Bootylicious Possibility

Today we're told that we can be whatever we want to be. That if we want to become an entrepreneur it's just a matter of willpower and elbow grease. If we want to run from Africa to England it's just about taking the first step. If we want to shred the guitar like Santana or get that booty poppin' like Kimmy K, it's all there if we want it.

Everywhere we look, there are messages about achievement, accomplishment, entrepreneurship, hustle, passive income, all telling us that anything is possible if we just get our grind-set right. Of course, what goes unsaid is the flip side of this ideology; if we don't get ourselves bootylicious and on our own spaceship, the lack of individual achievement is itself an individual failure and a matter of individual responsibility.

According to Byung Chul Han, this endless well of opportunity and possibility leaves us feeling pretty exhausted. He describes the modern subject as an achievement-subject, one who experiences life as a permanent project of self-optimisation. He writes that “the complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible,’” and that “no-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression… the achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself… depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity.”

It's like using GPS and instead of showing you the fastest route, it shows you every possible path. Every street, every alley, every parking lot you could turn through if you wanted to use your complete freedom. Not only that, but it keeps recalculating in real time, showing you that if you'd turned left thirty seconds ago, you'd arrive two minutes earlier. Your failure to arrive optimally is constantly being measured against all the paths you didn't take. The algorithm never lets you just commit to a route and be done with it.

Or it’s like sitting down for a relaxing evening with a streaming service that has every show, every film, every documentary ever made. You scroll, sample, and read reviews. Finally, you pick something, then spend the entire episode wondering if you should be watching something else. Suddenly the night is over. You feel like you wasted it, but you were free to choose.

And this is exactly the overwhelming possibility shit-storm we find ourselves in today: everything is possible all the time. Every piece of information is a few clicks away. Every piece of media is just waiting to be consumed. Every consumer product is at your fingertips, ready to be delivered to you tonight. Every potential lover or romantic adventure is only a swipe away. And every single one of the thousand tabs you’ve currently got open in your browser to read is all there for you right now.

And it's all too much. It’s all. too. much.

Which is why Slavoj Žižek asks: what if this isn't just an overload of choices, but freedom itself turned into a kind of sickness? The problem isn't that we have too many options, it's that we experience freedom as a command. We're not gently invited to choose like we’re ordering from a menu with friends, we're obligated to choose, obligated to enjoy, obligated to optimise, like we’re in a competitive eating competition lined up at the buffet thinking about how to maximise the volume, not savour each mouthful.

The subtext is this: you must be creative. You must be entrepreneurial. You must curate the perfect route on your journey of life. Every mouthful must be optimised from the infinite menu. And if you're burnt out or overwhelmed or scrolling through Netflix for hours, you're failing twice: once at the task, and once at being the kind of free, self-actualised person who's supposed to thrive under these conditions.

So, in the face of everything, we do nothing. Or inversely, we do a lot. We do too much. But we do so many little nothings to avoid confronting the one big nothing. And none of it feels particularly human.

This is the disease without a cure, where the very demand to be free and enjoy becomes our symptom. We can't cure ourselves by simply “choosing less,” because the command to choose, to be the architect of our own perfect existence, is baked into the entire structure of how we live now.

The GPS and the streaming service aren't just annoying interfaces; they're small machines through which this diseased freedom operates. Each one whispers the same thing: you could have chosen better, enjoyed more, optimised harder. And if you didn't? Well, you were free to choose, and that failure, my friend, well that's on you.

So maybe the point isn’t to escape this diseased freedom, but to betray it a little. To disappoint the algorithm, to leave routes unoptimised, to let whole menus go untasted on purpose. To choose a film you realise half an hour in might be absolute dogshit and stick with it.

Maybe the real work isn’t just asking “What do I want to achieve?” It’s also asking, “What am I willing not to be?” To live with the hundred lives I won’t live, the hundred careers I won’t have, the thousand shows I’ll never watch. In a culture where the only imperative is to achieve, deliberately leaving possibilities unrealised might be the closest thing we have to a sane, limited, actually liveable freedom.