Paradox of Choice: The Paradox

Part I: The Paradox 

"Life is somewhat like walking down a dark tunnel with a candle in your hand."

Although the line in itself is explanatory, I would elaborate upon it to put rest to the slight amount of vagueness that yet lingers. When we are in a tunnel with nothing but a candle as single source of light, all that is visible to us, while making a choice of path, is a circumference of space lightened by the flame of the candle. It is very much analogous with momentary nature of our lives. Our future is dark as we are unaware of it; we might have some notions about it as we have of the path ahead but eventually it is more or less oblivious to us.  Our past is dark as it is unalterable and thus cannot be of any help. Some might argue that we draw experience from our past but then, to be forthright, how often do we learn from our mistakes (someone did right say experience is the name we give to the mistake that we so blatantly repeat in past that it unlikely we will correct it in future). Every time we in our lives are induced to make decision based on what is available in that small circumference of space and time without being aware of the implication of such decision in future. We can call it as creating the dot on graph sheet which we believe in the end will join with all other such dots to give a beautiful diagram. This is what we call as connecting the dots. But what if all these dots are so randomly arranged that they yield nothing?

Let us imagine how we conduct an experiment where in the end we need to draw a graph after solving a set of extremely complicated equations (the assumption is that while taking the readings we can't determine how graph is going to appear in the end). Every set of reading can be assumed to be as a decision we make in our lives as they are independent of the former reading (I am not saying they actually are, but we assume them to be independent) and are taken while being oblivious to their contribution in the graph. Eventually we come up with a graph and up till here life follows a similar algorithm. But then when we come up with a graph which more often than not is fucked up, we now make manipulation to achieve the required manifestation and eureka we have performed our experiment. But, life offers no such scope for post-alterations. I mean we can't just wake up some day and realize how screwed our lives have been and move back to make corrections:"I shall go back to elementary school, I suck at calculations."  They say: you need to do what you have to do in order to do what you want do. The paradox is often we are not sure what we have to do or what we want to do.