Enough is enough!

When we were all stuck in lockdown, what did we do? What indeed do we spend much of our weekends and free time doing? The concept of leisure is a relatively new one, given that most of our ancestors spent all their time and energy just trying to survive, but nowadays (especially in the surreal world that is 2020) we find ourselves with a lot of time to fill. This is in itself a good thing; the problems start to arise when we begin to feel pressured by the sheer volume of choices we have to make - and how that can spill over into other areas of our lives. 

Perhaps this is something that only I and my fellow neurotic Type A's struggle with, but every single app and feed we are plugged into is streaming information at us 24/7, and keeping up with the cultural and political zeitgeist is starting to feel like a job in itself. The mood du jour now has the potential to change with greater rapidity than ever before; no sooner has a particular TV show or writer become this century's most iconic contribution to culture than they become problematic or even just passé. It’s exhausting to keep up with, if not nigh on impossible.

This is not an attempt to undermine the extraordinary privilege having access to all this technology really is. In fact I think life pre-pop culture must have been pretty boring, not to mention how accessible it has now become to people across the class and wealth spectrum. But is having so much choice always such a good thing? How can we recognise when it starts to have a negative impact?

To help illustrate the problems of having too much choice, a study was carried out in the 1980’s when Consumer Reports published their findings on which strawberry jam was ranked highest by a taste panel out of 45 different jam options. Some years later psychologist Timothy Wilson carried out the same experiment with a group of students, except this time they only had 5 jams to rank in order of preference. The correlation between each set of results was extremely high, indicating that the same stuff still came out on top no matter who was judging or how many there were to judge.

What this study shows us is the paradox of choice. We think that having more options makes us more informed and able to make better decisions, but it has been found that in actual fact the opposite is true. We feel as if we may have missed out on a better deal, or we falter and fail by telling ourselves that we can always go back and choose differently if one option doesn't work out. By doing this we struggle to make progress on any decision at all, knowing we have a fallback safely stored away. This can affect all areas of our lives, from dating to choosing a career path, and it can make us less successful in everything we do if we don't have the conviction to make a decision and stick by it. Not only is it tiring having to make all these decisions, but we worry even more about doing it wrong, whether that be which Netflix show to watch or how we should earn our money.

 We also can see from the jam experiment that having so much to choose from ultimately doesn’t change anything. By not knowing about the myriad of alternative options we aren’t necessarily losing out – we might really be saving ourselves unnecessary agonising over something fairly trivial in the long run. Yet there are even more damaging side effects to be felt from this paradox. There is so much to choose from that we simply can't do/have/absorb it all, and then we mistakenly believe that somehow we are failing by not doing enough. If we strip life down to what really matters, we see that this simply cannot be true. Our destination is one that can be reached from many different ways. If we assume the goal for most people is the same, finding a jam that tastes good or achieving career satisfaction, then whichever route we travel will take us there.

 That is not to say that people should always feel that they have to stick to the status quo, indeed there is a balance to be struck. Happiness can be found in personal choice – not just the decisions themselves, but also how many or few of them we feel able to make. The choices that are ours and no one else’s are the ones that make us most fulfilled; even if they can be overwhelming, the trick is to distinguish what matters to us, even if it is not what ‘matters’ in the eyes of society. It’s undoubtedly hard to push through the quagmire of information we are presented with every day, especially when most of it is utterly irrelevant to how we really lead our lives. But the reality is that the road not taken rarely leads to anything better, if anything else at all. So plug yourself in or disconnect yourself entirely – the choice is yours.