By An Phung
I am writing in response to the article ``Making choices, hopefully right ones” by Jake J. Nho in Thoughts of the Times on March 26, 2012. As I understand, the writer advices people that we have to make decisions and have responsibility whether they are good or bad.
In our daily life, it is not simple that we just make decisions. It is not only that we don’t want to have responsibilities in our life or we are scared to take risks. The ability for decisions making depends on many life factors.
Firstly, families interfere to decisions making. People are growing up from childhood to adult in families which have parents. Parents want good things for their children, so from childhood they decide everything for them such as what to eat, what time to go to bed, who to play with.
Progressively, all the decisions the children have to make are of their parents, or indirectly affected by their parents. Their whole lifestyles and decisions are their parents.
In some cases, the situations are worse. Parents force their children to do what they want. Because children depend on parents, there is no other way for them to make their own decisions until they are independent. But the time for becoming independence from dependence is long enough for their parents to affect their future decisions, and long enough to degenerate their decisions making abilities. The time is around ten to twenty years.
Secondly, society affects your decisions making ability. Affecting others decisions is one of the most desired things that people in the world want. By affecting others decisions, one can earn money, earn love, and earn fame. That’s why many people try to affect each other.
For example, politicians always want to control their citizens, and their decisions. They do whatever to make citizens satisfied and vote for them. Businessmen only show you the perfect side of their products and let you decide to pay them. Husbands and wives after the honeymoon don’t respect other’s decisions. The decisions making abilities are affected or abused badly in society because of people’s egos.
Thirdly, the decisions making depends on other things. Because one cannot make decisions freely from childhood, his decisions making abilities will be degenerated when they grow up. This is just same as other things. If you don’t practice, you cannot do well. The situation is like this. When you are in childhood, the decisions are less important compare to the decisions when you are in adult.
Your parents make those less important decisions, and let you make the more important ones when you are in adult. Parents hold you in their arms for long from the time you were born then put you on the ground and life asks you to run. How can one run when they don’t know how to walk? Also some people don’t have will, and responsibility enough to make decisions like the writer had talked about. They are always scared about “what happen if”. To overcome this, you should practice making decisions by yourself. Asking others opinions is good, but the final decisions are yours.
In inclusion, I want to emphasize that the ability of making decisions is affected by variant factors. Most the factors degenerate the ability rather than strengthen it. By these facts, I hope that people realize what influence their decisions in lives, and have right actions to make them better.
The writer is from Vietnam and currently majoring in computer science at KAIST. His email address is seraphpl@kaist.ac.kr.