The Road Not Taken — A Postmodernist’s Guide to Decision-Making

Last year, David Orr wrote a book called The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong — a compelling excerpt is found in a similarly titled article posted on The Paris Review: The Most Misread Poem in America.

You are encouraged to read that article in full, but for the sake of convenience I will provide what summary I can of its more salient points before making my own.

1. “The Road Not Taken” is the most popular and enduring poem of American culture.
2. Most people misread the poem as a wholesale endorsement of American-style individualism and self-assertion.
3. The famous lines of the poem — “I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference” — are significantly altered by the suggestion that the speaker may be lying. Prior lines in the poem suggest no discernible difference between the paths. Only in retrospect will the speaker evaluate his own path as making “all the difference” despite not knowing what the other path held in store.

Here’s the most concise evaluation in Orr’s own words:

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.

That last bit hits home for me because I am constantly constructing a narrative of self-deception — one that dangerously regards myself as the master of my fate (though that’s from another poem for another time.)

Orr is hardly the first to notice our inconsistent interpretations of Frost’s most enduring poem, but he might offer the most balanced evaluation of the disparity yet. The question is not about the validity or invalidity of any particular interpretation, lest poetry be a worthless endeavor. The question is one of revelation: whether right or wrong, the colloquial usage of “The Road Not Taken” reveals much about the American worldview as it is played out in daily living and decision-making.

Once again — to be very clear — this post is not about determining the intended message of the poem, or extracting its “true” claims (I think neither is possible). This post aims to let the poem speak into our lives where and when we might be able to appreciate its voice.

The Preponderance of Choice

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

In this stanza, Frost gives voice to a particular anxiety that has become increasingly relevant to my generation. Approaching a divergence in life — the choice between a variety of groceries, colleges, jobs, or candidates at the polls — fills us with trepidation. There is something irrevocable, something permanent behind each decision and the way it makes a permanent impact on the path we take in life. Who could take such a step so lightly?

And our options are rarely limited to two roads diverged. As the digital economy proliferates 85 years after Frost’s poem, we deal with an ever-increasing array of choices. Such is the foundation of Barry Schwartz’ The Paradox of Choice (read the book or watch the TED Talk). Schwartz writes about the overwhelming nature of having too many options — often hundreds of options per product at the supermarket, whether ketchup, cereal, or toothpaste — and concludes that the situation may, paradoxically, be bad for our ability to choose.

Part of the downside of abundant choice is that each new option adds to the list of trade-offs, and trade-offs have psychological consequences. The necessity of making trade-offs alters how we feel about the decisions we face; more important, it affects the level of satisfaction we experience from the decisions we ultimately make.

— Barry Schwartz

The speaker of “The Road Not Taken” agonizes over the trade-offs between just two roads — how much more sorry he would be over a multitude. If only we could travel all roads; if only we could actually test each option before we settle permanently on one choice. Some think it even better if we never have to settle at all.

Everyone experiences what I call the “First Stanza Phase” of decision making, at least briefly, when the options are presented to us but we have yet to examine them. We’d be fools not to give pause when so much hangs in the balance. But we have to get past this phase — and unfortunately, too many people are getting stuck here, before the story of each decision really begins.

Discernment in the Age of Misinformation

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

Here, the poem makes a very lucid claim that I find difficult to dismiss or reinterpret. The speaker briefly entertains the idea that one road might be better than the other — “having perhaps the better claim” — but soon concludes that, being honest with himself, there is no discernible difference from where he stands.

Isn’t this the way with all such decisions? From the front end nothing is clear. The future is hazy and inscrutable.

Yet this doesn’t mesh with the way we approach experience. An evaluative habit borrowed from the modern mind lingers among even our most postmodern citizens. We rank, we list, we enumerate. A “Top 10” list exists for anything with enough contestants to fill the queue. Think colleges, careers, cities, and entertainment. We can’t even go to a movie without checking its scores on Rotten Tomato or Metacritic.

