When In Doubt, Pick C

I posit that there has never been a generation that suffers more from fear of the indefinite than mine. In a world where paralysis by analysis is seemingly a norm, it is ever harder to be man or women of action and initiative. To illustrate this, think of all the times you were at a restaurant or a place that serves food, and either thought or heard someone express their lack of knowledge concerning what they want to order. "I don't know what I want." But in most cases, they do know what they want. If you were at a Burger King and you turned to a friend and itemized every ingredient that was available and asked them to respond with yes or no, you could almost always come to a logical deduction of a food suited to their taste. However, when someone expresses this sentiment, often what they mean is not that they don't know what they want, but rather they don't know what they want most. We, the children of the multiple choice age, have been trained to think deductively. We try to consider that of all the choices on the menu, which one would bring us the most glutto-oral pleasure. Instead of walking in and thinking "I would like bacon" and choosing an option that has bacon, we walk in not thinking very much at all and staring at the menu and thinking "bacon is nice, but so is chicken, and I want something with onion rings, or maybe lettuce and tomatoes; both sound good, but not together." This then manifests itself into "I don't know what I want." And that is a problem. It's not at all because we aren't an opinionated people. We have no problem whatsoever with naming the things that we dislike. any parent that has tried to feed one  of us will attest to that. However, stand the same child in front of a supermarket candy rack and tell them to pick just one, and it would not be surprising if he or she broke down and cried. The problem is that all or lives, we've been offered choices to choose from. Mothers tell kids that they can either go to the beach or the park. Teachers tell kids that they can either play with legos or crayons. The problem with this, is that this format of simplification extends beyond things that they can have or do. It spills over into how children understand consequences. For instance, you can either clean up your room, or get a time out. You can either be nice and share, or be scolded. You can either not cheat, or get sent to the principal's office. 

This is not an intrinsically bad thing. It allows kids to understand cause and effect, and the results of their actions in the context of their situation. However, what happens when a child grows up strictly understanding the world in this way, is that it might limit his or her ability to anything besides that. The result is that life is reduced to a multiple choice test, where options are presented, and although some are outright wrong, some are a little right, and some a neutral, there is always a clear, justifiable, most correct answer. And this bring us back to the menu. There is no most right answer to the question of what you would like to eat. There are wrong answers and mostly wrong answers (food that you are allergic too, and foods that you find disgusting, respectively), And sure, there will likely be foods that you don't dislike, but don't really care for either. But for the most part, when I walk into a restaurant, everything sounds pretty good about the same amount. And so our brain are scrambling, taking in information trying to find the right answer when there isn't one.

People talk about seeing the world in black and white, but my generation grew up comparing shades of grey. The problem is that as we grow up and are told to be more and more independent, there are very often more than fifty of them. The way your brain works then it is trying to decide whether to fill in the blank with "refute","repudiate" or "decry" on an SAT question (ignoring of course "embargo" and "confer") is completely different from how your brain works when you're trying to decide what to do after college. The first is a highly deductive process, taking your choices and discerning what should be selected and what should be ignored, and the second is a process of creation, balancing your hopes and dreams with reality to carve out a path between the two.

In recent history, society has put a lot of emphasis on choice. If someone wants to be any kind of sexual orientation, or have any kind of hair color, or drive any kind of car, the option is there. This kind of freedom is good for very many reasons. But to the teenager out of high school for whom the most difficult decision he faces on a semi regular basis is what clothes to wear or buy, this is frightening. 

I don't know that I have a solution to this. Normally, I'd like to end a piece like this with some inspirational conviction that spurs on those who do good in the world and persuades the apathetic to take a stand (which is ironic, because I'm fairly positive that no one reads these things anyway). But when it comes to such a systemized, methodical, formulated, and institutionalized practice of raising kids, I have no solution.