Do we really need so much choice?
Living simple in the lockdown
A few days ago in the middle of the lockdown, I went to the nearby medical store to buy a few medicines. By chance I noticed he had a freezer with ‘Amul’ written on it and it had a few ice-creams. I was thrilled to suddenly find some ice-cream that too without having to wait in line to get some. The freezer had a few candy bars and just about 3 flavors in the tubs. I immediately grabbed about 10 of the candy bars and one ice-cream tub of Choco-Caramel flavor and got home. Not wanting it to melt, I made sure my exit from the shop was quick and got home full speed in the blazing hot sun.
This was just before lunch time and after having lunch, with equal joy as my kids, I opened the Choco-Caramel tub and relished it to the last bite. After finishing it, I thought to myself : Choco caramel is a flavor I have never bought before. Even though I have seen it, I normally prefer something like roasted almond or chocolate chips. In the normal run of things, even if I had seen this flavor, I would most certainly have passed it for something else that I consider my favorite. Given I did not have a choice, I picked this up as one of the better among the 3 options. And to be honest I relished it more than any other ice-cream I had eaten! We all know that scarcity induces a certain feeling and when you get something in the wake of scarcity, it gives much greater satisfaction! Yet our world today is only increasing in number of choices for every single thing. We all want more choices but we want less stress, simpler lives and so on, which is a complex paradox. Greg McKeown, author of the famous book ‘Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less’ quotes Peter Drucker in his book:
“ In the history of human civilization, never before have people had so many choices. For the first time in history they have to manage it themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it. “
Truly by evolution, humans are not naturally good at making decisions. Probably because they have never been exposed so much of choice. Decision making leads to stress, especially if there is a downfall on either side. Take a simple example of watching a movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime. The abundance of choice and the desire to make the best decision,so that at the end of it you feel you have optimally utilized your time, creates its own decision making stress. As soon as you are about to finalize on one, you get second thoughts about what if there is something better. As a result of all of this, we wind up spending several more minutes of analysis paralysis making a decision in fatigue and left with a taste that we picked something suboptimal. I have myself experienced that if this decision is about watching a late night movie, we sometimes spend half an hour in just selecting the movie! How many times have we flipped channels for an hour and been left distasteful that we got nothing to watch. As an alternative if we had just 3 options to choose from, we would have made a quick choice and enjoyed our time much better
I think the lockdown became enjoyable for me because it removed the complexity of making choices. There were just 2 options and we had to pick one so life became simple and easy. Now that things are getting back to normal, once again we have multiple shops open, different brands to choose from and options on what to make for dinner tonight. It’s our world of choice!
