You get to a sushi restaurant, and you’re confronted with 87 possibilities for your next meal.
You go to the mall to buy blue jeans, and you examine the 99 combinations of brands, styles, and fits.
You open Netflix, and you begin sifting through the suggestions for 179 shows to watch.
Eventually, you make your decision, but end up dissatisfied, because you wonder if you could have done better.
This is what Barry Schwartz calls The Paradox of Choice (19′). He asserts that the freedom to choose results in reduced happiness, therefore we need to constrain such freedom.
The concept of needing limits or constraints to thrive is a fundamental. But is such constraint coercively regulated, or voluntarily created? Schwartz suggests that *economic policy* is necessary to alleviate the paradox, to eliminate the burden of excess in choice.
But any such top-down policy is founded in a psychological premise: humans can’t be trusted to make decisions that truly benefit them.
In a culture in which young people go to compulsory school for 15,000 hours of following directions – where personal choice and autonomous decision making are rarely fostered (side note: this is *not* a slam against individual educators) – it’s not a surprise such paradox exists.
The solution? Develop self-awareness and self-management. Create your own constraints.
Make decisions of exactly what your going to buy before walking into Costco. Choose the first item on the menu that sounds appealing, and don’t look at the rest of it. Leave your phone in the car when you watch your kid’s soccer game. Before opening Netflix, reference catalogued list of documentaries you hope to see.
When former Russian president Boris Yeltsin walked into an ordinary grocery store in Texas (6′), he was overcome with euphoria from the abundance of choice. Two years later he left the Communist Party.
The possibility for choice is beautiful.
Empower yourself.
JB
