Ever since the beginning of time, human beings have had to traverse through the minefield of making the right choice. Google promptly suggests, humans make 35,000 decisions every day, which approximately translates into needing to make a choice every 2.5 seconds!
You can love them or hate them but in today’s world, one thing is clear that you can’t really avoid them. With consumerism on an all-time high, we are flooded with the
best of things. It’s all about seeing what else is out there, how can you choose a better deal, a better life. All day long we are bombarded with digital signs highlighting how dull and boring our lives are, and we are required to ‘make the right choice’ to be shinier, brighter. And god forbid, if we don’t, then we’d be missing out on the more beautiful, smarter, awesome version of ourselves. The version that the ‘story induced’, ‘like hungry’ social media makes us believe we should be.
Even if you buckle down and go through the mind-numbing, mentally draining process of making a choice, there are opinion generators, who’d be on your case to convince you, you’ve made the wrong one. Or worse, they’d take your choice - if different from theirs, as a personal attack! The advent of social media means not only you need to be super precise about your options, but you need to be ready to have them thread bared, evaluated against social norms and points of view, of not the people close to you, but random strangers. How much can you spend while trying to maintain the balance of not being judged as too flashy or too miserly? How much can you own before you are classified as a hoarder and people ‘Konmari’ you, only to get you to buy other things?
Not only in the materialistic world but even in your lifestyle choices, if you go the conventional route of standard directive life – house, car, life partner, kids, fur-babies, you are labelled as ‘Boring’. Make a different choice and pop comes the label as ‘Wild’. Sift through a couple of prospective life partners – and ‘you are being too choosy’. Marry the first prospect – Really, ‘Aren’t you settling too soon?’
That brings us to the most pertinent question in this world overripe with research, opinions, and options, how do you choose? How do you become the perfect Instagram story – of being happy and joyous under soft sunlight, content reflecting from your grinning face (which incidentally is without a blemish), dressed in the perfect clothes, surrounded by just enough things you need? Makes you wish that instead of researching and bringing out more choices, someone would spend some time creating a rule book of how to make the right choices.
But then when everyone is advising you that you must make the right one, would it be so bad if you chose wrong? Let me rephrase, would it be so bad if the thing that
you thought was right turned out to be the wrong one? Would it be bad to let go of what others want you to be and choose what you can be? Is making the choice important or what you choose to do with them?
Rituparna's debut romance novel about people and their choices is available online and in all leading bookstores.
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