Life menus

In last week’s post, I had referred to this excellent post – “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds…” in the context of Google/Facebook/Amazon. As I had mentioned, I liked it because it had a direct connection with the can-want-need framework I (try to) use in my personal consumption. Specifically, his first point on the ‘menu’ and the illusion of choice. To quote from the post,

When people are given a menu of choices, they rarely ask:

• “what’s not on the menu?”
• “why am I being given these options and not others?”
• “do I know the menu provider’s goals?”
• “is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?” (e.g. an overwhelmingly array of toothpastes)

If you look at an average life, the menu is systematically reduced as we grow up and make our way through life. In addition to can-want-need, we also have to contend with ‘should’. The Book of Life rightly calls it ‘The Duty Trap‘. (in a tangential context) Duty to others, and then duty towards the ‘self image’ that gets created in the process. I think this has quite some bearing on the behaviour of those with privilege. The trappings of privilege, I have increasingly begun to see, have a lot to do with self image. For instance, my choices of everything from apparel to vacations reflect the ‘menu’ formed over childhood and youth until now.

‘Need’, in childhood, is quickly replaced with ‘should’. I think slowly, we forget that there is an option in life’s menu called ‘need’. The possibility that we have to do/consume something only if we need to, rather than ‘should’, and later ‘can/want’. As the concept of ‘need’ disappears from our own menu, maybe it becomes even more difficult to recognise it in others’. Blind to the extent that at increasing levels of privilege, our minds convert and justify ‘wants’ as ‘needs’ and prioritise it over even the basic ‘needs’ of others. Wealth, as this HBR article points out, seems to make us less generous. Apparently, so does over thinking!

I wouldn’t call myself wealthy, but I am privileged in many ways, and have been guilty of the above. Selfish in terms of money, as well as time, seeing both through the lens of scarcity. One of the ways I am trying to beat this, in addition to applying the can-want-need framing in as many consumption decisions as possible, is to look at life’s menu beyond the constraints of money, and the artificial illusion of choice it provides.

It’s a solace to know that some of the greatest minds have grappled with this. But it’s a solution that each of us have to find out for ourselves.