You are familiar with these torments of choice: what to order in a restaurant – salmon, a wok, or even limit yourself to a light salad? This question only at first glance seems somehow frivolous.
Do you know that slight anxiety that arises when choosing a dish in a restaurant? The waiter with a notebook in his hand is waiting for your decision, the eyes of the rest of the people sitting at the table are turned to you, and you hesitate. You do not know. Really, is there any reason to choose medium rare tuna and not entrecote? However, you need to order something; you need to make a decision. In the very moment of action, you finally know: you know that now you will make the wrong choice, which you will regret, while your friends will eat something delicious and enjoy it. The very air around you becomes rarefied, tense; your silence in the middle of the restaurant hubbub becomes painful. It’s not that the choice is too scarce, but that it is excessively large. Your freedom is inseparable from this fear of the field of opportunity. It is even possible that it is your freedom that frightens you: the choice is yours, no god guides you, and it is up to you to take the consequences. The moment you choose tuna, it suddenly seems to you that your overweight childhood friend, who is on a diet all the time, and now just ordered risotto with porcini mushrooms, can take it personally and be offended. That it will reinforce your image, which you do not like – the image of a person who constantly controls everything, never gives himself free rein, a person who “watches”. Sitting at the table, you feel at the bodily level the truth that can reconcile Freud and Sartre, although they differ in everything else: there are no small details, “small details” can say a lot about a person. You feel that by choosing to subscribe to something, that any choice is at the same time taking a position regarding the principle of this choice.
To choose medium rare tuna in front of others is always to tell them in some way that they should have taken the same thing, it is to threaten them that they will soon regret not having made the same choice; to take medium-rare tuna is to take them hostage. Nothing is easy for those strange animals that we are. What saves you for a while is the brilliant idea of putting the pressure on another friend of yours who hasn’t made his order yet: “Come on, you first, Jérôme; what will you take?” This is a step back to make it easier to jump, but the move is good. Now all eyes will be on him, he will feel this truth of our all too human life: we constantly have to decide, choose some options without sufficient reason. We have to throw ourselves into the water much earlier than we consider the issue from all sides. If we delay choosing until we are sure of ourselves, we will never choose anything. But one must choose, and one must do it in doubt; this is our freedom, and it is not easy. This is our greatness, even in small things.