Choice - mark of humanity or empty platitude?

Nobody wants choice.
We want only the thing that we want.

Nobody needs choice.
We don’t need the constraint and labor of setting up and examining alternatives.

Nobody makes a choice.
Choice is a vain thought constructed after the event.

I must be the nobody who wants choice.

You don’t want choice. Be honest. Do not be politically correct. You, me, everyone, want the thing we want. How could it be any different?

I enjoy being presented with multiple items to compare and contrast so I can choose what is the best available for me at any given time.

‘We want the only thing that we want’ is absolutely fine, but the idea of more than one option being a constraint is ludicrous. What if the only option we have is utterly repulsive to us?

Give an example to back your claim up if you can.

The ability to want is based on the reality of choice. Without choice, could there be any wants? I wonder.

If you like to be tempted to pick something you weren’t looking for then that looks like greed or idle waste.

Choice is a hell on earth. Let everything you do be considered for alternatives and feel life and spontaneity being stifled out of you.

If you want 1, how far would you want to go in looking at 2,3,4,5,6, ad infinitum?

Why?

You have to elaborate more I’m afraid. I’m all for sponteneity but you are failing to convince anybody why choice is an inhibition at the moment.

Go to the bathroom. But when you do, make a conscious choice where you place each foot, make a conscious choice about how far you breath out, and when you breath; make a choice about which route to the bathroom you will take - you might want to consider the choices of climbing out of the window and going over the roof to the bathroom, or flying a jet around the world and coming in through the back door, or simply walking close to the skirting board - an inch? 2 inches? They’re all choices. Do all that, think of that, and more, each time you do anything.

No, it doesn’t.

Gotcha. Well, these are all arbitrary choices. So much so, that many of them aren’t even choices (if spoken in terms of conscious choice). Other choices would be considered as much more important to us in a wider context. You can’t undermine these choices so.

You might want to consider the choice of going to someone’s else’s bathroom, or going in a cup. Consider all the choices and cups there are before you choose what to do. You might want to consider the choice of calling your mother before going to the bathroom; you might want to consider phoning someone else. You might want to leave going to the bathroom for i minute, 2 minutes or 3 minutes. All choices.

Again, these choices only come about when you actively thinK of them. Let’s go back to your original post:

So all choice, right?

A man with the press of a button is about to drop you 500 feet onto concrete road; you have no choice in the matter. Suddenly, a woman convinces the man to give you a choice between two things. Either press the button or give you a delicious cheese sandwich.

If you are only ever given one option, ie no option, it probably won’t be the desired option.

That’s nothing to do with choice. That’s to do with being forced to do something, whether good or bad.

You’ve been stripped of all liberty apart from one choice. It’s still a choice.

I can’t see how having one thing that you want amounts to a choice. but you aren’t giving choice a good deal. In order to consider which choices are useful, youmust consider them all, and there is an endless number of them to consider. That is hell on earth. in fact, considering all the choices is worse than pitchforks up your arse to flaming eternity.

I don’t know what your question means.

You seem to be making the case that choice in general is a bad thing. Is that right?

I get what you are tryign to establish here; that being that if we were to consider all potential things we can do we wouldn’t get anything done because we would be busy examining those choices for our entire lives. I even get that if you take away any undesirable options there are still almost infinite considerations.

But the ability to choose in general - being merely capable of that liberty is not an inhibition, or to use your hyperbole ‘hell on earth’. Far from it.

As I said, I get your point but you’re coming across wrong.