The Paradox of Choice
Feb 19 2024
I'd rather not choose.
Tomato soup
and nothing but;
no beef-and-mushroom
chicken gumbo
cream of . . . .
All burgers
well done.
And any colour you want
as long as it’s black.
As well as the girl next door.
Who is also happy to settle.
Because too much choice
and there's always something better;
the never-ending search
for the perfect match.
In the quest to simplify my life
I choose blindly,
take it or leave it,
grab the first thing.
Turns out
she's the girl of my dreams.
No swiping left.
No endless search.
No hoping for perfection.
Because I'm perfectly content
to leave those many stones
unturned.
Not worry
about what horrors may lurk
in the darkness underneath;
spiders manically circling,
frantic worms
with pink translucent skin,
the pungent smell
of warm damp earth.
The paradox of choice: that too much choice, instead of making us happier as you'd expect, actually makes us less so. Yet consumer culture is all about choice! Unfortunately, what inevitably accompanies all that choice is terrible waste. Is that wall of cereal in the supermarket really necessary?
There's just the bother of choosing: the time and energy; the frustration of not even understanding some of the alternatives. In technology, especially. So often, the engineers delight in far too many bells and whistles; stuff that no regular person has any real use for.
There's the anxiety about making the wrong choice.
Then there is loss aversion (if that isn't the same thing!): what you got should have made you happy, but what you might have let get away makes you even more unhappy. The negative feelings always seem to win out.
What studies have shown people end up doing is simply not taking anything! They are paralyzed by too much choice.
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