It’s a comfortable thing to have a number, rank or dollar sign attached to everything in life, always letting us know what things are really worth. But can such values really achieve what they claim? How can we compare films like Lion King and Ben Hur? Films are made for many different audiences and aim at many different goals. Or how can we really evaluate all the disparate pieces of experience that comprise the careers of lawyers, teachers, or accountants? You’ll be years deep into your educational commitment before you truly know “what it’s like” to be any of these. Or — in the case of straightforward comparisons, like which ice cream tastes best — how can we really test all the choices on our own scale of preference? Others can compile lists of other facts or create their own Top 10 lists, but your taste will always be your own. It’s up to you to try them all. (Besides, no Top 10 list worth making will be written the same way twice.)

Perhaps the sheer abundance of choices would not be so daunting if we could distinguish one option from among the others — if we really had the ability to evaluate things the way we’d like or if there really was a definitive “Top 10” list. As it is, sometimes we have little or no resources for making informed decisions about our own path. If we do try to gather data, we are likely to end up with bad information, which might be worse than no information at all.

Do not hear me say that anyone should eschew discernment in their life choices. Plenty of things can and should be taken into account. But in our world there are times when a choice is necessarily unclear to the point of arbitrary divergences. We must simply choose — even when no option seems the better.

Constructing Our Narrative

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Experiential meaning emerges post-hoc. That is, we look back after the fact at the things we’ve done and the things done to us, and we decide from that vantage point what really mattered, why it mattered, and what it has to do with our identity. There is wisdom to this; hence the phrase, “Hindsight is 20/20.”

But there is also a danger to post-hoc narration. As we construct the story of our lives, impulse tempts us to mince the details or assign meanings that construct a more pleasant vision of our self.

In some instances, this is fairly harmless. I hear some college students, once plagued by indecision, comfort themselves by saying, “now I can’t imagine being anywhere else!” I hear the same from men and women in careers that they acquired by some strange circumstances. They believe — or at least say they believe — that they ended up where they were always meant to be.

Such sweeping assessments about our past assuage the modern anxiety known as the fear of missing out. It’s nice to think that where we are is where we should be and that everything we’ve done has only led us to our most pleasant and inevitable fate. The idea that we are “here for a reason” is enduring, not because it adds actual meaning to our lives, but because it allows a higher regard for self-actualization and our own ability to choose.

That’s all well and good for the harmless things, but what about when these assumptions begin to shape our worldview at its core? Our narratives of self-deception change the way we think about our relationship with others — always making ourselves the protagonist. For centuries people have been using large-scale versions of post-hoc narrative to justify doctrines such as the crusades, manifest destiny, and slavery. The logic becomes that whatever we do, the results will be inherently validated by fate, God, or what-have-you. False meaning propagates poor living.

The common thread of all these false narratives is that they place the narrator at the center of meaning. That is why, I think, Frost’s speaker repeats the “I” in the narration of his decision. He emphasizes his own agency in the decision “I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

Theologically, this is concerning. No matter how much narrative control we attribute to God, it’s dangerous business to write our own meanings into the narrative after the fact and without reference to the story he tells us to share (the Gospel). I doubt that God’s plan for our lives always included the ways in which we make ourselves most comfortable — the same goes for the ways in which we assert dominance over others — and yet that’s often the conclusion we draw when examining our lives.

Is this what Frost was trying to tell us in “The Road Not Taken”? Maybe not in detail and probably without the theological bent. But this is how the poem speaks to me and many of the postmodern generation. It speaks the truth that story-telling is a valuable part of constructing reality and evaluating our decisions, but we must be careful not to deceive ourselves about our self-importance in the process.

“The Badlands” is an attempt to engage with the narratives around us — to pull back the undergrowth of the paths we find, no matter how meaningless they appear. The task must be done with great humility, however. We make no great claims to wisdom. This is the lesson I learned from Robert Frost.