The Paradox of Choice
Part 1
I’ve been enjoying writing these blog entries so much lately. It’s cool seeing how many people read them, or liked them. Even if it’s only like 10 people, it’s still 10 more than if I hadn’t shared anything.
I get to express my thoughts and it serves as an outlet for my creativity. And it’s a stretch, but there’s a chance I might inspire someone to do something or think differently. And that in itself is an amazing feeling.
But one challenge I didn’t realize I would have when I started writing and posting (almost) daily was that I would have too many ideas.
It’s actually kind of difficult to choose what to write about every day because there are a lot of different topics that capture my imagination. What’s more, a lot of them are related to one another, so they could all potentially be condensed into a single article. And it isn’t always clear whether a certain topic, storyline or theme would be better suited in one article or another. Or maybe it even deserves a whole article of its own.
In short, it’s the Paradox of Choice.
There’s a whole book about this topic, and it’s actually called The Paradox of Choice, and I haven’t read it. But watched the Ted Talk, and I know enough about it to explain the gist of it.
The long story short is that more choices don’t necessarily make us happier or our lives any easier. And there’s a relatively simple mathematical example to illustrate this.
Suppose you want to find and buy the best shampoo in the supermarket. To make this simple, let’s just say you only care about how good it smells. You would have to smell every shampoo at least once to make up your mind.
If there are two shampoos, it’s easy, but the more shampoos you add, the more you have to smell. More than 10 options and it starts to be a lot, especially if you consider you probably have to do this with several other products.
And this is only if you care about one dimension of the product: smell. Say you want to factor in price too. And color. And total amount of shampoo. And whether or not there’s a sale going on. And whether it will go well with the other soap you bought last week. And whether it is tested on animals. And whether it will react well with your skin. And so on.
The more parameters you add, the more complicated this optimization problem becomes. And it’s not just the total number of parameters. It’s how you weigh each one.
How important is smell compared to whether or not the shampoo was humanely tested? How important should buying in bulk be compared to whether your partner will like it or not? It’s all subjective.
Things get tricky very quickly and it adds an undue amount of stress. As xkcd so eloquently put in this comic:
And I think it’s true. Often the amount of time and effort we expend weighing two options does not make up for the marginal difference between the two: It just might not be worth the time and mental effort comparing the two.
There’s almost a certain narcissism to caring about such minor differences, or claiming to have strong preferences when two products are virtually identical. It deserves it’s own article, but the Narcissism of Small Differences is actually something Freud talks about as a way for people to create a distinct sense of identity. And the results of it can be two groups of people who share a lot in common becoming bitter enemies because of hypersensitivity to their differences. Think Capulets and Montagues, or Democrats and Republicans.
Personally I think the solution to this paradox is pretty simple actually:
Because the act of doing something is more rewarding than the act of trying to decide what to do. And anytime we spend planning, is time we spend not doing some other thing. It’s an opportunity cost.
That isn’t to say don’t plan, because I think acting frantically and impulsively isn’t a good alternative. But there has to be a balance. Too much of one or the other would be madness.
Which may seem obvious, but then I think this paradox is responsible for FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
It’s why people will be on their phones, texting friends who aren’t there while ignoring the ones who are. It’s why people will be checking out other people’s vacations on social media, instead of enjoying their own. And it’s why people leave one club to go to another possibly slightly better one, instead of settling into a spot for the night.
These all come from the same place. They represent a paralysis from indecision, and they really bog life down. I know this from personal experience and it’s tough to combat. Because every yes is also ten noes.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s important to leap without looking and not dwell on minutiae. That life needs to be lived in the moment, and that there are diminishing marginal returns to fussing over subtleties.
Possibility is addictive, but it’s also not real.
And as they say, the devil is in the detail.
