Do we need to restrain our survival instinct?
Most of us don’t like it when others make decisions for us — we prefer to make our own choices. But even when we do make decisions autonomously, sometimes it is as if the process is being hijacked.
Imagine you’re visiting a new restaurant in town that is all the buzz. As you are shown to a table, you are given a menu, but unfortunately it is not quite clear which dishes are vegetarian, which are gluten free and so on. You beckon a server and tell her your specific constraints. “That’s fine,” she says, and disappears with the menu. You are not quite sure what to think, but a little later, she appears with a dish that, she announces, meets all your requirements.
Making our own choices
Too baffled to react with anything else than “thank you”, you decide to start eating, and find it is actually quite a tasty version of one of your favourite meals. You had spotted it on the menu earlier, and had you known that it fitted your constraints, you would very likely have chosen it yourself. Yet there is something odd, and frankly, off, about what just happened. You have ended up with a good choice, but you did not make it yourself. And that grates: we want to make our own choices, in…
