USA, Pennsylvania, Reading
“Black Americano, please.” A simple enough request to a barista. But, oh, it’s not. I’m already grumpy. It’s too early for chat. But the questions keep coming. “Small, medium or large?” she replies. “Medium please” I grunt, hoping that will be the end of the matter. “Drink in or take away?” I reply. “Would you like milk with that?” I resist the temptation to refer my chirpy interrogator back to the original request for a black coffee. “No, thank you.”
Surely that’s enough information. But, no. “Would you like to try our new Guatemalan blend?” I decline, signalling growing irritation. “Would you like a pastry with that…” A list of various croissants and muffins follows. My mood darkens further. All I want is a bloody coffee.
Choice is the bane of modern life. “Existence precedes essence”, preached the existentialists. What they meant was that who we are is not given at birth, but is constructed by the series of choices we make about who we want to be. “Become who you are”, said Nietzsche some decades before.
From this perspective, life is a never ending succession of choices, a constant work-in-progress of self-definition. We are the authors of our own identity. Mini gods of self-creation. Sartre liked to sit in coffee houses, musing on the meaning of life. But surely even he could not have reckoned with the ubiquity of choice in a consumerist society. I fancy that he, too, would have been broken by the ever-present demand to decide for oneself. As I sip my coffee, a semblance of calm begins to return. Existentialism is too heavy a burden. No more questions, please. I can’t take it any more. I don’t want to be endlessly responsible for me. I want someone else to shoulder the burden on my behalf.
I was wrestling with this as I read the Children’s Commissioner’s comments about the mental health of our children. There has been a sharp rise recently in the number of children self-harming. There has also been a significant rise over the past few years in the number of children seeking help from psychiatrists. Why are our kids so unhappy? Various answers have been touted. The use of social media is an obvious one. So, too, is the collapse of community life. Both of these are important.
But I also suspect that the way we have come to treat children as mini-consumers, little choice-centres, also has something to do with it as well. For nowhere is this choice-inducing anxiety more toxic than in childhood. It used to be that childhood operated under instruction. For the child, life was a series of givens. And this functioned as a sort of emotional security. But now that we are inducting our children into this culture of choice at an ever-earlier age, we deprive them of the necessary scaffolding of care, love and support.
It’s a big claim, I know. But it is worth reminding ourselves of an important aspect of our culture of choice: that it absolves people of a responsibility of care towards others. To put it another way, our culture of choice contains this message: I am not responsible for you because you are responsible for you. Are you fat? That’s your choice. Smoke? Your choice. In debt? Your decisions have got you into trouble. It’s all on you.
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SubscribeThoughtful article, with a relevant and useful perspective. I would argue that this so-called “culture of choice” is nothing more than consumerism run rampant, with parents whose lack of capacity for critical thinking has left them unable to shield their children from its insistent demands to buy, buy, buy.
But in order for that to work, people must first be cultured in an ethos of narcissism, something psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell write about in The Narcissism Epidemic. Narcissism has replaced what was once a view of society as the relationship of individuals to a larger whole, which implied that self-gratification isn’t necessarily always the first imperative, that our choices have an impact beyond ourselves. According to Twenge and Campbell, the so-called “entitled generation” didn’t happen by accident but is a logical outcome of four decades or so of cultivating narcissism, each successive generation becoming more narcissist than the last. Children now run the household; a first in human history as far as I know. As you say, this imposes a burden on them they are not constitutionally or intellectually able to bear. That’s why parents were invented.
Joel Bakan in his book and documentary The Corporation pointed out how corporations now routinely hire psychologists from elite universities in order to more successfully manipulate the public to buy their products. And one of the things they realized long ago was that marketing to children as the primary consumer works far more consistently than marketing to adults alone. A child’s lack of experience and critical thinking capacity leaves them more open to manipulation, which then is passed on to the parents via the “nag factor.”
This shift in culture happened, according to the BBC documentary The Century of the Self, somewhere around the middle of the 1960s and was largely driven by marketing imperatives. JFK’s famous dictum, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” marks the watershed of the previous era just as it began to be eclipsed by the new narcissist-driven consumerist utopia. Marketing experts like Edward Bernays were critical in developing this new paradigm.
From that day to this, people are expected to define themselves by what they buy, rather than focusing on how choice can best be reflected by our ethical behaviour, how we hew to our integrity, how we contribute to society rather than demanding that it always serve our personal needs.
“Paternalistic is exactly what parenting should be.” This idea that kids are born with as much “wisdom” as their parents is a New Age trope that needs to be dispensed with. Evolutionary biology gives the lie to such nonsense.
Car; Trueman’s book, ‘The rise and triumph of self’ is fascinating on the so-called culture of choice.
Really late to read this article but I thoroughly enjoyed it – and agreed with most of the points made. While I do appreciate the many choices I have in my life and situation, sometimes less is more.Thank you Giles.