145. IT'S NICE TO HAVE OPTIONS - Existentialism and UCAS.
A student I know is struggling to decide which university to go to. They currently have offers to study at a wide range of top institutions, including one from the esteemed Oxbridge pair everyone gets excited about in the UK. “It’s nice to have options”, I told them, thinking of those currently without any offers at all, or the money to attend a place of higher education, but the student, rightly, shot back: “that’s what people keep telling me, but is it?”
And they had a point.
While gratitude is always important, and it is true that theirs is a very privileged problem to have, for the person whose problem it is, the fact that many other people don’t have the same problem doesn’t actually help make the decision they have to make any easier. It merely opens up a further option to the range of choices to decide from: you can always choose not to go to any university at all!
And maybe that would be better, depending on the reasons they have for indecision about any of the equally wonderful places currently offering them a place? Maybe the doubt and hesitation is about university itself, rather than which university? Having options can be good, but sometimes those options merely remind you of a choice which has to be made and which you only want to avoid.
But only you, the decision-maker, know that, and my student assured me it wasn’t that at all. They really did want to go to university. It was more about the epistemic challenge of trying to make a decision about a future when there are so many unknowns.
“I’m supposed to decide which of these places I want to live in for three years, which university I think will be best to study at, but I haven’t actually studied at any of them or lived in any of those cities. How would I know which one is better than the other?”
I pointed out that no-one ever knows the future, which is why we have to operate on best guesses based on extrapolations and inferences from what we do know. And imperfect ones at that. So, I suggested, perhaps weigh up the different courses, the quirks of each place’s particular way of teaching them, and think about the sort of person you are and what you like to do and then see which location offers you as much of that stuff as possible? If you like to read, make sure they have bookshops. If you like to watch gigs, make sure they have venues. If you like to sing, make sure they have choirs. If you like to act, make sure they have drama societies. If you like football, make sure they have pitches, etc. But only you can know that. I can’t. Nor could any teacher they might seek for advice. Know thyself, as best you can, and make a choice based on that.
But this only added to the student’s consternation.
“But how will I know what I like in the future? People change. I might base my choice on things that are true about me now but are no longer true when I get there.”
I admitted that they had a point, but also reminded them that if the premise is that one never knows for sure what one will be like in the future so, therefore, one can never make a fully knowledgable decision about one’s own best future interests, then that doesn’t actually add complication to the scenario. If anything, it eases the pressure: whatever you decide has as much potential to be wrong as to be right, which means it is equally as likely to be right as it is wrong. There is no wrong choice or right choice, there is only a choice.
I also pointed out that people don’t tend to radically change completely without any prior warning. While I might be surprised about how some of my former students have transformed themselves just a year or so after leaving school, that is only because I do not have access to their own thoughts and feelings. For the transformed themselves, the desire to change is usually something already brewing long before the transformation ever actually occurs. My worried student, therefore, should already know the likelihood of any radical changes in their future in terms of rejecting any old hobbies because the antipathy towards those activities is probably already there. In terms of gaining new interests, well that doesn’t add to the deliberations: if wherever they ultimately chose to study, it led to new interests then that is only to the good, and the new interest will logically be catered for in the place where it spontaneously blossoms or else, how did it ever blossom in the first place? The point is, the only person who can really know who you are now, and who you might be int he future, is yourself, not the people you ask for advice. The student might change, the places might be unknown, and, I pointed out, the places themselves might change too. My own university Philosophy department seems quite unlike the department I once knew when I look at it today. Gone is the diverse and erratic array of different specialist areas of research interest to be replaced by something far more homogenous and uniform. It is therefore always possible that the department you think you are signing on for might, within the three years of your time there, be gone by the time that you leave just as easily as you, yourself, might change.
Deciding not to bore the student with Donald Rumsfeld’s treatise on known knowns and known unknowns, I instead decided to offer guidance from the existentialists. That is to say: no real guidance at all. What my student was facing, I suggested, was a living example of the sort of anxiety and despair existentialist philosophers suggested comes from our absolute freedom. Another way of saying that you are finding it hard to choose between four equally good options is to say that it really doesn’t matter which of the four options you choose. There is no ‘right’ answer. No option you ought to pick. You are damned to be free and suffer the anguish of that total freedom to choose whatever you want, full in the knowledge that if you chose something different it wouldn’t matter in any objective sense. The universe doesn’t care and it would be bad faith to pretend it does. All that is left is for you to commit totally to any choice you make and live it authentically. Choose to go to Oxbridge, choose to reject it and go somewhere else, choose the university offering the course completely different from all the rest, choose the university in a completely different country, choose the one closest to home or the one farthest away, it really doesn’t matter as long as you choose and recognise that all that is important is that you chose it. Jump two-footed into something, anything, and commit to the decision because it is your own.
The conversation had started because of doubts being expressed about the possibility of turning down an Oxbridge opportunity everyone had been rooting for them to achieve.
“I can’t just say no. People will be disappointed. People have worked really hard for me to get in.”
But, I asked them, is it those people who will be living their life there, or only you? It’s your life, not theirs, and only you have to live with the consequences of your choices, not them. Let them go to Oxford or Cambridge if it’s so important to them - but don’t spend three years of your life pretending you had no choice but to do what what other people told you to do. That you somehow had to accept something you didn’t want. That would be dishonest. That would be bad faith.
When the student came back to me a week later saying they were still undecided, I evoked Sartre once again. In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre discusses his own example of a student who came to him for advice. That student’s question was about whether to avenge the death of his brother by going to England to join the Free French Forces, or staying by his mother’s side to help her move on with her life after the death of her son and betrayal of her husband who was a “collaborator” with those who caused her son’s death. Sartre points out that who you choose to seek advice from is a choice you make already pre-loaded with the understanding of what sort of advice you think they will give. If you chose a priest, for example, you would get advice in line with Christian doctrine, and if you choose the existentialist philosophy professor, you get the sort of advice someone like Jean-Paul Sartre would give. “In seeking me out, he knew what my answer would be” Sartre says. “To choose one’s adviser is only another way to commit oneself”. In other words: you can pretend you are seeking someone else’s advice, and even choose to blame them for the choices you end up making, but in reality the choice of where you seek your advice from is already a choice you are making. Your mind is already made up. If you come back for more advice about your university choices from the anarchist philosophy teacher who seems to be the only person open to the possibility that Oxbridge might not be for everybody, for example, then you already know what you are hoping to hear them say. It is your choice you are making, not theirs.
Shortly after our conversation, I read in The Guardian about a Cambridge philosopher, Farbod Akhlaghi, who suggested that “self authorship” is so important that one must make all big decisions completely by themselves, with advice from family, friends, and, yes, teachers, possibly violating “a crucial moral right” for us to decide for ourselves about crucial life decisions. As the Guardian article puts it: “Akhlaghi argues that it is impossible to know if a friend’s life will benefit from a transformative experience - such as new job, the birth of a child, or a university course - until after the event. It is for them to find out, he says.” Because he believes we each have the right to the “revelatory autonomy” of self-authorship, we have an interrelated moral duty not to interfere in the autonomous self-making of others. “Offering reasons, arguments or evidence as if one is in a privileged position with respect to what the other person’s experience would be like for them disrespects their moral right to revelatory autonomy.”
In other words, I was right to leave it up to the student to grapple with their own free choices rather than give them an easy answer. To quote the great Taylor Swift, perhaps paraphrasing Sartre, perhaps anticipating Akhlaghi: “You’re on your own kid. You always have been.”
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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