Friday 31 July 2009

Choices and Environment

As a person I am naturally smug of my thought process, which I and for that matter we all believe is ours solely. Notion of our mind being played by others could be intriguing as well as frustrating and for the same reason never acknowledged with open arms. Decision making process is attributed to be the prerogative of one's intellect and one's intellect only, wrongly however.

My personal observation of decision making process seems to conclude that it is heavily dependent on immediate surrounding in which the person is, and in particular on the opinion of person around you when the situation at hand is to be one to which your acquaintance happens to be relatively new. Take for instance the decision of choosing your drink when in a group, its going to be substantially affected the group's choice of drink , unless you are too sure of what you want to have. Its strange to find that , your immediate surrounding could even trump your personal choice ( a vague idea, may be ). And when the decision has been made and you look at it from a different vantage point you wonder why you made that choice, or whether you would have had really made that choice , under the situation when different set of people were around you.

It leads me to a more generic conclusion; unless we are too sure of what we want to do, at any general moment, which most of us generally aren't , we are going to be considerably affected by the person around us. Every moment is a new one , laden with sudden events and unexpected ones , and in this moment the decision making gets heavily influenced. Its for this same reason that our parents enforce upon us the need for a good friend ( with their personal notion of goodness), and its for the same reason that we zero in on an institution where we could find superior quality intellectuals around us, which would considerably influence our choices made and motivate us to direct greater part of our force towards bettering ourselves in the qualities of our surrounding.

Looked at philosophically, it all ends at the point where things are differentiated by what lies within and what lies without. Its true that our mind is capable of making decisions , choosing the best course for itself, but its only in full command when you "know" what you want , and not when you have a fuzzy notion of your want. In the latter case it will always be a slave of fortuitous circumstances around us. How do we decide or for that matter know what we want to do? This is the hard part, nevertheless, I would suggest , "think" and yeah preferably in solitude .

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Worth knowing ,this looks to be very very very true and I guess most of them would agree to it a good extent .