In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options.

One could even argue that we have a duty to create and pass on stories about choice because once a person knows such stories, they can't be taken away from him. He may lose his possessions, his home, his loved ones, but if he holds on to a story about choice, he retains the ability to practice choice.

Then, the other thing that affected my interest in choices growing up was the fact that I was going blind and that meant that there were lots of questions that constantly kept arising about how much choices I actually could have.

This is at a time when you know most of us drank tap water, so I used to go to this store and examine all the varieties and we used to marvel at all the choices out there, but I found that I rarely bought anything and I kind of thought that was kind of curious. I mean, they had things that the other grocery stores didn't have and yet I never bought anything.

What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.

You get to decide how you're going to look and what you're going to be when you grow up and when people learned that my parents actually had an arranged marriage people thought that was the most horrific thing on earth. I mean how could anybody allow their marriage of all things to be prescribed by somebody else?

So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.