The illusion of 'lack of choice'

You might have heard people saying phrases like "I don't have a choice", "I did not have a choice", "What else I can do?" etc in certain situations. Do people really don't have a choice when they say they don't?

Let us take some extreme examples to understand what it means to not have a choice. Say when someone is jailed, or being paraplegic, they really have no choice or very limited choice to exercise any will. They will be at the mercy of their harsh reality. Actually some people exercise their choice even in extremes of situations. Bhagat Singh for example went on a hunger strike to fight the atrocities of the British empire being in jail. Mahatma Gandhi famously said (referring to the British again) "They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me, then they will have my dead body. But not my obedience". Barring such extreme personalities, for the sake of argument, we can consider people in such situations to be helpless to exercise any choice.

My sample set is not the kind of situations or people who I referred above. I am talking of people in normal lives who face certain difficulties. Let us take the example of an old couple who is being constantly troubled and abused by their son. After a zillion chances and exhausting almost all the possible ways of help, the situation is not rectified. At this juncture what would a typical parent do? My bet will be on, they will continue to endure though some part of them know deserting him/her would give a fighting chance to help the situation. However, when asked to exercise that choice, they might say "What can I do?" or "I don't have such a choice". But in reality they do have that choice but it's a difficult one. I am aware when people say they don't have a choice, they are intending that certain choices are difficult to implement. However, in my opinion, telling oneself that there is no choice will lead to mentally blocking the small chance of entertaining it's possibility. It would be better to tell "I have a difficult choice" than "I have no choice" because that can help the person to sleep over it, contemplate it and probably muster the courage to exercise it.

We all have choices. It's just that some are more difficult than others.