The Choice Journals #1: Mechanics of Choice
We Are Always Choosing
For years, I drank two litres of vodka on an average day. That’s a level of dependency I had reinforced over a lifetime.
Nothing and nobody could stop me from wanting to drink. No person, no consultant, no book, and no near-death experience had any effect. Stints in hospital and prison forced temporary breaks on me, but I went straight back to it the moment I was ‘free’.
The only thing that finally ended it, and transformed my life, was understanding choice.
It wasn’t until I fully grasped that my own choices were creating the conditions that led me into addiction, that I could begin to fundamentally change everything.
And I mean everything. Because addiction, sobriety, health, wellness, good relationships, and fulfilment don’t appear randomly. They are byproducts of the choices that sustain them.
At the centre of our reality is the act of exercising choice.
Not just the big, obvious choices. Not just the dramatic, life-altering ones. But the small ones. Everyday ones. Automatic ones. Intangible ones. The seemingly insignificant ones. The ones you don’t recognise as choices.
Looking back, I see how often I was choosing the worst options without realising I was even choosing at all.
For a long time, sometimes without even knowing it, I blamed everything except the real culprit: me. My upbringing, the system, lack of resources, runs of bad luck, the state of the world, even blaming my genes. Anything else. But none of these made me drink.
My suffering was perpetuated by my own choices. But I never connected my outcomes back to myself as the choice-maker in everything I experienced. When I did, everything made sense.
I’ve since learned to completely forgive myself for slipping down as far as I did. I’d argue that if anyone else were in that much personal agony, they’d find an escape too.
When I chose to believe my reality was my responsibility, I started to change, and so did my reality. Not instantly though. Make no mistake, there is no magical off-switch for bad things or instant on-switch for good things. Change is a process, not an event. But the shift begins, slowly but surely, the moment you accept your role in your reality. And believe me, that role is enormous.
Let me tell you this: you don’t just witness your life, you govern it.
The world around you isn’t inherently good or bad; it just is. And beyond an arm’s reach or your immediate influence, most of it is beyond your control. You can’t force it to be better or worse for you. It doesn't care what your thoughts about it are.
But how you experience your version of it, through that small cluster of it, that lens of perception of itself that calls itself you, is shaped by the choices you make.
All of your power is created by how you choose to navigate yourself.
This is the first in a series exploring choice. I’ll begin by outlining what I believe are broader principles and work towards specifics as they unravel in my mind. Perhaps I’ll come back to what I’ve already said with a new understanding.
I won’t be discussing addiction and recovery just yet. Those are long downstream effects of choice. Before we get there, I want to explore the foundations of how choice works; breaking them down into digestible articles, which will appear more like musings rather than structured essays.
What to expect today:
Defining choice.
We are always choosing.
Consequences are inevitable.
You create your version of reality.
I’m not dismissing trauma, memories, biology, conditioning, circumstance, environment, or other powerful forces. My focus is on recognising where choice exists today, despite those factors.
As this series unfolds, I hope you begin to see your choices, evaluate their utility, and make better ones that serve you in the longer term.
Let’s begin.
Defining Choice
The Latin word electio means ‘choice’, from which we get the English word elect. To elect is, quite literally, to choose.
You elect what you focus on. You elect the people you allow into your world. You elect the state of your health through your daily actions. What you possess results from small elections you’ve made. You elect a lens through which you see reality.
In every moment, you are both the elector and the elected. The question is: which parts of yourself do you elect into power?
A dictionary might define choice as the ability, opportunity, or the act of selecting between two or more possibilities; or the thing chosen. It suggests a degree of control within a space in your mind that allows you to select between options, even if those are limited.
We do not have absolute free will. We are bound by limits, but we’re capable of reasoning, adapting, and deciding. In fact, we are always choosing.
We Are Always Choosing
If you are a healthy adult human, alive, awake, and of sound mind, then you are constantly making choices, whether you recognise them as choices or not.
Your brain processes uncountable micro-decisions in the background, while the conscious you makes the choices that shape your days, months and years. Some choices are deliberate, others are automatic. Some are micro and some are macro. Some are tangible, others intangible. Some are liberating, and others limiting. Some are shaped by reason, others by emotion. And so on. Choosing to believe you are not always choosing is, itself, a choice.
To believe you are not choosing is to surrender agency to external control. Both agency and surrender are self-reinforcing mindsets; one leading to self-determination, the other to passivity. Whether you see yourself as the driver or the passenger in your own life is, itself, a choice.
