Your Decisions Are Made For You, How To Take Back Your Decision Making

Aram Rasa Taghavi
Aug 27, 2017 · 5 min read

“The sacred word ‘freedom’ turns out to be, just like ‘soul’, a hollow term empty of any discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented’.

–Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, best-selling author of world-renown book, Sapiens.

We don’t choose our desires, we feel them and act accordingly.

Yet feelings come from thoughts, and given we don’t know where our thoughts come from, or are engineered by our local environments (work, news etc.), most of us aren’t free to make our own decisions though it may seem like we make them on our own.

To test this just ask, “can I control the thoughts that happen to me?”.

I’ve been slapped in the face with this realization that we’re in an internal prison, and I’m trying to break out.

The fierce societal forces don’t make it easy by any means to engineer my thoughts and internal programs the way I’d like them to be, but knowing is taking the first step and half the battle.

It’s a life-long process.

The question to ultimately ask yourself is: ‘why do you want to want, what you want to want?’.

For example, as a full time start up entrepreneur, and passionate weekend writer, getting things done and my level of productivity determines whether my happy chemicals make me feel good or bad.

If I get things done well, I feel good. If I don’t, I often feel dissonance.

So naturally, the activities that fire my reward centers of the brain are working and writing. Perhaps not a bad problem to have in our current system, but that’s besides the point.

95% of our behavior is subconscious.

If we aren’t good at programming the subconscious, we aren’t in control.

We just strive each day to fire up reward centers of what we think we want at that moment.

The same way rats felt to have freedom of choice in an experiment done by professor Sanjiv Talwar, at New York State University.

“The rats work for pleasure”, responding to animal rights activists who voiced concern about experiments on rats. He continued, “they enjoy the experiments, and when the reward centers of their brain lights up, they feel Nirvana”. This passage is from Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus.

“The rat doesn’t feel that somebody else controls her, and she doesn’t feel that she is being coerced to do anything against her will.”

When Professor Talwar presses the remote control (triggering the rat), the rat wants to move to the left, which is why she moves to the left.

The rats desires are nothing but a pattern of firing neurons.” Technically, the rat is free to act, but it’s acting as it’s programmed.”

Ie. Working at your company feels good when it goes well, and you feel fulfilled, but at the end of the day, you’re working day in day out at a company to fire up your reward centers.

So think about why your reward centers command you to ‘work at this company’ or do whatever else it is you do. That’s the purpose of this article to and main point to stop and understand.

I know we have to make livings but again that’s the point of the piece.

‘Making a living’ is a program and believing we need to be fulfilled by being useful and productive is also a program.

The point is you can feel useful, productive or fulfilled without having to ‘work hard’ or ‘be famous’ or ‘change the world’ which is the trap many of us (myself included) have bought into and creates a lot of strife and stress.

Here’s How To Consciously Take Control Of Your Choices

1. Realize Every Belief is a Program That Can Be De-Programmed By Simply Not Believing It

Feeling good because you had a productive day (my personal big one) aka ‘getting things done’ is a program.

Know you can program yourself to ‘feel good’ for other things, taking the day off. Having fun. Not feeling guilty (some on my list) etc.

It can be anything.

Here’s pioneering developmental biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton on our beliefs affecting our biology:

“Endowed with the ability to be self reflective, the self-conscious mind is extremely powerful. It can observe any programmed behavior we are engaged in, evaluate the behavior, and consciously decide to change the program. We can actively choose how to respond to most environmental signals and whether we even want to respond at all. The conscious mind’s capacity to override the subconscious mind’s programmed behaviors is the foundation of free will.”

In a nutshell, believe that you can believe what you want to believe, and perceive the world around you in the way you want it to be, and create your reality. The key to winning at life.

2. Train Your Subconscious (Beliefs) With Neurolinguistic Programming

NLP allows you to change the patterns of mental and emotional behavior.

It’s actually very simple to program ourselves. However we’re the #1 biggest obstacle to achieving what we want.

We’re the only species that can visualize our success and let it happen.

It’s our desires and other self made obstacles of wanting that create conflict or block what we want.

What you desire, you won’t get. What you visualize and work for in the spirit of excellence, you’ll easily achieve.

3. Absolutely Decide That You Decide What You Want to Want and How You Want to Live

This is exceptionally difficult. We are in an established system all around us and so deep into the game and we all have to make livings now.

It’s very clear what get’s rewarded in a capitalist game and it can also be difficult de-programming the way we’ve been conditioned since a young age.

However it’s clear and simple, it just needs to be worked on daily.

Being aware of it and beginning that process to my life is my goal and think one worth all of us worth fighting for because it can create the world we want to create for ourselves.

Art by Emily May Rose

Thanks for reading. Please give the piece 3 claps if you made it this far ;) Helps a ton. And finally:

)

Aram Rasa Taghavi

Written by

Articles on entrepreneurship and life from personal experiences (only). Former XIR @ Expa SF

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