The reasons we often give for our decisions are often less compelling and rational than we think – they only seem so because we have chosen them cleverly in retrospect. It is a process that helps us make our choices more certain and explainable. We look for reasons that retrospectively fit our choices into a coherent story. This story, in turn, gives us a sense of security and identity. It helps us reduce the perceived responsibility for our decision by making our choice seem logical, reasonable, and inevitable. In retrospect, the alternatives seem, so to speak, more distant from each other.
So we also choose our past. By visualizing how we have overcome obstacles in the past, we can become more aware of this. But to really understand how free we are in our choices, it is worth taking a closer look at the moment of decision. This is where we feel the freedom of choice most clearly, when we are weighing two or more equally valid alternatives. In these moments of neutral back and forth, we prove to ourselves that we can indeed choose the less likely option. Only when the alternatives seem too intense can this obscure the significance of the choice. For then they quickly appear to be self-deciding.
