The False Menu

It's July, ninety degrees in the shade. I'm home alone for two weeks the family's away. I stocked up on the food that I like in advance. I've been looking forward to this all day meal kit or something on the grill. Nobody asking me for anything. I opened the chest freezer in the garage. I'm not gonna describe what I experience in any detail, because honestly, some things you just don't want to revisit. What I will tell you is that everything I'd been looking forward to was floating.

I wasn't happy, and in that moment I made a decision.

The best way to handle this situation. I decided was to haul the freezer to the dump. Remember I have a chest freezer full of liquid meat soup basically ninety degrees plus middle of July in Indiana. So I duct taped the lid shut wrapped it all the way around, actually just to be safe, because yes, that was a thought I had. And I loaded it onto a trailer by myself, not because no one offered to help, because I was too frustrated to think clearly enough to ask.

I drove to the dump, paid the disposal fee backed up to the edge and watched with genuine satisfaction as it tumbled and over end down the embankment, broke open the duct tape seal and emptied its contents everywhere. Next problem, I needed a new freezer. As luck would have it, an older couple near my office was moving to a retirement community and had a chest freezer for sale. So I bought it, took it home, plugged it in. Nothing happened.

I checked the breakers, new problems. I grabbed a box fan plugged it into the same outlet. Nothing. I was now on my second freezer of the day, standing in a hot garage in July and running out of ideas. So I called my father, My father, who was an electrical engineer and who I probably should have called before the duct tape. He asked me one question, did you check the GFCI in the garage? Now I knew what a GFCI was, I'd never seen one in a garage. This was the first house I'd ever owned. Every house I lived in before was built before nineteen seventy eight, when GFCI outlets became code for garages.

I went to the garage, found the outlet. It was tripped. I reset it thirty seconds, maybe less. The original freezer was fine. I didn't make a bad decision. I made a chain of decisions, each one completely logical inside the framework created by the last one. Haul the freezer, buy a replacement, check the breakers, call for help. Every choice made complete sense from inside the situation I'd built. The problem wasn't the choices. The problem was the premise, the premise something is broken, which meant the only choices available were variations of how to fix it.

My father wasn't working from that premise. He asked a question that premise couldn't generate.

Here's something interesting about a menu. It feels like choice. It looks like freedom. You can be as deliberate as you want, standing in front of it, reading every option, making the most conscious selection possible. But someone built the menu. And if the menu was built by frustration, by heat, by the assumption that something is broken, then every option on it is a variation of the same faulse premise. The sophistication of the choice doesn't change what the choices are built on. This is what the economy of striving is, not a collection of bad decisions, a menu generated by one operating assumption.

I am separate, I am incomplete. Something is missing, something needs to be fixed. Religion offers options from that menu. So does the self help industry. So does the productivity system, and the personal brand and the optimization habit stack different items, say, menu built by the same premise. You can be completely conscious about your choices and still be choosing from a false menu. Conscious choice from inside the wrong premise is still the wrong premise.

My father didn't give me a better option from the menu I was working from. He asked a question that menu couldn't generate. That's not a better choice, that's a different lens. And once you see the menu itself, once you feel the edges of it the way I felt them standing in that garage on my second freezer of the day, something shifts. Not a resolution, not an arrival, just the beginning of a different question. Sit with this discomfort means it landed. Next time, what are you choosing when you choose

The Story