How much of your life is chosen?

We live in a society which emphasizes autonomy, independence, fending for one self. When a person finds themselves in a predicament, we often hear that they "made a wrong choice".

But how much choice do we truly have? Nobody chose to be born when and where they were. To the parents they had. We definitely do not chose our physiology, or how it operates. Our breathing, the blood flowing through our veins, the thousands of synapses in our brain every minute are not of our choosing.

Even large parts of our social lives are not chosen. We are a social species, we didn't chose that. We only have minimal choice in our friends. We live in such a neighbourhood through where and how our parents brought us up. We go to school because (although it is a positive thing) we pretty much have to (it could be argued that we "chose" education as a society). So we choose our friends within a limited sample.

Work wise, most people "choose" a job that happens to be available, one which offers benefits we like (choosing the benefits over the job!!), or one within our chosen profession, but we are still confined to the location, rules, and operating procedures of said job.

Would we say the person with diabetes, cancer or heart disease "chose" that? Of course not.

So in the same way, when we hear about or see a person with depression or another mental illness which perhaps incapacitates them to the point of living on the street, lets not flatter ourselves by seeing them as having made "poor choices", rather that they didn't have the opportunity to chose.