Credit: Main ideas are from Barry Schwartz’s TED video
We all want more choice in our lives, more opportunities. Unfortunately choice has a confusing paradox; When you have a lot MORE choice, you become LESS happy.
Crazy ain’t it?
Decision Paralysis
When you have more than about 7 choices, you start getting lost. Which choice is better? Will you have to try each choice to see which is best?
What happens then is that you’re paralyzed and can’t make a decision until you “get all the information”.
Not making a decision means not making a choice that could be making your life better. You become LESS happy.
Opportunity Costs
In the old days, there would only be 1 type of jeans. If you wanted to buy one, that was the only one. Nowadays, you walk into a store and see 100 different kinds. So now you just have to try each one to get the best.
Imagine 2 stores. One only has 3 types of jeans. The other has 100 types of jeans.
You waste sooooo much more time trying 100 jeans than just 3 jeans. Therefore, you won’t ever try out all 100 jeans.
When you finally DO pick one of those jeans out of 3, you can choose the best one. When you choose out of 100, you might only try on 10 pairs. So you lose out (opportunity cost) on 90 types!!
You therefore become LESS happy because instead of gaining on one pair of jeans, you’ve lost out on 90 pairs. Because any of those 90 pairs could have been better than the pair you just tried on.
And the problem duplicates itself when buying cars, or houses, or even just choosing what to do with your life. When you have SOOO many more options, life becomes tougher, because it becomes harder to know if the choice you take is the best.
Then what should I do?
So what do you do? Stay tuned for my next post; “Satisficing: Why it’s good enough”
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