Essay On Loss Of Freedom

The Loss of Freedom from Making Choices Faced with choices every single day, adolescents have opportunities to succeed and to fail. There is the choice to wake up and go to school. There is the choice to sit with a friend in class. There is the choice to talk to a crush. There is the choice to do homework after school rather than going to an extracurricular activity. With so many choices, it is easy to see why adolescents have such a hard time making decisions. In the article, Adolescence and the Agony of Decision Making, Carl E. Pickhardt Ph.D. discusses the reason why adolescents agonize over the idea of having to make decisions. This conflict comes about due to the fact that decision making is related to a loss of freedom. Pickhardt states that “all decisions reduce more freedom than they create,” (2013). This loss of freedom brings about feelings of indecision and ambivalence which can lead to teenagers procrastinating the choice to make a decision until it is absolutely imperative. …show more content…
That is at least what the article suggests. It is not that this statement is not necessarily true, but it is much more complex than it appears to be. The idea of the loss of freedom that comes from making decisions is paired with statements such as “young people prefer to be dreamers rather than doers,” or “growing up is giving up,” (Pickhardt, 2013). The main ideas that are stated in the article include: Choices are not free of consequences, choices decide the rest of someone’s life, and choices do not necessarily mean someone will be completely satisfied because choices are a gamble. The only problem with these main ideas is that there is not any research (listed in the article) to back up these