Beliefs Archives - Page 23 of 23

Seeking the One Right and Perfect Choice

February 21, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

It’s good to have options. It’s good to have choices. The more the better, right? But maybe we can actually have too many of them. Maybe having so many things to choose from complicates our lives rather than enhancing them. It’s been suggested that having so many options has two negative effects. The first is that it produces paralysis: we can’t decide which thing to choose, so we choose none. The second is that it escalates our expectations so that even if we do make a choice, we aren’t really satisfied with it. What if there was a better choice? What if we made the wrong choice?

A lot of the research in this area has been done in regard to product choices, but the principles apply to all kinds of choices. Maybe our choice-making behavior carries over from—or at least is reinforced by—our shopping experiences.

[I]t seems that as society grows wealthier and people become freer to do whatever they want, they get less happy. —Barry Schwartz, The Tyranny of Choice, Scientific American, December 2004

Maybe the abundance of choices we have impacts our ability to create meaning in our lives. How much time and mental energy do we spend trying to decide: what to do on our vacation, where to go for dinner, which item to select from the menu, what to wear to this or that event, whether or not to redecorate the kitchen (or bedroom or bath) and then what colors to use and which things to replace, whether to get this book (or CD or DVD) or that one, which movie to go to, what kind of car to buy, which area to major in in college, which job to apply for or accept, and—for many—what the heck to do with the rest of our lives.

Some of the choices we have to make are far weightier than others, but I wonder if we’ve become so bad at making day-to-day choices—so hung up on the process—that it’s impaired our choice-making ability. If it’s true that we have escalated expectations about the effect a particular brand of olive oil or car or kitchen appliance is going to have on our lives, imagine what our expectations are about the really significant things, such as who we choose to spend our lives with, whether or not we choose to have children, and what career path we choose for ourselves. How can reality meet those heightened expectations? The research says that it can’t and doesn’t.

The secret to happiness is low expectations. –Barry Schwartz

The grass is always greener somewhere else as long as we think there is one right and perfect choice and we need to find and select it from all the options available. How will we ever know whether or not we made that one right and perfect choice? It’s not a game show where we’ll find out at the end that Door Number Three was the one with the biggest prize.

Freedom from Choice

February 17, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 7 Comments

The concepts of freedom and choice seem to belong side by side. What is freedom if not freedom to choose? The idea that we could be free, experience freedom, without also having and exercising the ability to choose is difficult to contemplate. But Krishnamurti believed otherwise.

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert relates the results of a study involving photography students who were put into two groups, the escapable group and the inescapable group. After developing their two best prints, all students were told they could keep one print, but the other print would be kept on file. The students in the escapable group were told they had several days to change their minds about which print they kept. The students in the inescapable group were not allowed to change their minds.

The results showed that students in the escapable group liked their photographs less than did students in the inescapable group…. Apparently, inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances, but we do not anticipate that this will happen.

I got a taste of this recently when some blood test results turned a couple of things that had, until then, been desirable to do into things I have to do. When I merely wanted to do them, they were actually a much bigger issue. I was invested in figuring out the best way to do them. When I was presented with this new information, I gave up trying to figure it out and began doing them just like that. It took me a couple of days to come to terms with the situation. I briefly bemoaned my perceived lack of choice in the matter, but I’m no longer struggling with it. My mind isn’t at all confused about the situation. And the truth is that I do feel a much greater sense of freedom than I did when I believed doing or not doing those things was a matter of choice (escapable).

The costs and benefits of freedom are clear–but alas, they are not equally clear: We have no trouble anticipating the advantages that freedom may provide, but we seem blind to the joys it can undermine. –Daniel Gilbert

Making Meaning Pt 2: Acorns?

February 7, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman wrote that within the acorn exists everything the oak tree will “become.” “Each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.” We are the acorns.

Each person bears a uniqueness, sure. But the older I get, the less inclined I am to go along with the rest of that sentence. It just doesn’t map onto the world I see around me. How many people in this world are just not interested in the idea of living out their uniqueness, don’t understand the concept in the first place, or are in no position to devote any attention to it? The majority? That’s my wild guess. So what’s up with that? It seems as though you have to be born into the right set of conditions in order to grasp this concept and then be able to identify and live out your uniqueness. The game is definitely rigged.

