Barry Schwartz, the Swarthmore professor we mentioned earlier, may have the solution. In his book The Paradox of Choice, he proposes that when it comes to making decisions, people fall into one of two camps: maximizers and satisficers. Maximizers aim to make the best choice possible. They may invest enormous amounts of effort and time fastidiously gathering as much information as possible about each option, considering all the alternatives and weighing all the pros and cons. The difficulty is that in today’s world of almost boundless choices, the maximizer’s task is never done. There’s always more information to be gathered, more alternatives to be weighed. Satisficers, on the other hand, gather enough information to make a good-enough decision. Once they find an option that meets their needs, they stop and make the decision.
There is a significant trade-off between these two problem-solving styles. While maximizers objectively make better decisions than satisficers, they’re less satisfied with their choices and often experience regret over the alternatives not chosen. Satisficers tend to be more content with their choices, though those choices may ultimately not be as good as the ones made by maximizers. This trade-off is vividly illustrated by a 2006 study published by Sheena Iyengar, Rachael Wells, and Barry Schwartz in the journal Psychological Science. They tracked hundreds of students from eleven universities in their senior year as they graduated and sought employment. Just before graduating, they were given a test of maximizing tendencies and asked questions about how they would go about seeking employment. A year later, the researchers followed up with the graduates, asking them whether they had found employment, what their starting salaries were, and how satisfied they felt with their jobs. Maximizers had secured objectively better jobs, at least if salary is any indication. They made $44,515 on average compared to satisficers’ more meager $37,085. That’s a 20 percent advantage. But maximizers were less happy with their choice of jobs, regretted that they didn’t have more alternatives, tended to fantasize about having jobs other than those they had, and reported more negative feelings in general.
Iram, a satisficer, was content with his choice to run with his daughter. Everyone knew this meant leaving behind his chances of ever winning another race, but this sacrifice didn’t torture him. He knew he couldn’t have it all, realized there wasn’t a perfect choice, and felt strongly that what he had was more than good enough. On the other hand, Asha, a maximizer, was objectively successful by anybody’s standards. Her career had taken her into the world spotlight. She and her purple electric violin had toured with rock icons, and a major label had signed her band. But doubts and regrets about the options she had left behind tortured her. Like any good maximizer, she still wanted to have it all.
Asha woke on the morning of her thirty-fifth birthday in a small hotel room in Omaha, Nebraska. After Porcelain had concluded its tour, she returned to the United States to play with one of the top ten ticket-selling bands in the world, a progressive rock opera outfit called the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Today she gazed out her hotel room window at the cars zipping past on Interstate 80. She imagined the drivers heading to work or dropping kids off at school, each person living lives far different from her own.
She showered, dressed, and drove her rental car to an empty arena where the Trans-Siberian Orchestra rehearses a couple of weeks every year before heading out on tour. It didn’t feel like a birthday to Asha, and this was entirely by design. She would focus on work, on traveling, on the future. Still, the significance of today was inescapable.
As the age-thirty-five surgical deadline approached, Asha had felt the pressure mounting. She scrutinized the choices she’d made since becoming a supersurvivor and the life paths on which these choices had placed her. “Most of my friends back home look at my life and think, wow, it’s so glamorous,” Asha says. She knows from experience, however, that the life of an entertainer is not nearly as alluring as shows like American Idol want fans to believe. Hers is not a life of pampering and excess. Perhaps a few mega-successful entertainers live like royalty, but for Asha, life consisted of perpetual travel and a career that demanded nothing short of performing under tremendous scrutiny at a level of perfection. She’d given up the luxury of the familiar routine, of weekends off, of time with friends and family, of a place to call home, and of having the family she wanted. She wasn’t rich, either. Not by a long shot.
Asha realized that entertainers get married and have children all the time. They also frequently adopt or have children on their own. Though she saw that having a child wouldn’t mean giving up her career, she knew it would mean making sacrifices. In theory, she was willing to make compromises. In practice, however, Asha the maximizer was tortured by which compromises were the best to make. Motherhood isn’t easy, and her values would demand that she be the very best mother she could. But being a touring rock violinist isn’t easy, either, and her values were equally demanding here. She was haunted by the realization that no perfect solution was possible.
And the clock was ticking. The removal of her ovaries would mean losing the ability to choose when or if to have children.
We all face forks in the road, but maximizers such as Asha seem to feel an amplified sense of the gravity of loss that accompanies each choice, even with tremendous personal gain. More than a decade into remission, she was still facing difficult choices, and the most difficult one was still before her.
Asha tried not to make too much of her birthday and what it represented. The music, the rehearsal, and the prospect of a national arena tour with a new band provided her the best possible distraction. But there was no denying the march of time. At the end of rehearsal, the musicians came together and played “Happy Birthday” for her on the huge stage.
The melody stretched to the edges of the empty arena. The final notes held on for what seemed like an eternity. Asha had made up her mind not to call and schedule her surgery, not that year. Not yet. There was, she hoped, still time.
“When are we going to go faster?” Kiana asked her father.
With a grin, Iram glanced down at his daughter in the running stroller. “We’re not going fast enough for you?”
“Faster,” she said.
