Role models impact your life’s trajectory
When you find yourself surrounded with many choices, your ability to choose decreases and your degree of anxiety and fear of missing out on all the other possible alternatives available on your vast table consumes your energy and confidence in your ability to pick the best alternative.
When too many domains of your life have too many choices, you may counterintuitively become paralyzed. That’s the paradox of choice. When a person has very few choices and a life of necessary restrictions and scarcity because of economic or other conditions in their environment, they may wish to have more choices; to escape the daily scarcity inherent in their routines.
When a person has too many choices and a life of abundance, they may wish to have fewer choices, because all the available options feel cognitively overwhelming, and making decisions becomes a high-effort activity most of the time.
Deciding where to live for someone who works remotely (i.e., not required to be at a specific location for work) and pursues the digital nomad lifestyle, for example, can be an anxiety-provoking thought because there are too many options, where your possible next home can be anywhere in the world. So the person may end up wandering around, switching locations every few weeks or months. For some, such freedom has a dream-like quality. For others, it feels overwhelming.
The certain possible downside of having too many choices is a feeling of alienation; of not belonging — because integrating within a group of people requires consistently showing up when everyone else shows up and sticking to the process for long enough to make relationships stick.
It can also feel frustrating to have to choose from a vast pool of options every time you choose where to live next if the next place could be anywhere in the world. The feeling of missing out on all the other possible options you could have chosen can be daunting.
On the other hand, having many options can be a signaling mechanism for wealthier individuals. Normally on Earth, the more money you possess, the more choices you have in many domains of life. Therefore, also complaining about having too many choices can be seen by some people as a way to subtly signal one’s status by putting oneself one up.
Robert Greene provides what I consider very clear and valuable insights on the topic of choice in the context of choosing role models here. This is particularly relevant for younger people (say, younger than 30 years old), because their life development and mental models are in constant flux, and the current social environment is one packed with options and influences stemming from many outside sources.
The world is much more accessible than ever before, and for this reason, defining one’s identity is more difficult than ever before, because choosing whose advice and thoughts to consider requires a lot of cognitive effort. You can select role models also from people you don’t know in real life. The internet provides (curated) visibility into many people whose ideas and way of being you may consider inspirational. Those are the people to follow as role models. Watching how they behave, how they speak, the body language they use in specific situations, the way they dress, and other elements of living life as a human. You often can’t get very detailed insights into those elements when you don’t have access to your role model in real life. But you can get a great part of them by watching videos (if available) of your role models, ideally in unscripted situations.
Then you internalize and aggregate all the qualities you admire from multiple people into your own identity, and you pursue the path of becoming the kind of person you intend to become. Over time, you will also likely change role models depending on the shifting circumstances within you. That’s a constant process of exploration, decision, and renewal that happens within every human being.