this is existential... somehow...
i need to put the computer in the same room as the heater. it's too cold in here.
yesterday, i think that i told takeone that i was going to write an entry about existentialism, and then i didn't. well, here it is.
basically, i was talking to V recently and she told me what she had learned recently in a psychology class: that people are afraid to make choices because choosing any one thing often eliminates the other possibilities. if you take one job, you can't work at another. move to georgia and you can't live in philadelphia (unless there's a philadelphia, georgia). marry one person and, well, you're stuck (until you get divorced). what if that choice isn't the best one? what if there's somebody better for you out there?
the interesting thing is that this fear of choices might even be because narrowing down your choices makes your future more clearly apparent. if you can see what the rest of your life is going to be like, then you can basically see death coming. you work in x job in y state, married to z, settle down and have kids, live, die. fear of making choices is fear of death.
i'm not even to the point of fearing death. i'm still at the point where i just fear making the wrong choice. what if i spend a long time learning how to do something and then decide that i can't stand it? what if i go to the trouble of moving somewhere else and then can't make any friends? what if i marry someone, out of fear of being alone, and then realize that we're not any better than my parents?
(once, my mom said that she probably would have divorced my dad if it weren't so much trouble. oddly, i tend to think that my dad probably didn't marry the right kind of person for him. horrible, huh?)
the funny thing about not choosing, though, is that you are still choosing. if you think of any one choice as eliminating all the other choices, then you can think of not choosing as eliminating every choice.
but now i feel like i'm trying to prove something, and i don't have to prove anything here. this is my diary, dagnabit. i'm such a dork.