But in the time it had taken her to finish cancer treatment, earn a chair in the America Idol band, and witness the rise of her own band, eleven years had passed. She was now thirty-three years old, and despite her indisputable beauty, talent, and success, she was still single and without children. With the age-thirty-five deadline fast approaching, she had little more than a year to get pregnant before the operation to remove her ovaries would be necessary. But the Los Angeles dating scene was a challenge, and touring made romance that much more difficult. “Let’s say I met someone,” she says. “Two weeks later I’d be back on the road. That’s no way to sustain a relationship.”
There were other methods of having children, of course. She might freeze her eggs and opt for in-vitro fertilization or undergo intrauterine insemination. But these options typically involve hormone injections, and Asha’s cancer had been hormone receptive. So her doctors recommended extreme caution.
Time had gotten away from her. Asha wondered about the odds of winning this game, the cost of losing it, and the wisdom of all the choices she’d made to reach this supposedly wondrous height.
Life presents a constant stream of choices. Some of these choices are big—what to study in school, whom to marry, or where to live. Most of them are small—which brand of toilet paper to purchase or which store to buy it from. Regardless of the kinds of choices we consider, the sheer number of options available to most people has increased dramatically in the past century.
A recent visit to a local grocer’s breakfast cereal aisle revealed a staggering array of 220 options, with twenty-two granola cereals alone. The cheese section is even more daunting, presenting the consumer with 391 varieties. Buying a package of parmesan cheese becomes an ordeal: block, shredded, shaved, powdered; in a tub, shaker, or bag; fresh refrigerated or dry; mixed with other varieties of cheese. What exactly are the three types of cheese in the Italian Blend? And do all the different bags labeled “Italian Blend” contain the same mix?
All this may sound prosaic, but life presents us with more serious choices as well. People are increasingly given the message that they can choose to be anyone they want. In her book The Tyranny of Choice, philosopher Renata Salecl explores the downside of, as she calls it, “the dominant ideology of the developed world: the individual is the ultimate master of his or her life, free to determine every detail.” Salecl isn’t denying that choice can be good. Though there’s still much progress to be made, it’s good that more people in the early twenty-first century than at any other time in history enjoy the freedom and means to pursue education and choose the career path that is right for them. It’s good that, in most developed countries, people’s choices about where to live, whom to love, and what kind of life to pursue are limited less than ever before by prejudice and discrimination. It’s good that medical technology has evolved to the point where women like Asha have choices about how to address serious illnesses. As Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote in a 2000 article in American Psychologist, “I think it is only a slight exaggeration to say that for the first time in human history, in the contemporary United States large numbers of people can live exactly the kind of lives they want, unconstrained by material, economic, or cultural limitations.”
Being free to choose is wonderful. But Schwartz makes an additional intriguing observation: The unprecedented prosperity experienced by many and the overabundance of choices that prosperity affords would lead “one to expect clinical depression in the United States to be going the way of polio. Instead, what we find is an explosive growth in the number of people with depression . . . Some estimates are that depression is ten times more likely to afflict someone now than at the turn of the century. Thus, we have a puzzle.”
In addition to being profoundly good, choice can be intimidating, and having so many choices can be profoundly terrifying. Freedom rightly means that nobody can tell us how to live our lives. We are ultimately responsible for our choices and, by the same token, for our failures. We’re offered both the possibility of making the right decision and the risk of making the wrong one. The only problem is we don’t have a crystal ball. We can’t know until after we’ve committed to an action whether we chose correctly. That’s what the great philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre meant when he wrote, “Man is condemned to be free.”
This is an argument that existential philosophers such as Sartre, along with Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others, have been making in various forms for nearly two centuries. Peter Lawler, Berry College professor and conservative blogger, sums up the core of their argument well: “Hell is the experience of ‘pure possibility.’ It’s the experience of not knowing who you are or what you’re supposed to do. It’s to have no order or direction to your life except what you might quite arbitrarily choose for yourself. If you might be everyone or might do anything, you don’t have what it takes to turn your life in any ‘particular direction.’ ”
Recently this classic perspective has received a flurry of scientific support. Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University’s School of Business has produced a number of studies in the past decade that have changed the way psychologists think about choice. She has shown that the basic dilemma of choice is made even worse as the number of options at our disposal increases. In one study, appearing in the Journal of Public Economics, Iyengar and University of Chicago researcher Emir Kamenica tracked the contributions of more than 50,000 employees in 638 institutions to their voluntary 401(k) retirement accounts. Given the fragility of the United States’ Social Security pension system, most financial advisers strongly urge their clients to contribute regularly and substantially to such accounts. One of the features of 401(k) accounts is the ability of employees to choose among a variety of funds in which to invest. But the number of fund options offered to employees can differ widely, ranging from only a few to fifty, sixty, or more. Happily, the researchers found that on average only 10.53 percent of employees didn’t contribute anything to their retirement accounts. The astounding finding, however, was that this probability increases by 2.87 percentage points, or 27 percent, for every ten additional funds the employees could choose from. In other words, more choice leads to a greater tendency to choose nothing at all. This phenomenon, called decision paralysis, is one ironic downside to the surplus of choices we increasingly enjoy.
