Choosing Choice: Don’t Mess with My Head
by Si Thwaites

Choice, much more than love these days, is all around us. You may not be able to feel it but you can certainly see it. ‘You’re the boss’ declares the sign outside your local fast food emporium; ‘What do you want to watch?’ the leaflet through your door excitedly asks, bursting with the endless opportunity of it all. If no-one has said that we’re entering the Era of Choice yet, then they very shortly will. In the modern, individualist age governments and big corporations are trying more and more to fill our personal world with self-selected services. But will we increasingly choose to opt out of this imposed Tyranny of Options?

The coming wave of CIY services is most obvious in the entertainment industry. Sit back and make your demands, your breed of entertainment can be zapped down towards you, and video-on-demand can capture any moments when you’re not in the armchair. MP3 has allowed music to permeate every moment of waking consciousness, and mobile phones have become the new portals of smutty or snide entertainment whilst you walk and work.  The mobile phone can store porn, pop, and any other paraphernalia. What you want, where you want, when you want.

‘Rabbit-in-the-headlights embarrassment at the simplest of choices is one of life’s most recognisable feelings. Just ask a busy waiter.’ 

But it needn’t stop with entertainment. Increasing affluence in society has brought us shops and restaurants from around the globe, offering a range of products unheard of a decade or two ago. Now, with its usual bog-eyed tardiness, the government is to introduce choice into the NHS. We are to be presented with cards explaining the relative merits of our local hospitals. With these NHS Top Trumps, we will choose where to have our life-threatening operations. The choice is yours.

Behind all of this advertising hype, however, the reality is that a large part of this choice is unwanted and unwelcome. A recent Which? poll indicated that 89% of people would really rather a qualified professional simply told them where to have their operation. Really, who can blame them? More widely, our rabbit-in-the-headlights embarrassment at the simplest of choices is one of life’s most recognisable feelings. Just ask a busy waiter.

‘We can choose, and most do, while others go to Thailand where the choice is even freer, if the sex is compelled.’

The cultural beginning  of choice could be traced to  the sexual revolution.  As contraceptives broke onto the market, eager fornicators were suddenly faced with an array of sexual partners.  The decaying church no longer held the moral clinch on our sexual desires.  With no consequences, the quality of sex can now be used in the criteria for long-term selection of human DNA.  We can choose, and most do, while others go to Thailand where the choice is even freer, if the sex is compelled.

But most of us don’t really enjoy basking in the warm sun of choice. Humans also enjoy being led, being told. Despite the existence of well stocked DVD stores and a burgeoning Video-on-Demand service, how many of us would much rather just watch what is on the TV? It is the glory of the linear, the unplanned, a moment of dilettantism, the basket of unexpected fruit. In our stressful, high-paced lives we do not have time to decide everything, and the risk of poor programmes is too low to overcome our choice apathy.

But there is something far deeper than simple apathy at work here. The very fact that a thing has been selected for us to consume gives it a psychological added value. Critics still do not lack for employment. Whether it be the desire to conform and be cool, or a lack of confidence in our own ability to choose, those things which are selected by others for our benefit carry an aura of the special, the elite.