He picked up his speed.
Kiana looked at the scene around her. A long tire-black road. Thick, reaching branches of oak trees extending all around them. There were no cars and no other runners. “Haven’t we been here already?”
“We’re running a double loop,” Iram responded, glancing around.
The wind was growing stronger, adding strain to a route that was already difficult enough navigating with a stroller. Stroller running made quick hairpin turns impossible.
Still, Iram thought, we’re making good enough time.
He and Kiana would finish the first loop at one hour and sixty minutes. Iram took off his headset and plugged his iPod into the little speaker he’d started using when he began taking Kiana along on runs.
Since his diagnosis two years before, he hadn’t competed in a race without Kiana. He hadn’t won any, either, though his times, surprisingly, hadn’t been half bad. His teammates had long since acquiesced to Iram’s choice to run with a stroller—a reasonable preference, but a choice he would not have made so easily before diagnosis, back when he was in the race to win.
He didn’t think Kiana fully understood the concept of death yet, or that in a few years he wouldn’t be there anymore. She’d found this out, though, when, in March of 2012, her father went on a training run and woke up in an ambulance again, having collapsed, unconscious. His physicians ran a battery of tests afterward and tripled his antiseizure medications on race days. Now when he trained, he wore a GPS device so people could monitor him. His spatial orientation was poor. He felt fine most of the time, but he was losing confidence in himself. Having Kiana there with him on these runs only made it better.
The iPod played a Randy Newman song from the movie A Bug’s Life. Kiana started singing along. Iram joined in: “It’s the time of your life so live it well.”
The road turned sharply at the start of the second loop. At the bend, Iram looked behind him and saw a length of road without any runners, just as two volunteers appeared ahead. One offered Iram and Kiana snacks. He waved them away. “Give them to her.” The biker tossed a banana, energy gels, and a bottle of water into the stroller.
“Hey,” Iram said breathlessly to the biker. “How far behind am I?”
“No, man,” the biker said. “There’s no one ahead of you.” The closest runner was six minutes behind them.
Impossible, thought Iram. We’re ahead?
He pushed through his fatigue and found a good pace. At mile twenty-five he turned around again; he and Kiana were still alone on the road. Kiana was singing Bon Jovi’s “Open Highway.” She stopped singing when she noticed people on the sidelines cheering.
“Why are they shouting?”
The wind was pushing harder, and it was more difficult for Iram to breathe. He told her to be polite and wave to everyone.
“We’re in first place,” he said. “We’re going to win.”
He was certain now. The finish line was just a few yards ahead, and he had his cheerleader with him, pushing him toward victory as he pushed her.
The Beaumont Enterprise newspaper reported that a man with terminal cancer had won the marathon. Iram’s story was too good not to be featured on the front page. Local television and radio news reported his victory, which would have been impressive enough even if he hadn’t won the race while pushing his young daughter in a stroller. Just as with Alan Lock’s victorious row across the Atlantic Ocean and Maarten van der Weijden’s triumph from illness to Olympic gold, people were quick to attribute Iram’s victory to the so-called “power of positive thinking.” But we know there’s much more at work than mere positive thinking; these stories are full of anguish and struggle. The Wall Street Journal ran a feature-length piece on Iram, implying that he was a hero: “He won the Gusher Marathon, finishing in 3:07:35. That was one second slower than his personal record in the 26.2-mile event, set days before he underwent brain surgery in early 2011 . . . Leon’s high-speed finish provides cancer survivors with an athletic role model only weeks after the defrocking of Austin’s more-famous cancer-battling competitor, Lance Armstrong.”
Iram blanches when he reads these kinds of comparisons, because he doesn’t feel like a hero. “If anything, I feel I should have started running with my daughter sooner,” he says. “I have friends who’ve had to relearn to walk and talk and have also run marathons, and lung cancer survivors who struggle to breathe. These are the heroes. I run because things still work. Most of us know what we need to get through the day, to be better athletes, better parents, better friends. I’ve found that most of us aren’t lacking information, we’re lacking inspiration.”
People, Iram finds, are impressed with the choice he made, but for him, it just seemed like the right thing to do.
Asha’s performance on the electric violin was a centerpiece of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s highly theatrical symphonic fusion of classical music set to heavy metal, bombastic lasers, and pulsating lights. Now age thirty-six, she and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra released a five-song EP that debuted at number one on Billboard’s Top 200 Rock Chart. To support the EP, they planned an arena tour of sixty cities in three months.
On the final night of that 2012 tour, the arena lights came down and the darkness was spliced by a single beam of blue that became dozens of green streaks skating across fifteen thousand fans. While playing, Asha ran through the audience to the back of the arena. She took her place on a movable platform that swiftly rose thirty feet above the crowd against an explosion of pyrotechnics igniting behind and below her. At the finale, she made her way back to the main stage, which was backlit by towering walls of video screens. Along the way, she stopped to play her electric violin to a group of kids at stage left. The arena was ablaze with music and lights that culminated in bursts of white fireworks. In those final moments, the temperature onstage jumped fifteen degrees, and Asha, in grand theatricality, broke her bow across her knee.