Some choices might not feel like choices, but they are. For any decision to have been made, at least one other alternative had to exist, perhaps overlooked or uncomfortable, and even if only slightly different, it was present nonetheless. Not finding an option does not mean it wasn’t there, as sometimes choices are hidden beneath limiting beliefs, ingrained habits or the language used to describe them. When something is framed as inevitable - ‘I had no choice’ or ‘I always get angry’- that framing is itself a choice, and it can obscure the fact that other possibilities exist, even if outside of familiar thinking patterns. The way we perceive the availability of choice determines whether we recognise it at all. Not looking for choices is itself, a choice.
Every moment presents an array of possibilities in what to do, believe, think, say or ignore. Right now, you are choosing some options and disregarding others. You are also experiencing the consequences of past choices, whether made consciously or not. How you interpret those consequences is, itself, a choice.
In some areas of life, you may feel like you are thriving; in others, you may feel like you are falling back. The areas where you thrive are likely supported by choices that reinforce that success. The areas where you struggle may be sustained by choices, perhaps unnoticed, that maintain that difficulty. Even how you define what is a win or a struggle is, itself, a choice.
You might dislike your current options, but that doesn't mean you aren’t choosing among them. Nor does it mean that alternatives don’t exist. And in some way, even if indirectly, your past choices may have contributed to the set of choices before you now. To deny self-responsibility is, itself a choice.
Action is a visible form of choice, but choices begin before action occurs. Action is preceded by a network of beliefs, perspectives and habits, each of which, at some point, were formed by choices. Inaction is as much a choice as action. It shapes your reality in ways you might not immediately realise, perhaps even more than action. This does not mean all inaction is inherently bad; it can be a strategic tool if consciously and justifiably applied. What matters is whether inaction is a default response or a calculated one. How you justify your choices, is itself a choice.
The question isn’t whether you are choosing or not; it’s if you are choosing well.
Consequences Are Inevitable
Every choice has consequences. This is not a matter of belief; it is a function of cause and effect. You cannot opt out of consequence, just as you cannot opt out of choosing, gravity, thermodynamics, or time.
Choices set off chain reactions. Some are visible, some are unseen and subtle. They could influence the external world, your internal one, or both. For example, ignoring something you need to do means it won’t get done, and there’ll be some price to pay later. It also might start a habit of ignoring important tasks, which can spread and might make it easier to skip something else. Some consequences you may anticipate, and others you won’t, or can’t, because they will emerge in patterns beyond what’s reasonable to foresee. While nobody has absolute control over how consequences take shape exactly, the wisdom of the choice that sets them in motion can determine whether they point towards serving you or costing you.
You can learn to navigate choice and consequence as a powerful tool. Through reflecting on past outcomes, trusting your intuition, and developing foresight, you can turn what was once perceived as random into patterns you can influence.
You Create Your Version of Reality
Your version of reality is not a string of random events. It’s an intricate web of your choices and their consequences. They interweave to form this experience you call life.
Your present circumstances, to a significant degree, have been influenced by the choices you’ve made and continue to make. You may take credit for the outcomes you like and distance yourself from the responsibility of those you don’t. But even when external forces truly come into play, you are still making choices about how you interpret them, how you respond, and how much you allow them to impact you.
No choice exists in isolation. They interact with each other. They compound and reinforce one another, and they create feedback loops and patterns that themselves interact.
This web isn’t fixed, even though it might feel that way. You are constantly creating it through choices, but perhaps unexamined ones. If past choices led to a reality you don’t want, then new choices can create a different one. As you are always choosing, and consequences are inevitable, then buried in every moment exists an opportunity to shift your trajectory, even ever so slightly. Collect enough small trajectory shifts, and circumstances will change. Over enough time, that change could be dramatic.
What are you choosing in your reality that you could change? Are you choosing to argue, blame, or hold onto resentment? These choices won’t serve you. They only deepen suffering instead of bringing the relief that better choices could achieve. You can choose differently, and by doing so, you create different consequences.
Unexamined choices lead to unchanged outcomes. What you are not changing, you are choosing. Examine choices closely enough, shift them even slightly, and what you call ‘fate’ and ‘luck’ might be more malleable than you believe. Your fate and luck might prove to be a habit.
The past is fixed, but the future is not; it is shaped by the choices you make from this moment forward. Understanding choice is a skill like any other that requires time, practice, patience and willingness. Developing this skill is built through pausing, reflecting, and willfully seeking alternative options. This skill will help shift reality from something that seems to happen to you into one where you happen to it.
And truly mastering choice goes beyond realising that you are selecting from options. You must also recognise that you are the architect of the mind that creates them.
To be continued in the next chapter….
Thank You.
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Bravo!!!! You always explain what is simple in theory but never easy. Profound. I will always read anything you write!!!
Great article! The moment we fully understand that we have autonomy to make the choice, whether positive or negative, we reclaim our identity and get back in the driver’s seat!