Most people, I think, either allow or are forced to let other people or their circumstances determine what kind of life they are going to live. A vast number of people worldwide allow their religious or spiritual beliefs to determine the meaning in—and of—their lives. A far fewer number undertake the quest to discover the uniqueness they are here to live and then manage to live it.

Yet people do want meaning in their lives and they want their lives to mean something, no matter what physical/material conditions they’re living in. Whether or not they can articulate it, meaning is important to almost everyone. The lack of meaning can lead to all kinds of ills—personally, socially, culturally, and globally.

But must we have a supernatural explanation for the source of meaning and the reason it is important to us? I don’t think we do. I don’t think meaning is inherent in anything. I believe we create the meaning in our lives—or we fail to create it. When we create meaning and live lives that are meaningful, we and everyone around us are better off for it. When we fail to create meaning, we are dissatisfied no matter how well off we may be. We know something’s missing; we just don’t know what it is.

According to some sages, life is empty and meaningless—and it’s empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless. If that’s true, those of us who were trying to find meaning or figure out our unique purpose for being here have got it backwards. Instead of looking for meaning, we need to decide what is meaningful for us and then go out and create that in the world.

A Little Zen Story

I knew a zen master. I asked him about life. He said, “Life is empty and meaningless.”

I said, “That can’t be so!”

He said, “And it doesn’t mean anything that it doesn’t mean anything.”

And I still said, “No!”

Then he said, “And that gives you the freedom to make it up to mean whatever you want it to.”

And I said, “Ahh!”

Is determining what has meaning easy? No, not for most people. But it can be a much more fascinating, creative, and rewarding game than going on a metaphysical scavenger hunt to find meaning. When all is said and done, it may actually turn out to be the only game in town.

Making Meaning vs. Finding It

February 3, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (album) — Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sometimes I think the difference between making (creating) meaning and finding it is the difference between reality and wishful thinking. Sometimes I think it divides the non-believers from the believers. And sometimes I think it might be nothing more than a matter of semantics.

The idea of finding meaning implies to me that meaning, although intangible, is inherent in situations, circumstances, relationships, events, and things. It comes pre-loaded, so to speak, as a hidden file, and it’s our job to locate, download, and access it. As I’ve written before, this sort of thing is not a game I’m particularly interested in playing. It’s like a metaphysical scavenger hunt. And the huge question it raises is if meaning is inherent, by what means did it become part of the stuff of our human lives? This view of meaning pretty much implies the existence of an extra-human force or being as creator of the game of life we all must play.

The Meaning of Our Individual Lives

Both James Hillman, a Jungian psychologist, and Viktor Frankl, an existentialist–as two examples–were convinced there is a reason for our existence and that we are responsible to that reason.

From The Souls’ Code by James Hillman:

Each person enters the world called.

[This book] does speak to the feelings that there is a reason my unique person is here and that there are things I must attend to beyond the daily round and that give the daily round its reason, feelings that the world somehow wants me to be here, that I am answerable to an innate image, which I am filling out in my biography.

You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth.

From Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, who survived several years in Auschwitz:

[M]an is a responsible creature and must actualize the potential meaning of his life.

I think the meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.

The majority…consider themselves accountable before God; they represent those who do not interpret their own lives merely in terms of a task assigned to them but also in terms of the taskmaster who has assigned it to them.

There are those who believe God has very specific plans for them. There are those who believe they are being directed by spirit or the universe to travel particular paths in life and to have certain experiences. The idea that everything happens for a reason may be their attempt at accepting unpleasant circumstances by assigning meaning to them, even if that meaning isn’t yet know. They are all are entitled to their views, of course, and the meaning they find in their lives. But obviously not everyone is religious or even spiritual. Not everyone believes in the existence of a “taskmaster” to whom we are responsible.

I don’t mean to deny the considerable mystery surrounding our existence. To the contrary, I see much that is mysterious and am glad for the mystery. I don’t know all there is to know, and neither does anyone else. Perhaps there actually are celestial guiding forces at work in our lives pushing or urging us in one direction or another.

On the other hand, what if life is empty and meaningless?

More next time.

A Little Zen Story

The Meaning of Our Individual Lives

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