Backstage, she signed autographs for fans and then jumped back on the tour bus, which took her to the hotel. In the morning, she would take a flight to Boston to visit her family and once again consider her next move. In twenty-four hours it was going to be New Year’s Eve, time once again to make new promises to herself and think about the choices her life presented. She might take a trip to the Middle East with friends or enroll in a ten-day silent meditation program. She might go to Washington, DC, to shoot a twelve-episode pilot for the Travel Channel or move back to Los Angeles and play violin with The Tonight Show band again. The future seemed limitless.
Before making up her mind, in the winter of 2013 she visited Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Her oncologist had reluctantly gone along with her decision to put off the surgery, as long as Asha submitted to a genetic test for mutations of tumor suppressors called BRCA1 and BRCA2. A mutation would indicate a particularly strong risk of her developing ovarian cancer. Ruling out this vulnerability would make her medical team much more comfortable with her decision to wait. If the tests indicated particular abnormalities, however, her oncologist would urge Asha not to wait a moment longer to schedule the surgery.
A nurse came into the examination room and passed Asha a plastic vial to fill with saliva. Asha held the vial in her fingers as she would a violin bow, filled it the best she could, and handed it back. The nurse took the small tube from her and left the room. Asha gazed at her knees and struggled to catch her breath. A decade of performing live in front of millions of people had given her nerves of steel, but they melted under the threat of what this test might tell her about her body.
The results were late. Asha called the clinic and was told the sample she’d given had somehow been contaminated. So she repeated the test.
In the waning days of the summer of 2013, Asha learned that she did not have the particular markers that indicated an increased risk for ovarian cancer. Though she is not entirely free of risk, she could much more safely wait until age forty to have the surgery, an age when fertility for most women naturally drops to very low levels. She still had a little time to settle down, to meet someone, and to start a family. If that did not happen, she says, she would pursue alternative methods of fertility, such as egg freezing and in vitro fertilization.
“I’ve made choices in my life. Not good or bad choices, just decisions that were right for me at the time,” Asha says. “I would love to tell you that I have everything I want right now.” She thinks for a moment. “But I definitely don’t have regrets. . . . I wouldn’t change any of the decisions I made.”
Like Asha, Iram, and all the survivors we’ve met along the way, every one of us must play the cards we’ve been dealt. As much as we might yearn for a life without pain, without suffering, without adversity, we realize we’re asking the impossible. We must make choices—sometimes difficult, sometimes easy—based on what life puts in front of us. But we know how to survive these trials, and how to thrive despite them—or perhaps because of them. It’s part of who we are. Life is worth embracing in part because of our ability to transform suffering into triumph and setbacks into successes. Supersurvival isn’t a magic bullet that makes everything instantly better. It’s not something we do that solves all our problems forever. In a way, life is a constant process of supersurvival, of facing life’s seemingly impossible choices with honesty and faith in ourselves. It’s a capacity all of us share.
It’s the capacity to hope.
Epilogue
On August 10, 1976, a thirty-three-year-old working-class mother left her house in Belfast to run errands. For roughly ten years the city had been a theater of violent clashes between the mostly Protestant unionists eager to keep Northern Ireland with the United Kingdom and the mostly Catholic nationalists fighting to create a united Ireland. For residents such as Betty Williams, a quiet receptionist with shoulder-length dark hair and a toothy smi
le, political violence, riots, and bombings punctuated ordinary life. On her drive into town that sunny afternoon, as she turned the corner onto Finaghy Road, the thud, thud, thud of British army rifles rang out.
Just ahead, two Irish Republican Army operators were fleeing British troops in a stolen blue Ford. As the Ford raced through the residential neighborhood, another shot rang out, piercing the vehicle’s hull and instantly killing Danny Lennon, the driver. For the rest of her life, Betty Williams would be haunted by what happened in the next five seconds. The Ford, now driverless and out of control, jumped the curb and crashed into a young mother who was out for a walk with her three young children. Betty leapt from her car to help, but quickly discovered there was little she could do. Though the mother had survived, her three children, one of them only six weeks old, would die. Betty would never be able to blot out the memory of their screams, of their mangled bodies, of the blood.
Betty did not know the children Joanne, John, and Andrew Maguire, but their deaths would propel her life in an entirely new direction. Before that day, she was not politically active; nor had she ever taken any stand on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yet the horrible events on Finaghy Road sparked something within her. She could no longer sit idly by while such senseless violence pulled more innocents into the line of fire.
Two days after the tragedy, Betty took to the streets. She knocked on door after door, pleaded with person after person, and acquired six thousand signatures on a petition to denounce the actions of the IRA and demand peace on both sides. Her actions caught the attention of the aunt of the three dead children, Máiread Corrigan, who invited Betty to the funerals. Soon after, both women were scheduled to appear on a local television news show. There, Betty and Máiread met another guest, a Northern Ireland correspondent for The Irish Press named Ciaran McKeown. Backstage, these three like-minded strangers connected, planting the seeds of an alliance that would play a crucial role in ending the violence in Northern Ireland. Over the next thirty years, their grassroots organization, the Community of Peace People, would fight for human rights, support interfaith schools, create peace camps, and petition for nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution.
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