“
Students of Jean-Paul Sartre will recognize here the problem of existential anguish, which he explains in “Being and Nothingness” through the metaphor of vertigo. The sense of vertigo you feel when walking along a narrow mountain path, Sartre writes, is not the fear that you will fall off but rather the fear that you will suddenly decide to jump. Free will is terrifying because it necessarily entails the freedom to change radically in the future.
The freedom to do anything we want later becomes the freedom to thwart our present desires. I decide to quit smoking now, but later, when someone offers me a Lucky Strike, I exercise my free will to decide that what I really want to do is quit smoking tomorrow. Halfway to the filter, I realize that actually I wanted to quit all along, and the question of who is in charge becomes depressingly complicated.
The tattoo tries to make an end run around this problem by indelibly marking the one part of the self that remains tangible and consistent: the body. It is what behavioral economists call a precommitment device, ensuring that our present values remain in force in the future. You take a cab to the bar when you are sober, so that you will not be tempted to drive home when you are drunk. You wish to stop texting your ex-girlfriend late at night, so in the clear light of morning you delete her number from your phone.
”
shaun james bockert 