Choice, Freedom and Happiness... Compatible?

What's in a life? That's the question I've been asking lately. Not anything like "what's the point in life" or any other such nonsense, but what should be in a life? We get 80+ years these days on average and that's a lot more than ever before. Old news, I know, but have you ever really stopped to think about what that means? Where do the kids come into it? Where does the "education" start and end? How are we supposed to manage to stay married to only one person for the whole time we're kickin' around this rare ball o' mud in space?

With shorter, more uncertain lives, none of these questions matter a damn. Getting an education that would let you develop your talents to let you earn a living, so you could get married and do the old biological imperative thing and then be a responsible genetic being and kick off to make room for your successful progeny and their progeny... etc. You kicked off between 50 and 60, leaving all your life's work to them so they could build on what you made... or something idealistic like that anyway. But we're not going to die nice and simply like that anymore. We don't even keep the same job for more than a decade or so anymore. We move with increasing frequency and become more transient and absorbed in our own interests as the years go by.

Now, I've already decided that I believe humans, well everything with chromosomes, is inherently selfish by nature. It's not an evil, it's not good, it just is. A lot like humans are bipedal, or learn a language if they're exposed to one while they're growing up. I used to think that selfishness was an evil, but even people doing good for the world are doing it to satisfy their own internal reward system, that rewards them for doing things for others... essentially selfish, even if it does benefit others. It's the most favourable (as far as society and others are concerned) kind of selfishness.

Anyway, being selfish by nature, we naturally tend to do things we're interested in. It only makes sense. Why would you do something that's not rewarding for you in some way? The straight answer is that you wouldn't. There are more beneficial things wrapped up in whatever we do than there are in whatever we're not doing, That is, of course, for the time being. Maybe something changes in your world-view or your values or your understanding... That would lead to a change in behaviour-reward loops that would have you doing different things. Well, now that we live four-score and something, and few of us are dying of hunger (at least in the industrialised world) most of us have some disposable income and along with that income, a host of things to do. There are tens of millions of books, more maybe. There are CDs and LPs and comic books and sheet music to last lifetimes... there are hundreds of different musical instruments, millions of songs, an infinite number of interpretations. There are hundreds of different disciplines, academic and technical, with new ones emerging every year. There's food you've never tasted, flowers you've never smelled or seen. There are teas you've never even heard about, animals, birds, fish, all manner of creatures that most of us have never even heard about. There is more under the sun than any of us could imagine. Now that it's all becoming accessible to the average Joe and Susan, how are we to keep ourselves satisfied with a 9-5, 2.5 kids and a car?

Fact is, we can't. We can't. We dig for extra hours with caffeine, amphetamines, and new drugs and research designed to get the most out of the 24 hours in a day. Cutting back sleep, improving sleep, making it a little more of a cut and dried affair. We try to make ourselves smarter, stronger, better so that we can do more. We go to the gym, or imagine that we'd like to, Or that's the idea most of us have anyway. The realities of this hectic mess are increasing depression, decreasing stability, strained friendships and family relationships and general ennui.
I've been thinking the thing that's making us miserable, if indeed we are miserable, is too much choice. My friend Nige read a book about how choice is doing that very thing. It gave a lot of evidence to back it up... book name... book name... uh... I'll post it later... Anyway, the synopsis was that we should just create fewer possibilities for choice. A kind of self-imposed discipline of choice poverty. If there's nothing to get frozen over when you are trying to decide something, there's no discomfort from wondering if you made the best choice. Just make your choices and stick with them. Unless, obviously, you are presented with overwhelming evidence that your choice sucked.

With that in mind, I've been streamlining my days... I've stopped going out of my way to see people I don't particularly enjoy and have withdrawn from activities that I'm similarly ambivalent about and have basically started focusing on work, mountains, fitness, Japanese, French, mnemonics and mnemonic techniques, the current interest fad in my life. I hang out with my girlfriend Maya, on the weekends or for an occasional supper during the busy week and I don't go shopping. I do see the friends I like and do do things I like, but they're the wee gems in the crown of my new chrome-plated life... I wonder if that's a metaphor with good feelings... ah well, if you have thoughts, leave them to me! I do like contact from my good friends the world o'er.