TO CHOOSE OR NOT TO CHOOSE
In the debate of free will versus predestination, I like to choose not to choose.
It’s neither alone because it’s both together. The two systems interact and perpetuate each other. Something like, my future self already exists on another plane, and I’m subconsciously choosing to follow the map of her memories.
That being said, a few disclaimers.
I am well aware of my astronomically lucky draw in the game of life. I don’t know how or why, but my soul found its way to this planet in the healthy body of a baby girl born into a white-collared white-skinned financially stable American family in the early 1990s. Receiving every resource a child needs to succeed in this world was built into my existence from the first moment I opened my eyes and I had no choice in that.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t have asked for this existence—if my soul was waiting in some kind of universal queue to inhabit an earthly being and it was given a choice between impoverished suffering and privileged comfort, I’d have obviously chosen the latter. To the best of my knowledge though, I was never offered that choice.
As a good friend recently expressed to me, terms like “mid-life crisis” or “quarter-life crisis” are inaccurate and arbitrary.
“I hate that term,” he said. “If I die when I’m 50, then this is my mid-life crisis!”
At first, I had to laugh at the irony of a 25-year-old guy feeling anxious about whether he should be referring to his existential thoughts and emotions about life and death as his quarter-life crisis or his mid-life crisis.
But then, I had to think a bit deeper about the implications of this time-sensitive terminology and agree with him. If it wasn’t already stressful enough to feel like your purpose in life has slipped away from you and your satisfaction with the world you’ve built around yourself is deconstructing, let’s go ahead and label your situation with the approximate time you might have left to do anything about it.
When social scientist Elliot Jaques coined the term “mid-life crisis” in an essay he wrote in 1965, he was using creative geniuses like Dante as his study subjects. Jaques was interested in the way that these people’s creative processes changed as they came closer to the truth of their inevitable mortality, but the ideas in his essay resonated widely and his terminology became a point of reference in popular psychology. What followed were years of research, studies, and statistics on the reality of the phenomenon of a mid-life crisis—does it really happen? Why does it happen? What types of people are the most affected by it? How do we combat it?!
Unsurprisingly, the answers to these questions seem to be entirely dependent on the psychological and philosophical disposition of the individual.
So, instead of saying that a year ago, I turned 25 and had a quarter-life crisis, I’ll say that a year ago, I turned 25 even though I did not want to turn 25. It was my first unwanted birthday, and it presented me with a perplexing truth: I can’t make a choice about how much time I’ve spent here or how much time I have left here, but I can make a choice about everything else.
In all of those theories and studies on the concept of a mid-life crisis, there’s a common driving force: death. The big D. The final curtain. No longer being. As we get closer to it, we have fewer opportunities to make choices until at last, we are completely powerless to our mortality. The stereotypical crisis often manifests in the form of some choice a person can still make in order to feel younger, or further away from death. The choice serves another purpose, though; not only does it make you feel like you’ve got more time to find yourself, it also uncovers a bit more of your map to doing so.
I remember learning about the psychology of choices in high school—how certain studies have shown that people are happier with their lot when they don’t have much choice in changing it compared to those who are less satisfied when they are able to make changes. Interesting.
Interesting… and enlightening for me as a young, capable, well-educated kid in the first half of my twenties. Right out of college, I stumbled into a job in advertising in New York City. It was interesting enough, and the young, hip company culture was laid back and fun. After a year and a half there, I delighted in how easy and predictable the rest of my career could be if I stayed. But another year or so after that, I realized I was far from happy.
Making choices has plagued us humans for far too long. And making the scary, risky choices has been given a bad rap ever since interpretations of the Bible vilified Eve for actually daring to think for herself and learn by doing. In the ongoing quest for purpose and understanding, I think there must be times when free will is more important than goodwill.
When I turned 25, I felt completely lost on my search for purpose and understanding. So as I ventured into the second half of my twenties, I began to greet my freedom to make choices with a gracious embrace. I started with the most risky and least glamorous choice of all—to leave my secure job at a bougie New York agency and try something different. Quitting that job was my forbidden fruit—the choice I was constantly wondering about, the action that I felt I needed to take if I was ever going to find my own truth in life.
As a graduate of Middlebury College, I can’t write this article without a decent nod to that classically misinterpreted poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.
Frost wrote the poem for his best friend as an inside joke. Only, his friend—an English poet named Edward Thomas—didn’t understand the joke at first. It took six letters back and forth between Thomas and Frost before Thomas eventually acknowledged the irony of the poem. He did not find the joke funny.
Frost and Thomas met in England right before World War I. The two became fast friends, and they’d often take walks through the woods of Gloucestershire together. Thomas had an irrational fixation on the varying possible outcomes of choosing one path to walk versus another, convinced that a particular choice was bound to lead to something extraordinary—a bird’s nest, or a patch of rare wildflowers. Frost was thoroughly amused with his friend’s paralyzing indecision.
Shortly after the war broke out, Frost returned to America, but was in serious talks with Thomas about his own possible emigration to the states. Thomas, in characteristic manner, was not quick to make a decision between fleeing his homeland or staying to fight for it.
Frost was always laughing at Thomas for so harshly lamenting his own decisions after he made them, always wishing he had made the opposite in retrospect. To Frost, it was not about one life-altering decision, but rather about the succession of infinite choices in life and one’s ability to feel content with a decision and then progress to the next one. So when Thomas would complain about choosing the wrong path, Frost would readily insist that Thomas would be sighing at his choice, no matter which one he picked. When Frost wrote this assessment into a poem for Thomas, he did not foresee the lasting impact it would have on his best friend’s path.
Edward Thomas was just about ready to move his life to America when he received the poem. Shortly thereafter, he changed his mind one final time and enlisted for the war. It was his defining chance to make his own decision, to travel down his own road. Three months later, on his first day in battle, Thomas was killed. Unfortunately, for him, there was that one life-altering decision.
I don’t think that makes Frost wrong. Again, it’s neither alone because it’s both together.
Sometimes we know that a certain decision will redraw our entire map; other times we’ll have no way of predicting it. But if you do find yourself with the crazy, amazing blessing of an opportunity to travel that other path, study that other map, or take that other road, and you’ll always wonder about it otherwise, do your future self a favor and at least acknowledge it. Who knows, maybe it’ll help you avoid some kind of mid-life crisis.
So, why did I quit my fancy job and leave New York to head back to the drawing board at the age of 25?
Because I was lucky, young, and alive enough to still have a choice.