Dave was watching Game of Thrones. Nor can we bond over being annoyed by that “overplayed” song on the radio, because we each have our own playlists on our phones that we listen to. And we can’t even discuss the news (unless it involves Trump, who paradoxically may be the only unifying force in American culture right now despite being the epitome of divisiveness) because we all read different news that morning, too.
And this also means that I have the power to eliminate any individual voice that I am not pleased with for any reason. I have line-item veto power over the news. That was never possible with newspapers or television. Sure, you could decide that you weren’t going to read a particular journalist’s columns anymore, but they would still be there. You would still see their columns, be reminded of their existence from time to time. And we can't discount the impact that mere exposure has. Now, unfollowing a person on Twitter or unsubscribing from a subreddit makes it like that person or topic has ceased to exist for you.
Right now, there is a particular person who I follow on Twitter but have been thinking about unfollowing. Why am I thinking of unfollowing her? A couple of separate strikes. First, she has tweeted a couple of things that have made me think that she is too “extreme” of a feminist for my liking, that she is too much a member of the social justice orthodoxy, too much of a “purist” as opposed to someone with more nuanced views. Second, she has twice now tweeted criticism of someone I admire greatly and I found the criticism to be shallow and unnecessarily personal. So I have the power to remove her voice from the onslaught of voices that I am exposed to on a daily basis. Which means that I will no longer encounter her criticism of that person I admire or her feminist perspective - even though some of it in the future could be more substantial, even though some of it could be good or important for me to see. But I have that power as the result of getting my news from a medium that is built around choice.
And I think it is easy to see how this leads to the formation of social and political “bubbles” or “echo chambers,” where each person hears only the things he or she wants to hear. This has been brought up a lot since the 2016 election, especially as it pertains to liberals who were shocked by the fact that so many people voted for and supported Donald Trump. But I think it is a mistake to think that it is only young liberals who live in a bubble. Our society is becoming one where everyone can bubble themselves, because that is what we tend to do when we have so much choice over what we hear. Maybe it is our responsibility to force ourselves outside of our respective bubbles, to deliberately expose ourselves to the sort of things that we wouldn't normally choose. But maybe we were better off in some ways when that happened naturally, inevitably, just as a part of life.
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I have always felt that homeschooled kids are sort of weird and socially awkward. Just
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| The "bubbles" are not just political, but cultural as well. |
So I revised my hypothesis, like any good scientist would. It wasn’t that homeschooled kids didn’t socialize enough; it was that they only socialized with people they chose to see (or who their parents chose for them, of course.) They met their friends through voluntary activities. And when you like the same things as someone else, I think there’s a better-than-average chance that the two of you will get along. (Though, of course, that’s not always the case, and one of the great bummers of life is finding out that someone you dislike loves something you love. Like, imagine
finding out that Mitch McConnell was super into Modest Mouse or something.) But even when that’s not true, an activity like horseback riding or painting class tends to be only a couple hours a week. Homeschooled kids are deprived of the important experience of having to spend all day, every day surrounded by people that you dislike - which is pretty much all public school really is.
(Speaking of which, I do think this issue has ramifications for the whole debate about "school choice" as well. But it would take a whole separate post to get into that and I have been rambling on for long enough here.)
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| "You wasted life. Why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" |
And another thing we have lost is the sense of there being something that is common to everyone in the culture. We have lost our lingua franca. There is nothing to talk about around the water cooler at work anymore because last night I was watching Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or something last night and my co-worker Susan was watching NCIS and my other co-worker Dave was watching Game of Thrones. Nor can we bond over being annoyed by that “overplayed” song on the radio, because we each have our own playlists on our phones that we listen to. And we can’t even discuss the news (unless it involves Trump, who paradoxically may be the only unifying force in American culture right now despite being the epitome of divisiveness) because we all read different news that morning, too.
Maybe the point here is this: I kind of miss feeling like I lived in an actual culture. And that is one of the things we lose when everything becomes about choice.
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And we also lose this:
"Sometimes you happen across a brilliant run of radio songs, where each time one station goes to commercial, you scan to another that has just started to play a song you love but had almost forgotten about, a song you never would've picked but that turns out to be perfect for shouting along to." - John Green, Turtles All the Way Down, p. 49-50
