Life Lately
The Hell Called ‘Choices’
I dreamt of Excel sheets last night. There was a single cell in the spreadsheet that gave back that darn #N/A and I spent a great portion of the night trying to figure out why, since all the other cells were resulting with some neat-looking numbers. My dream comes as no surprise, of course, since I spend about 90% of my day waiting for Excel to load, getting angry at VLOOKUP, or sending prayers to the Universe when the fan on my laptop starts going berserk and I haven’t clicked the floppy disk (for all Gen Zs, I mean the save button). And, I’m angrier at Excel still, because despite all the fecking formulas, pretentious PIVOTS and whatnot, at the end of the day, it is a useless piece of software when it comes to the most important thing — decision-making. You guessed it — I’m stuck.
Life would’ve been a piece of cake. Just imagine. You open a file, write a list of pros and cons of the thing that you’re deliberating, plug in adequate weights, and TA-DA — Excel does the math and tells you that you absolutely shouldn’t even consider going out on a date with that person or have burritos for dinner 5 days in a row, for example.
We choose between a million things every day. Ok, fine.
To provide factual info for a change, the average person makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions (stress on the remotely). In a single day! From whether to snooze the alarm for 9 more minutes, wash the hair or put some gel, what to wear, which road to take to work that is not going to take an eternity and some more, the dreadful decisions on what to eat and what to pretend to watch on Netflix, Prime, HBO, Hulu, Disney+ (I’m lost really). To important budget decisions, whether to change jobs or a career, go to uni or that extra course, invest in a home, move, begin or end a relationship, have kids… the list just. doesn’t. end. Just writing these made me tense and confused, let alone having to decide. So… I don’t.
The art of choosing? More like the hell of choosing. Even now I’m pondering why I chose this darn topic to write about when there are so many other subjects that are far less complex to try to make sense of. Psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this The Paradox of Choice. In a nutshell, psychologically, the more options we have
a. The less likely we are to make a decision
b. The less satisfied we are with the decision we’ve made — scientifically proven.
In a society where we have 178 salad dressings on a supermarket shelf, about a truckload of home entertainment options, and apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and whatnot to swipe on through an endless stream of “potentials” like they’re not actual living breathing humans, does this mean we’re royally screwed? Does freedom really mean maximizing choices, and how do we proceed when choices paralyze us?
I sometimes wish they had indeed chipped us with those COVID vaccines, so that someone somewhere out there would be sitting behind a dozen screens, watching me and going “Ah yes, Jane will be eating healthy today, a Minestrone with a side of salad.”. Click. “No, Jane will not invest in an AirFryer just because it seems cool as she’s not going to use it and has no space in her kitchen.”. You know, that kind of stuff.
But no. Instead, we have the freedom that we so yearn to have (or so we say) to make all the choices. In all fields. Every day. So, it really should come as no surprise that much of life feels like a game of Whack-a-mole, whacking random holes and hoping that we got at least one of those little feckers. Because seriously, who can keep track of all the inputs we need to factor in to make the best choice for any given moment? Not the human brain, as we have what is called “bounded rationality” — we have limited thinking, incomplete information, and are severely constrained by time. And I’m not even considering emotions here.
And I cannot help but wonder, is there such a thing as a “best choice”? Best by whose standards? Or a “satisfactory decision”? Don’t we all make choices that bring absolutely no satisfaction, yet we know we must make them? If you expect an answer to any of those by the end, please stop reading, spare yourself the disappointment and instead distract yourself from the things on your mind by watching YouTube Shorts or TikToks or Reels, your choice.
Just pair our bounded rationality with the Paradox of Choice and I think that we can get to why most of us feel so dissatisfied. In general. Whatever decision we make. There is always something else we could’ve been doing/buying/consuming in whichever form. There is always somewhere else we could’ve been going. Someone else we could’ve been dating. The FOMO is there, all the time. So does it come as a surprise that we’re the most anxious generation, living through an unadmitted epidemic of depression even though we descend from a generation that had it much worse?
Consequently, consciously (more like not), we do everything in our power to keep choosing to the minimum. I mean, with 35K decisions daily, can you blame us? We stick to the same route to work. We eat the same food, from the same restaurants. We keep rewatching Friends. We either stay in relationships far too long or way too short — both imply avoiding making any real decision. We live life on autopilot and then construct defence mechanisms — rationalize, repress, displace — to justify it. Or we numb. We self-medicate with food, things, alcohol, drugs, and depthless relationships to avoid. What? Ourselves mostly. That results in feeling trapped, feeling unmotivated, doubting our choices or the lack thereof, and thinking that we need more and “if only” this other thing was available, thus restarting the vicious cycle.
And we never, for a second, stop to ask “Why?”. It is really beyond me how, as a society, we got to a point where we overthink and don’t think enough. At the same time! We sweat the small stuff and get preoccupied with the form over the substance, and not for a moment do we consider “Why does this matter so much to me?”. And if it does, at all. The autopilot often gets us trapped in someone else’s lane, being a back-seat passenger in someone else’s car, going to someone else’s destination, that doesn’t even fit who we are as people and what we stand for.
Do we know what we stand for? What are our values? Even if we did have an Excel sheet to choose for us, do we know what weights we’d assign to each choice? Take this with a grain of salt as it’s coming from a girl in a fluffy purple flannel bathrobe, drinking tea (okay, with rum) on a Sunday night, but I do believe that choices would be a whole lot easier to make (and stick to) if we know why we’re making them. That’s the point, right? Are we actually choosing anything if we don’t really know why?
Decision-making doesn’t necessarily mean doing anything, per se. If you complacently sit in someone else’s car even though don’t want to, it’s still a decision, right? Inaction is an action. Not choosing is a choice. Whether it is to send that message or not, tell that person “I love you” or not, stay in the relationship or not, each is a valid decision from which different ones will follow. If all ultimately lead to the same destination, we can never know. But what’s the gamble you’re willing to take, and why? What are your values telling you? What weight would you assign, today, to each pro and con given you had that amazeballs Excel sheet that would make the decision for you? Which “what if” would you rather live with?
Regardless of the people (or horoscopes) we ask for advice, the self-help books we read, or Google searches to try to get more information, nothing and no one can really answer that for us. The freedom we seek is exactly that — the “you do you” sort of thing. There is not a single entity out there that can know better than ourselves what to do for us *if* we understand the right reasons why we’re doing the things we’re doing. There are also no right answers — the trick to getting any is mere brutal honesty with oneself. At least until they update Excel. Till then, I’m equally as stuck with the choices I must make as I was in the beginning. But hey, at least I chose to write something, right? And you chose to read it all the way, kudos.
We have the freedom to choose, well almost anything really — big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things. Life in its entirety is now a matter of choice. With that power comes even greater responsibility — actually choosing. It is the choices we make that make us in turn. The food we choose to eat. The workouts we (don’t) do. The people and relationships we devote time to that keep us driving in our own lane, to our chosen destination. Because it turns out – freedom doesn’t come from having options. Freedom comes from having chosen.
Some (hopefully useful) resources:
The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More — Barry Schwartz
and his way-too-good TED Talk The Paradox of Choice
The Art of Decision-Making — a nice read
The 3 Paradoxes of Life (And How They Determine Who We Are) — an article by Mark Manson
