Death by Choice
We live in the age of options. The grocery store has an entire aisle of cereals. Phones come in multiple shades of black. And within 5 seconds anyone with a smartphone can pull up a list of all the restaurants around them. Life as a human has never been better. Or has it? Is having all the choices really all it’s cracked up to be?
I submit that it is not.
In the last two hundred years or so the number of choices people make in their daily lives has increased drastically. The Model T was available in a single color — black. Or “any color as long as it’s black”. Now we can get our cars in black, white, gray, and all those other colors nobody ever buys. If you went on vacation in 1850 it was probably to the neighboring town to visit cousin Alfred. Now we can spend days or weeks perusing travel blogs and TripAdvisor to find the perfect getaway that will bring us as much joy as we can possibly squeeze out of 7 days and $3000.
Two things have brought us here: the industrial revolution and the internet. The industrial revolution made it possible not only to manufacture lots of things cheaply, but also make them available in 15 different colors, 3 of which are green. And thanks to the internet all the world’s knowledge is only a Google search away.
On the surface, this abundance of choice and information is wonderful. It’s empowering and gives us the freedom to live our lives the way we want to. But is it really? Or is it overwhelming and paralyzing instead? I’d say that for the most part making all these choices actually prevents us from being who we want to be, unless we want to be people who spend half our lives choosing between a shaggy bath mat and a slightly less shaggy bath mat. The truth is that making choices is hard, even the simple ones. Most of the choices we make are almost pointless, but they take just as much mental energy as the “hard” choices. It’s actually pretty hard to choose which shirt to wear, or which burger place to go to, or which park to visit. And so we agonize over it. But in most cases both options are great! We would actually be happier if there was only one shirt, or one burger place, or one park. Not only would we spend less time choosing and more time living, but we’d also enjoy whatever we had without the fear of possibly missing out on something much better (which in reality isn’t any better at all).
So what’s the solution? Go with the first option every time? Flip a coin? Always pick the red one? Trying to eliminate the options and choices pushed on us everyday is probably futile and unrealistic. I think it’s less about how we make choices and more about being ok with the choices we make. The reason it’s hard to make choices is that we’re afraid of making the wrong choice. FOMO. That’s ultimately the problem. Maybe if we trained ourselves to realize all the options are great and the choices we make are mostly insignificant, then we could free ourselves from the paralysis. We’d realize that it doesn’t matter what shirt we pick, what matters is what we do that day. It doesn’t matter what burger place or park we go to but who we go with.
Unless you’re choosing between McD’s and Five Guys. One of these is definitely the wrong choice.
