Tragedy Ted Talk: Are We In Control of Our Decisions?

We live in the United States of America. Freedom is a thing, right? We Americans can do what we want, when we want. We can choose what we want to do with our lives, and what we want to eat. We have freedom of mind, and freedom of decision.

Right?

What if our decisions weren't really our own? What if our decisions were actually decided for us?

No, no. That's impossible!

Is it though? When you think about it, there are a lot of decisions that are kind of already made for us, and that is what this TED talk discussed. When you have the option between two things, you are probably going to naturally pick the easier one. He used a great example in the TED talk. There are some countries who get tons of people to sign up for organ doning, but the US is failing in comparison. Why? Well, the countries that had high rankings had the option that you would check the box if you DIDNT want to donate, whereas lower scoring countries asked for people to check the box if the WANTED to donate. The difference is that one is an opt out and one is an opt in. Chances are, people will just skip over these options, causing higher "yes" scores by default. I have absolutely seen this on many things, and I am the kind of person who notices these things. For example, a lot of the time I will see forms with a "check this box if you do not want to receive emails from so-and-so", hidden in the fine print where no one will notice it. I always make a point to look at these, but I know that most people don't, since it is slightly more work than just ignoring it.

This idea can even relate to the media. The media is always bias towards someone. For example, Fox is obviously republican and MSNBC can be considered more liberal. Well, if you're a child growing up with Fox news playing on your parents TV all the time, theres a pretty good chance you will (sadly) be a republican. Although we think we are free and make our own decisions, the media has a huge hand in our minds. How we think and what we do is controlled by the media in a way. Look at it this way, they only talk about two or three of the presidential runners on the news. The hardly ever mention the people lower in the polls, or maybe its just the people they don't like. For a while, Bernie Sanders was hardly on the news at all, and when he was all they talked about was how he was a "socialist". I immediately assumed that the media was afraid of Bernie, because if people actually knew his views on things, and what he wants to do for our country, everyone would love him. He is essiantally the perfect candidate in regards of no conspiracies, no lying, no nothing. The only thing the media "had" on him was that he is considered a "socialist". However, they would refuse to discuss his actual motives and ideas. The point of this is that the media can make someone look however they want them to look. So do we really know who we are voting for when we vote?

For the most part, we are able to decide what we want to do with our lives. However, we cannot ignore the idea that our surroundings can cause us to make decisions that we may or may not have made under different circumstances. As is so with tragedies, we have always had an idea that tragedies are always a bad thing. However, in this unit we are learning that that may not necessarily be the case, it depends on how you look at it. So we need to keep looking, paying attention to the world around us so that we can try our best to make our own decisions.