Too much Choice creates paralysis and kills Choice. We can realize that in any restaurant with a too long menu. The excellent TED talk by Barry Schwartz tackles this issue deeper: ‘The paradox of choice‘.
The usual assumption at least in Western societies is that “The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have.”
Barry Schwartz notes that too much choice leads to choice paralysis, and also to ‘cost of opportunity’ issues (“the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen“).
Barry Schwartz goes as far as to attribute the unprecedented increase of clinical depression (and suicide) in our societies to too much choice. Finally, he says, when there was not to much choice, people had lower expectations and that may have been a cause of higher happiness.
I believe that faced with too much choice as we are today, it is still important to maintain low expectations and a mindset of satisfaction with what we have. I understand this is difficult in a world of temptation and where it is easy to depress over the fantastic lives other seem to have on social networks.
The paradox of choice is clearly a major challenge in our societies. The best response seems to be targeted education about how best to behave in such a world – and this seems to be mission in the new generations’ formal life learning.
