Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Many are put off by the endless variety on offer for pretty much every item out there. The variety forces you to make a choice, pick one item over the others. That requires a comparative analysis which in turn means gathering information about each option. Even with Google at your fingertips, that’s not easy. And therefore, we feel pressurized, writes Seth Godin: “We feel the failure of a bad choice in advance, long before we discover whether or not it was actually bad.” If you’re rational about it, getting so stressed by such choices is, well, irrational. After all, most of the time, the choice doesn’t really matter all that much, in terms of money, or time, or the finer details of what one option offered over the other. And therein lies the rub: we are not rational beings. We are ruled by emotions more often than we care to admit. To make matters worse, when it comes to making choices, multiple emotions are involved, as Godin points out: -       Fear ...

As a teenager, I read a few Hardy Boys books where at the end of some pages, you’d have a choice: If you want to pursue the crook, go to Page 30. If you want to take the victim to the hospital, go to Page 40. It was interesting at times, and choices at some points may lead you back to pages you had already visited via a different series of choices. But I had never read (nor even knew about) a similar category called the “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. It too had the same forks where the reader makes choices to decide which page to read next. So what was the difference of this new kind from the type I had read? In the kind I had read, the final outcome was guaranteed: the good guys would win, the crooks would end up behind bars. Only the path to that outcome would vary. Whereas the other kind could have different “types of outcomes at the end of each path”, writes Sarah Laskow . The endings cover the entire spectrum from “great, favorable, mediocre, disappointing, or catastrop...

Hunter S. Thompson, at the age of 20, gave this piece of advice on life to a friend. He started with the Hamlet quote on choices: “To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles… And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives…A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.” Thompson recommends avoiding setting goals for life: “Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.” While Thompson’s advice makes sense, it is very hard to follow. That is why most people tend to look back and feel that if only a few choices had been made differently, life would have been so ...