What's the right choice?

The “mechanical” quality of life that industrialization fostered was proving to be a source of dissatisfaction for many, which made it ripe for its satirization by Charlie Chaplin in his 1936 film Modern Times. Chaplin’s legendary character the Little Tramp goes to work in a factory that has taken the spirit of Taylorism to its extreme. He is instructed to stand at a particular spot on a fast-paced assembly line and screw bolts onto the pieces of machinery that pass him at an ever-increasing rate. His hands become so accustomed to the prescribed movement that even after he has left the assembly line, he continues to compulsively twist anything that remotely resembles a screw, much to the consternation of anyone nearby who happens to have a nose or be wearing buttons. While in the factory, the Tramp is not even allowed to eat unsupervised; in the name of efficiency, he is fed at a “feeding machine” station with forkfuls of steak and a corn on the cob that is rotated for him. In the film’s most famous scene, he becomes so overwhelmed by his work that he simply lies down on the conveyor belt and allows himself to be pulled into the factory’s mechanical belly. His body slides along through the rotating gears and wheels, and he becomes a literal cog in the machine.

Ironically, industrialization played an important role in shaping the landscape of choice that we now take for granted. The Protestant work ethic’s emphasis on thriftiness had made practical sense in the nineteenth century, when credit was tight, as well as during the Great Depression, but in the post-World War II era it became increasingly incompatible with the average worker’s greater prosperity. What’s more, manufacturers could produce more goods than people needed, so they strove to push up demand by adopting innovations in style and advertising, thereby transforming the act of purchasing from a purely practical one to a self-expressive one. When you bought a car, for example, you were not only meeting your need for transportation but making a statement about who you were and what was important to you. The parallel expansion of mass media furthered the trend. People could now participate vicariously in the lives of glamourous movie stars and entertainers like the rebellious James Dean and the provocative Elvis Presley. After the white-picket-fence, Stepford-y early ’50s, a bright new vision of success was developing, one that jettisoned blending in and dutifully playing your role in favour of standing out from the crowd by expressing your unique personality.

These economic and cultural forces combined in the late ’50s and ’60s to create a widespread shift in society’s conception of individual identity. An entire generation grew up in an era of prosperity with no great cause to unify them in the way World War II had done for the previous generation: the perfect environment for the rise of an ethos of independence. Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac challenged the mainstream culture of the ’50s, and the road they were on led straight to the hippie countercultural movement of the ’60s. In 1964, the Beatles made their first live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, sparking controversy with their unusual mop-tops. Hundreds of thousands of Beatlemaniacs and other young people began to push against the boundaries through music, long hair, soft drug use, and explorations of alternative spirituality. Though the more extreme manifestations of this paradigm shift in the concept of self subsided by the end of the ’70s, the message endured: independence over conformity, (almost) always! And thanks to the globalizing forces of mass media technology and increasing international integration in the economic sphere, the individualist values were readily exported to the rest of the world, along with products like Coca-Cola and Levi’s jeans, which came to symbolize these values.

Choice

land
Where does this whirlwind tour through history drop us off? In a rather curious place, actually. Here, in Choiceland, I can select among options that didn’t exist or weren’t available to people like me until quite recently. Variations on the traditional family structure (double income, no kids, stay-at-home fathers, single parenting, adoption, same-sex marriage, and so on) are becoming increasingly acceptable across the globe, and where these families reside is more and more a matter of choice. By 1970, two-thirds of the inhabitants of major US cities had been born elsewhere, as had nearly half the inhabitants of Asian cities. The most recent US census shows that 39 million Americans, or 13 percent of the population, relocated just within the past year.

Even religion, which was once considered as absolute a marker as eye colour, now comes in a variety pack; more than half of Americans have changed their faith at least once, according to a 2009 Pew poll. The fastest-growing category consists of those with no religious affiliation at all. For that matter, eye colour itself can now be altered, thanks to tinted contact lenses, and with full-blown cosmetic surgery we can literally change the face we present to the world. From baristas with hair colours that don’t exist in nature to CEOs in jeans, people are increasingly permitted, even expected, to express their individual styles in the workplace as well as in their personal lives. Online communities like MySpace, Facebook, and Second Life give us full control over the personas we present to others. There are no signs that these trends of increasing choice of identity are temporary; if anything they seem poised to grow in the future.

