Choice consists of the mental process of thinking involved with the process of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one of them for action.
There is a dogma which the western industrialized societies follow. This dogma is based on freedom, and it says that in order to maximize the welfare of the citizens, the society must maximize their (individual) freedoms.
Freedom is the essence of being human. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. The problem with choice is that nowadays it simply exploded.
If you’re sick, you go to the doctor. And the doctor tells you: “Well, to make you feel better, we can do (a) or we can do (b). (a) has these benefits and risks and (b) has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do?“. And you say: “Doc, what should I do?“. And the doctor says: “You can choose (a) or you choose do (b). (a) has these benefits and risks and (b) has these benefits and risks“. If you want to take it even further, you ask: “But doctor, what would you do if you were in my position?“. He would say: “But I’m not. (a) has these benefits and risks and (b) has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do?”.
This is a shifting of burden and responsibility of decision making from someone who is well and knows something (the doctor), to someone who is sick and knows nothing (the patient). Does this look right to you?
Is all this freedom of choice good news, or is it bad news? The answer is yes. It’s both.
Since you know what the good sides of freedom are (you are enjoying them right now), I will write about the the two main negative effects.
Paralysis
With so many options around, people find it very difficult to choose at all. The paralysis is a consequence of the world having too many choices.
Even if one manages to overcome the paralysis and makes a choice, it ends up less satisfied than if it had fewer options to choose from.
The reason for that? With so many options to choose from, if you buy some stuff and it’s not perfect, it’s easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens next is that the imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made. This regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get from the decision you made (even if it is a good decision).
The more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as as the opportunity calls.
Escalation of expectation
Adding options to peoples life can’t help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options would be and what’s that going to produce is less satisfaction with those results (even if they are god results).
With so many options available, our expectations for a particular product go through the roof.
You compare what you got to what you expected, and because you didn’t make the perfect choice (it’s kinda impossible to make a perfect choice), that will make you feel bad.
I think everything was better back when everything was worse.
When everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. These days, the best you can hope for is that a product is as good as you expect it to be. And since our expectations skyrocketed, we will never be pleasantly surprised by the choices we made.
The secret to happiness in a consumer society is to have low expectations.
Buying bad stuff when there is only one kind to buy makes you ask yourself “who’s responsible?”. And the answer is simple: the world. The world is responsible for producing an inferior product.
Buying bad stuff when there are countless options results in you asking the same question: “who’s responsible”. Only this time, it’s you who’s responsible. With so many choices, there is no excuse for failure.
And so, when people make decisions, even if the decisions and the outcomes are good, people put pressure on themselves because they know that they could have chosen better from the oceans of available options.
This growth of the number of choices is a significant contributor to the explosion of depression in the industrialized societies. People are constantly having disappointing experiences because their standards are extremely high, and when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they are at fault.
The paradox is that we do better (in general) and feel worse.
Of course that some choice is better than none, but it doesn’t follow from that. More choice isn’t better than some choice.
Choices are much like shoes. If too small (the number), they gall and pinch us; if too large, they cause us to stumble and trip.
Expensive complicated choices don’t help. They hurt and make us worse off.
The absence of limits is a perfect recipe for misery and disaster, because it produces paralysis.
I’m faced with a multitude of choices right now, as I finish writing this post. I could choose to publish it now, in an hour or two, or maybe even tomorrow. I could also choose to save it as a draft or send it as a guest post to another blogger.
All these choices certainly have different results, and if choose to publish it now and the amount of readers it draws isn’t what I expected, I could easily imagine that the results would have been much better if I published it tomorrow or used it for a guest post. This may not be the best example but it summarizes the essential.
What’s important is to remember who we really are and what we basically want. It’s very easy to forget these two things and get lost and confused.
What’s your opinion on this subject? Are all these choices helping you?
