Your Range of Choices is Smaller than you may Realize and That's Limiting to your Lived Experience

Though Pervasive this Condition isn’t Conclusive

When I say “choice” I am referring to autonomous choice. Autonomous choice is akin to free will. It’s the choices you get to make without any outside influence at all. It’s as close to if not actually making a choice “within a vacuum.” I parenthesize “in a vacuum” because the idea of doing something in a vacuum when it comes to choice isn’t in and of itself autonomous choice, because the “vacuum” influences your choice as well. That being said, for conceptualization purposes, “in a vacuum” refers to or is operationally defined as, absence of all, complete and total influence of/from anything.

Influence-free choice matters because it’s the essence of life. As someone who values life I feel as though I tend to make inferences and draw conclusions around life. I am predisposed to a certain bias because of that. I admit that the importance of waking up every morning and having that conscious experience for a 24-hour period of time, as humans have decided to organize it (it can also be referred to as a sun cycle), may not be significant to you. But that conscious experience is the context and ultimate influence on everything. First of all, the idea of life and death is based on whether or not you are having a conscious experience. If you are not having a conscious experience, then there is no concept of life and death, because you aren’t. When I say you aren’t, I mean you don’t exist.

The plane for someone who experiences consciousness and something other than what humans understand as life and death, is different. An alignment and proper functioning of your physiology results in a conscious experience.  This is what it means to be alive. If physiological alignment (your mind and body working together) is a familiar and or common experience for you, the choice of deciding whether or not that matters to you, is the point of choice. Choice gives whatever aspect of life you deploy it in (or have it) meaning, as long as you are in the realm of life and death, and are for all intents and purposes on the living side (since I am not dead yet, as of the writing of this article, or have never not existed prior to birth, or knew what that was while I was in that space (I am unaware of the level of consciousness an individual egg and sperm, human or otherwise, does or does not have) I can’t speak to how you derive meaning in a realm of non-existence or post life (lack-of-functioning-physiology) existence).

All humans are predisposed to do something. That is the nature of work. All humans have a propensity to work, and when you work you do something. When you democratize work, it doesn’t mean punching into a job. That kind of work is capitalized work. That is work that produces some type of material (and maybe sentimental) value for you. Work is anything you do with your body. And because humans do everything with their body, we are predisposed to it. It’s your responsibility to make that aspect of yourself matter. Making that aspect of yourself matter is a human need. The significance of your existence is how and why you ascertain sustenance, protection and safety, love and a sense of belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization or the fulfillment of your purpose, AKA a higher understanding of life, AKA intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual enlightenment. Basically, if you can’t make autonomous choices (from here on I will be using choices and autonomous choices interchangeably, they mean the same thing unless otherwise specified) you aren’t really living and are therefore missing the purpose and function of life.

I am suggesting that there are more people alive but not living, than any of us may realize. The fullness of life materializes within the choices you make, and you only get to make choices within the scope of your maximum capacity of choice. Your maximum capacity of choice is the host of options available to you when you are presented with a choice, and ideally when you make a choice that you believe will yield the most satisfying result for yourself. Objectively there are very little if any choices that lack outside influence. But there is also something that can specifically influence your autonomous choice. You don’t necessarily get to select any given option that you ever have to choose from.

You don’t get to prescreen the options available to you in any scenario before you have to make a choice about it, on the macro level. On the micro level, you get to choose for example, your cell phone carrier, the kind of cell phone you want, the plan you want with them, or whether or not you have a cell phone and carrier at all. On the macro, you don’t get to choose if whether or not cell phones or cell phone carriers exist. You don’t get to choose the cell phone making companies of the world, why or how they exist, or the phones they make and choose to sell in your region. You don’t get to choose if whether humans need to communicate at all, if it’s a luxury, or both, and why. You don’t choose preferred methods of communication or what all the forms of communication are. You make choices about those and similar pre-existing options, based on various other influences when you have to make that choice. That’s your maximum capacity of choice.

Autonomous choice within the context of your maximum capacity of choice is being able to make a choice within your maximum capacity of choice without any outside influence at all. This is virtually impossible. The only way to experience autonomous choice is to make choices in a space void of influence on your decision making. Everything influences your decision making up to your maximum capacity of choice, which itself is a bunch of options that are influenced by your context. Once you arrive there however, you have the opportunity to make an autonomous choice, AKA live, granted you can overcome the following step. the next step to making an autonomous choice (unfortunately, maybe), is to make a choice void of the perniciousness of specifically, though not necessarily exclusively, self-fulfilling prophecy.

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Self-fulfilling prophecy is the experience, circumstance, and or condition where the quality of your decision making is influenced by yours and or someone else’s perception of you. What someone else thinks about you influences not only the options you have, so your maximum capacity of choice (MCC), but also the choice within your MCC within a given circumstance, that you are inclined to make. For example, if someone thinks to themselves that you are dancer, let’s say, and you are completely oblivious to this thought they have and or even the concept of dance; self-fulfilling prophecy suggests that the options that materialize around you and the choice(s) that you are inclined to make in the presence of those options, will likely be one(s) that orbits around the concept of dance. And just like that you lost your free will, autonomous choice, and or your ability to live your life. Other than being oblivious, not once in this example did you have a chance to be yourself. Even within your MCC, your options and your response to your options all revolved around dance. So, even if you thought you were making the best choice for your future, it’s not your future; its someone else’s construct of your life.

What I am referring to in the aforementioned example is a specific type of self-fulfilling prophecy known as the Pygmalion Effect. There are various types of self-fulfilling prophecy but the function of it, whether you’re doing it to yourself or someone else, or someone else is doing it to themselves or you, is the same. What you believe about yourself and someone else, and or what someone else believes about themselves and you, has the ability to shape the trajectory of your respective lives. This makes autonomous choice important, should you choose to care (have the ability to make the choice to choose to care), because if you can’t make decisions free from influence, you are inherently predisposed to potentially living in a way that is undesirable to you. Living in this way is a breeding ground for most if not all the maladaptive behaviors someone may perpetuate. Unhappy people are unhappy because they are unhappy.

One way you can make true autonomous choices is to assume formlessness. When you deploy your power, you can exceed the expectations of yourself and others. Exceeding expectations in this scenario doesn’t mean materializing a self-fulfilling prophecy to its highest degree. It means escaping a self-fulfilling prophecy’s gravitational pull. You can use power to achieve escape velocity. Power is your ability to move things quickly and, in any direction, as quickly as possible. Assuming formlessness is one of the ways you can achieve and demonstrate power; by disassociating yourself with any preconceived notions. Your morals and who you are as a person should still frame how you operate, but when you assume formlessness specifically, and demonstrate power generally, what you do (not who you are) becomes more fluid and dynamic.

When you break away from the projection and confirmation bias that comes with self-fulfilling prophecy, yours or someone else’s, you can make what is likely the closest thing to autonomous choice, or a free will choice, as possible. This is because you are now unburdened by what anyone thinks, including yourself. This effectively and practically looks like better decision making within the context of any maximum capacity of choice scenario, AKA living.

Updated February 1, 2025.