While this unparalleled freedom of choice can be liberating, it also carries with it certain demands. As Nikolas Rose, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, writes in his book Powers of Freedom, “Modern individuals are not merely ‘free to choose,’ but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice. They must interpret their past and dream their future as outcomes of choices made or choices still to make. Their choices are, in their turn, seen as realizations of the attributes of the choosing person — expressions of personality — and reflect back upon the person who has made them.” So to be oneself is to make the choices that best reflect the self, and these choices — taken cumulatively — are the expression and enactment of that most treasured value: freedom. As citizens of Choiceland we live in the ultimate democracy, and we are obliged to make choices not only for ourselves, but also in order to affirm our commitment to the very notion of liberty. Our personal decisions have a political dimension.

When the locus of power shifts to the choosing individual, the question of who that individual is — what his goals and motivations are — becomes very important. It necessitates self-scrutiny at a level that is confusing and, frankly, a bit scary. And as our horizons widen, the number of possible selves also multiplies. The block of marble surrounding our sculpture keeps getting bigger, with more and more to chip away before we can uncover the essential form within. In other words, the process of self-discovery becomes more challenging at the very moment it is most imperative. If no single path in life has a privileged claim to being right, there are no easy answers for any of us; it becomes exponentially more difficult to know ourselves, to be ourselves, to do our thing. How are we to go about finding our identity and choosing in accordance with it? Let’s explore the three major challenges we face in this process, and perhaps we’ll arrive at a different understanding of the relationship between who we are and what we choose.

Do you see what I see?
On July 28, 2008,1 woke up before the crack of dawn (4 am, to be exact), hailed a cab, and headed down to the Apple retail store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I joined the crowds in line to buy my husband the birthday present he coveted: the new iPhone 36. He had spent days examining the iPhone in the store and online to determine exactly what he wanted, and he had me memorize the specifications in case I made it through the line before he arrived. As I waited for hours, I went over the details: 8GB, unlimited nights and weekends, black, 8GB, unlimited nights and weekends, black. I was nearing the front, when my husband arrived. At the counter, he said, much to my surprise, “I changed my mind. I’ll have the white.”“I thought you told me that white would get dirty more easily, and that black was sleeker,” I responded.

He replied, “Everyone is getting the black, though. I can’t carry around the same thing that everyone else has.” He knew which one he wanted, the reasons why he wanted what he wanted, and he knew that he had arrived at the decision by himself. Yet, at that final moment, he changed his preference because, simply put, he did not want to be a copycat...

...as we form and express our identity, we need others to see us as we see ourselves. We want to find common ground, but not be a copycat. The need is so powerful that we may even behave in ways inconsistent with our true desires in order to avoid creating the “wrong” impression. When around other people, we want to come off as entertaining but not overly attention-seeking, intelligent but not pretentious, and agreeable but not submissive. We all likely think of ourselves as embodying only the best of these attributes, but how do we go about projecting that socially?

We can’t avoid the fact that any choice we make may be considered a statement about who we are, but some choices speak more loudly than others. The music we choose to play on our stereos will probably say more about us than the brand of stereo we play it on, as music choice is supposed to be determined purely by personal taste. The less a choice serves some utilitarian function, the more it implies about identity, which is why we pay special attention to categories such as music and fashion that serve no practical purpose. To rip playlists directly off a trendy music blog or an in-the-know friend, or to exactly copy outfits from a movie or magazine, is to announce to the world that we have no mind of our own. On the other hand, using the same brand of toothpaste that a favourite actor uses could easily be attributed to the superior tartar-control abilities of the product.

Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we tend to organize our lives to display our identity as accurately as possible. Our lifestyle choices often reveal our values, or at least what we’d like people to perceive as our values. Someone who takes the time to volunteer at soup kitchens or clothing drives will be seen as altruistic, someone who runs marathons as highly disciplined and self-motivated, and someone who paints her own living room and reupholsters antique furniture as handy and creative. As we make our everyday choices, we continuously calculate not just which choices best match who we are and what we want but also how those choices will be interpreted by others. We look for cues in our social environment to figure out what others think of this or that, which can require being sensitive to the most localized and up-to-date details of what a particular choice means.

(Excerpted with permission from Hachette India’s, ‘The Art of Choosing: the decisions we make every day — what they say about us and how we can improve them’  by Sheena Iyengar, Rs 499)