The Decisions We Make

Decision making is something that we do every second of every waking moment. You made a decision to click on the link that led to this post, I decided to write my post on the vast amount of choice that we’re faced with today, and you are currently deciding whether you are going to continue to read this post or click over to Netflix - another place that will require even more decision making.

David Brooks writes about the explosion in the number of choices that has occurred in the last 3 decades. This is not necessarily a bad thing, the reason we have so many choices is because our freedom of expression has increased, consumer goods have evolved, and our culture has shifted to allow us to live our lives in a way that is dictated by us.

When you really boil it down, choices are the things that we base our lives around. Our education, the people we surround ourselves with, and the vocation we dedicate our lives to are all examples of choices that we seem to make, but is the role that we take in this decision making process as large as we are led to believe? Clearly our conscious plays a large part in decision making, all you have to do is think about an ultimatum and then choose an option in order to show that you can make a decision. However, this decision making process can be altered by external influences that then affect the course of our lives. We, as humans, tend to comply and internalize other peoples' opinions ultimately having an extensive impact on our own decisions.

The agency over the myriad of choices that we have makes decision making exceptionally complex. A simple meal with friends can turn into a 45 minute discussion on whether to have pineapple on the pizza, let alone life-changing choices such as career and education. It must be noted however, that our agency only seems to stretch so far. Our surroundings impact our decisions and cause our lives to be led down different paths. The decision of where to go to college for someone on the east coast and someone on the west coast is influenced by their location, an external factor that could lead their lives on completely different paths from one another.

To give a more extreme example, perhaps the decision of the east coast student somehow led them to be stranded on a desert island, whereas the west coast student’s decision has led to them sitting on their couch - their decisions for what to have for dinner are going to be completely different and influenced by entirely divergent factors.

This previous example shows that something external can influence our decision making but, to speak candidly, the chances that we - or anyone we know- are ever in that situation are very slim. Despite this, there are a great deal of more external factors that can affect people. In today’s society, the ability to make decisions as you wish has become a commodity, and the distribution of this commodity often comes down to your socioeconomic status.

Brooks writes of a meeting with a principle of a school in a poverty stricken section of Pittsburgh. The principle spoke of the way that concentrated poverty can limit perceived options, which I thought was a particularly salient example. Someone who lives without the knowledge of where their next pay check is coming from doesn’t have the same agency in decision making that a comfortable middle class bachelor does.

Perhaps our perception of free will is clouded by our desire to have agency over our own lives, yet we must recognize and take into account the external factors that influence and, in extreme cases, control our decision making.

Brooks, David. “The Choice Explosion.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 May 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/opinion/the-choice-explosion.html.

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