I’ve touched on this briefly in my prologue. The reality of choice is a f’cking beautiful thing. This reality, the reality we all live in, is what epitomizes free will. We all have the freedom to make whatever choice we please. While some people use this ability to choose to do evil things, I have to believe that most people only want to do what’s best for themselves and those that they love. This may lead to causing problems that go further than the people they thought would be affected by their choice, but there’s no way we can know what the exact outcome of our choices will be. That is the beauty of choice. It’s indeterminate and incalculable. We know full well how we will react to a choice or an outcome. We can never presume to know how others will react.
Choice; is sitting in a restaurant. You’re presented with a menu and you read it over. You notice several things that sound delicious but you can’t make up your mind. So internally you flip a coin. You play Eeny, meeny, miny, moe and you leave the choice to chance. Little did you know that the sandwich you decided to eat would give you food poisoning. Had you chosen to eat something else on the menu, would that still have happened? It’s a choice. It’s not random. You decided to eat that sandwich, and you must deal with the consequences.
This is the simplest and easiest example of choice that I can provide. In reality a lot of the choices we encounter are much more difficult than this. The most difficult thing about it is that we never truly know what the outcome of those choices will be until after we’ve already made them. We can do a little math in our head, come out with a guestimation of what we think might happen, and then make an educated guess. I think that’s what most of us do. But we never really know what will happen for some of those more difficult scenarios until the choice is already gone. That’s what we call hindsight.
With 2020 about to begin, I hope that hindsight isn’t all we have left.
