Choice (Big Ideas)

We are encouraged from all sides to view our lives as being full of choices. Like the products on a supermarket shelf, our careers, our relationships, our bodies, our very identity seem to be there for the choosing. But paradoxically this seeming freedom to choose can create extreme anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Choice explores how late capitalism s shrill exhortations to be oneself can be a tyranny which only leads to ever-greater disquiet and how insistence on choice being a purely individual matter prevents social change.

Drawing on diverse examples from popular culture from dating sites and relationship self-help books, to our obsession with imitating celebrities lifestyles and fusing sociology, psychoanalysis and philosophy, Salecl shows that choice is rarely based on a simple rational decision with a predictable outcome. With wisdom, humour and sensitivity, she examines the complexity of the essential human capacity to choose which has become mired in.

Table of Contents Introduction Why choice makes us anxious Choosing through other s eyes Love Choices Children: to have or have not? Forced choice Conclusion: Shame and the lack of social change.