Such paralysis tends to occur when we are faced with either a very large number of choices—think fifty mutual funds or two hundred and twenty breakfast cereals—or a smaller number of equally attractive but different choices. The late Stanford psychologist Amos Tversky, who helped revolutionize the scientific understanding of decision making, and his colleague Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir showed the latter in an experiment appearing in the journal Psychological Science in 1992. They asked college students to imagine that they were in the market for a CD player but hadn’t decided which model to buy yet. As they were passing a store one day, they noticed a popular Sony model on sale for only ninety-nine dollars, a fantastic price. But it had to be purchased that day, because the sale would be over the next day and all the CD players would probably be gone by then. Not surprisingly, two thirds of the students said they’d buy the player then and there. Only the remaining third said they’d defer their decision until later. This makes sense; it’s rational not to pass up a great opportunity. The interesting results came from a slightly different version of this question the researchers asked a second set of students. The students were told they were passing by the same store and saw the same popular Sony player on sale for $99. But they also saw that a top-of-the-line AIWA player was on sale for only $159, an equally deep discount over its usual price. Interestingly, under these conditions, almost half the students said they’d defer their decision. This wasn’t because there was a dizzying array of choices, but because the two choices in front of them, though different from one another in some respects, appeared equally good. Under these circumstances, people tend to become paralyzed.
Life often confronts us w
ith situations like those in these studies. On the one hand, we often face almost limitless possibilities, only to discover we can’t possibly get enough information to make a reasonable choice. On the other hand, like Asha, we also often come to stark forks in the road. Have children or go all in with our career? Go back to school or stay in a steady yet unsatisfying job? Take a risk and move or stay where we are? Although the same psychological principles are probably at play, decision paralysis under these circumstances can lead to serious consequences. Asha felt the pressure, grappled with the indecision, and initially decided to kick the can down the road. She put off her decision to undergo a surgery that could possibly save her life but that would eliminate her ability to have children. But she also put off having children. Unlike Asha, not everyone in Tversky’s experiment, or in life, becomes paralyzed. How do they avoid this fate? A man named Iram Leon may have the answer.
Even with a flat stroller tire, Iram was not going to give up. As he stood at the starting line, the Texas sunlight blinked in and out through the branches of the high oaks as heat lifted from the black pavement. The humidity was already seeping into his bones. The last time Iram ran a marathon, he threw up all over the course. Sometimes this happens when he takes his antiseizure medications. He wasn’t trying to prove anything by running the Gusher Marathon in Beaumont today, except maybe to redeem himself from his last dismal run and beat his own best time.
Sitting in the stroller, Iram’s daughter, Kiana, was six years old, a bright and happy kid with lots of friends. She loved to draw, so Iram had painted a chalkboard wall in her bedroom and pinned her pencil drawings up all over the house. He had been working in the garage recently when Kiana said, “Look what I made.” She’d carved “I Love Daddy” in the wall with one of Iram’s game darts. He’d framed that image in his mind, and thought of it while he ran, when the lengths of road grew too long and his body hurt. Then he started bringing Kiana on his runs, in a stroller, and then the hurt wasn’t so bad.
Iram had arrived at the starting line in Beaumont, Texas, eighty-five miles northeast of Houston, only to discover that his stroller had a flat tire. He borrowed a friend’s air pump, bent down to refill the tube, and the pump’s lever broke off. Someone from his running team offered to watch his six-year-old so he could still compete, but the whole point was to spend time with her. Iram wasn’t going without his daughter.
He looked around desperately for a solution and noticed someone in the crowd with a similar stroller. Iram negotiated a trade. They exchanged front wheels. He was buckling Kiana in when he realized the race was starting in two minutes. He took off jogging, panicked, weaving the stroller carrying Kiana through the mass of marathoners taking their starting positions. With seconds to go, Iram positioned himself with the stroller near a curb, to stay out of people’s way, but he managed to frustrate two runners directly behind him anyway. If he was the only one dumb enough to race with a stroller and offset his time, no one was going to stop him, but he didn’t have to block anyone else.
“Are they mad at us, Daddy?” Kiana asked.
“We’re not going to block them,” he said. “We’ll let them pass.” Marathon organizers and participants tended to frown on Iram running with a child in a stroller, worried the contraption would get in the way of other competitors. To accommodate everyone, Iram made a point of standing off to the side at the start of these races, out of the way of other, faster runners.
The starting whistle blew. As the race began, Iram realized that in his haste, he’d left both his shoes untied.
The marathon was moving around him. He leaned forward over the top of the stroller and said to Kiana, “We’re off!” The next time he looked down at her, she was asleep.
Iram had been a runner his whole life. He was born in the city of Chihuahua, Mexico, and came with his parents to the United States in 1988. He first joined a track team in the third grade. He ran the 600-meter long-distance race. In high school he ran the mile and cross-country. On his thirtieth birthday he entered his first marathon and placed at about five hundredth, but he was determined to do better the next time. He continued training, and his time got better with each race. Much of this success is due to Iram’s naturally competitive nature. Besides, he told himself, no one on his deathbed ever says I wish I’d gotten more sleep.
