We wake up each morning and make a hundred small choices—what to wear, what to eat, which route to take. Most of these feel automatic, beneath the threshold of real decision-making. But what if each choice, no matter how trivial, is an exercise in freedom?
The existentialists would argue that even our most mundane selections carry weight. When I choose oatmeal over toast, I'm not just satisfying hunger; I'm authoring a tiny chapter of my life's narrative. The weight isn't in the oatmeal itself, but in the fact that I could have chosen otherwise.
This feels overwhelming at first. If every choice matters, aren't we condemned to paralyzing analysis? But perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps recognizing the significance of small choices liberates us from the tyranny of only caring about the "big" decisions—career, marriage, where to live. Those milestone moments don't define us any more than the accumulation of our daily choices does.