It’s good to have options. It’s good to have choices. The more the better, right? But maybe we can actually have too many of them. Maybe having so many things to choose from complicates our lives rather than enhancing them. It’s been suggested that having so many options has two negative effects. The first is that it produces paralysis: we can’t decide which thing to choose, so we choose none. The second is that it escalates our expectations so that even if we do make a choice, we aren’t really satisfied with it. What if there was a better choice? What if we made the wrong choice?
A lot of the research in this area has been done in regard to product choices, but the principles apply to all kinds of choices. Maybe our choice-making behavior carries over from—or at least is reinforced by—our shopping experiences.
[I]t seems that as society grows wealthier and people become freer to do whatever they want, they get less happy. —Barry Schwartz, The Tyranny of Choice, Scientific American, December 2004
Maybe the abundance of choices we have impacts our ability to create meaning in our lives. How much time and mental energy do we spend trying to decide: what to do on our vacation, where to go for dinner, which item to select from the menu, what to wear to this or that event, whether or not to redecorate the kitchen (or bedroom or bath) and then what colors to use and which things to replace, whether to get this book (or CD or DVD) or that one, which movie to go to, what kind of car to buy, which area to major in in college, which job to apply for or accept, and—for many—what the heck to do with the rest of our lives.
Some of the choices we have to make are far weightier than others, but I wonder if we’ve become so bad at making day-to-day choices—so hung up on the process—that it’s impaired our choice-making ability. If it’s true that we have escalated expectations about the effect a particular brand of olive oil or car or kitchen appliance is going to have on our lives, imagine what our expectations are about the really significant things, such as who we choose to spend our lives with, whether or not we choose to have children, and what career path we choose for ourselves. How can reality meet those heightened expectations? The research says that it can’t and doesn’t.
The secret to happiness is low expectations. –Barry Schwartz
The grass is always greener somewhere else as long as we think there is one right and perfect choice and we need to find and select it from all the options available. How will we ever know whether or not we made that one right and perfect choice? It’s not a game show where we’ll find out at the end that Door Number Three was the one with the biggest prize.
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