Running is a merit-based sport. Winning comes from training hard to build endurance and capitalize on natural athletic abilities. Iram’s competitive personality pushed him toward excellence, a fact that served him well in almost every domain of his life. His goal in racing was to beat the others; outside running, his goal was the same. He beat every student in high school to become the class valedictorian. Then he graduated summa cum laude in four years from Pacific Union College with two degrees, in psychology and religion. In 2004 he was living in Austin and working for Travis County probation services, where for seven years he had excelled as an accomplished court officer. Running was not a metaphor for life; running was life, and the spirit with which he excelled on the track to reach elite times was the very thing that guided everything else in his life. His dream had always been to be the best, period.
Once, a friend asked him why he had never run one of those Races for the Cure. No one close to Iram had ever had cancer, so he’d never really given it much thought. A couple of days later, when Iram woke up unexpectedly in an ambulance, disoriented, his thoughts returned to the odd timing of his friend’s question. He was in the ambulance because he’d experienced a grand mal seizure. At the hospital, he was tested for stroke, low blood sugar, and epilepsy. Later, he waited for the results of his brain scan. It revealed a tumor in his left temporal lobe. A later operation removed most of the mass, but the vestiges were beyond the reach of surgeons. Most tumors such as Iram’s are fatal. The Duke University Hospital neurosurgeons who operated on Iram’s brain told him the mean survival rate with treatment was about seven years. Age thirty at diagnosis, Iram found that the odds were he was not going to live past forty.
His daughter, Kiana, visited him in the hospital. She sat on his lap while he lay in bed, and he showed her the brain scan. She looked at the two-tone image with disappointment. “I thought I was gonna really see your brain.”
“Just pictures, I’m afraid.” He handed her the film, and her face brightened.
Iram and his wife were separating. In court, she brought up concerns that leaving Kiana in Iram’s custody might be dangerous. What if he had another catastrophic seizure? His memory was becoming unreliable. He tried to hide his condition from his employer and colleagues, but his thinking was growing murkier. At work, he was making too many mistakes on the stand. Because he was unable to remember important facts, the county let him go.
“No matter what the doctors say, you’ll be okay,” Kiana said to her father. Iram put up a strong front, but really, he wasn’t so sure he would be okay. He stopped running; he was a mess. His running team was trying to encourage him to come back to the sport; he refused. So soon after his surgery, Iram was in no condition to compete anymore. Given his spatial disorientation, he wasn’t allowed to drive, so he never left the house, except, he says, to walk Kiana in her stroller.
These stroller walks around the neighborhood were supposed to help her fall asleep. Instead, she blinked awake and started gabbing away. They talked about music she liked, about her friends at school, about her favorite television shows. These walks became sacrosanct to Iram. When so many pieces of his life were coming apart, his time with Kiana made everything else fall away.
So when his friends finally convinced him to start racing again, Iram asked if he could bring Kiana along in a stroller.
The answer was yes, he could. But he faced a serious choice, one that would challenge his competitive nature and his goal to win. Running with his daughter was a nice idea, but it would increase his time. Running was a full-body workout. Add a twenty-five-pound buggy and forty-pound cargo, and he was going to be at a considerable disadvantage to runners otherwise unen
cumbered. The Iram everyone had known would never bow to such a handicap.
Before his cancer, before he’d realized he was dying, Iram ran to get better times because winning seemed like the most important thing in life. Winning still was important to him. Surely he wouldn’t—couldn’t—give up the prospect of a victory. But now winning wasn’t the only thing that was meaningful to him. His relationship with Kiana was more important than ever. Running marathons with her in a stroller was an opportunity to spend quality time with her, to leave her with positive memories of their time together before he was gone. It seemed like an impossible choice, the outcome of which even his old teammates couldn’t predict. Either way, Iram would be gaining something he valued enormously only to lose something he valued enormously.
For him, however, the choice was easy. “I’m only doing this if I can run with Kiana.” He told his team he wasn’t running to win anymore. Yes, it would be hard for him to leave that part of himself behind, but it was worth it. Kiana was worth it. He had always run to beat his time. Time was no longer something to beat. Time was something to cherish.
Today, if he walked the stroller across the finish line in last place at the Gusher Marathon, so be it.
Both Iram and Asha faced forks in the road, choices between two alternatives they powerfully valued. For Asha, driven by the impending need for surgery, the choice was between a skyrocketing career and her desire to be a mother. For Iram, it was a choice between using the precious time he had left either achieving athletic victories or spending as much time as possible with his daughter. Neither of their choices was easy, but for some reason, Iram made his more easily. While Asha deferred her decision, suffering the fear and regret that stemmed from that inaction, Iram committed fully to one alternative. Experts in the fields of psychology, marketing, and economics have long pondered why some people seem to get more easily caught in the net of decision paralysis than others.
Supersurvivors Page 19