The Danger of an Easy Choice
The path of least resistance leads to a harder life
Your phone is a hub of easy choices.
Doom-scrolling through endless videos, most of which you can’t remember, is the easiest choice you’ll ever make. It is so easy; you don’t even notice you’ve made a decision. Unlike swimming against the current, an easy choice offers no resistance.
Hindsight reveals the danger.
Regret grows when deadlines loom. What should have been done goes undone. Then, urgency and haste, or even worse, outright incompletion, give rise to the discomfort we attribute to failure and, dare I say it, a hard life.
What often follows an easy choice is entropy. By not making the hard choice, you sacrifice control and in so doing, invite disorder, randomness and uncertainty to gain the upper hand in defining the outcome. You’ll curse, calling it bad luck, but in truth, you gave away control when you let the easy decision happen. A life you don’t choose is the perfect way to describe a hard life.
Doom scrolling isn’t alone in feeding easy choices. Although the endless screen you slide through for hours could be more destructive to mankind than what the Trinity test proved possible in 1945, there are other causes to be wary of. The 24/7 newsreel is one.
