What is destiny?
Increasingly, we learn that many things are not really in our control. My recent reading has attacked that from several angles. The most fascinating of the bunch was Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely The book's approach is similar to another one I found particularly interesting, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink. Both are built on the authors' experiments and show similar types of systematic, cognitive errors. We are swayed far more easily, and by far more influencers, than most of us believe; indeed, in some cases even knowing about the tendency to make a particular error does not prevent a person from making it.
And then there's the influence of genes. Reading Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America's Obesity Epidemic, (Eric Oliver) and The Fattening of America, (Eric Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman)--two interesting books with very different approaches to the topic, by the way--we learn, among other things, that humans naturally are attracted to fat, sweet and salty foods, and that populations who survived repeated famines did so because they had a greater than average tendency to store calories on their bodies. Hence, given an environment in which there is an abundance of calories, more and more people will get fat, because storing calories as fat is what we've evolved to do.
Which brings me to a Nightline episode about genetic testing. What strikes me most is in the summary of the article:
"We both fear and love the idea that somehow our genomes are us, that everything about us is defined by this long sequence of as CS GS and TS. You know, it's just not true," said Greely. "For most of us, the events that have happened during our lifetimes our parents' efforts for us, the friends' we've made, the jobs we've had, the good and bad luck we've had that's more important in who we are than what genes we're born with. And that's really important to remember."
Why does this strike me in particular? Recently I ran into the (now rather famous) Last Lecture of Randy Pausch. I found that presentation moving for a number of reasons, of course, and the version I linked to is the best one because it includes the introduction and the speakers who went after him.
Because Randy was born the same year I was, I started to think about what might have been different if I'd made the same choice of college he did (and managed to choose computer science as a major). I first imagined what path I'd have had through college if I'd had a strong, charismatic advisor like he did. And then I started to imagine what else would have been different. My guess is that my satisfaction with life would be about the same, but none of the particulars: Different graduate school. Different jobs. Different city. Different friends. Different hobbies. Different wife. Different kid. And given the relationships that caused me to seek therapy, quite possibly a different personality. All still shaped by my genetics (e.g. I'm sure any choices I made would have been limited by my struggle with Crohn's disease), but my life would bear little or no resemblance to the one I have now. And every difference growing out of ONE choice.
Fortunately for all of us, most of the choices we make on a daily basis are not momentous. And perhaps it's the case that we often don't recognize until afterward which ones really did define our lives. Most likely, that too is fortunate.
Posted at 09:58AM Mar 04, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General |