DIFFICULT DECISIONS
Making Choices
Is Harder Than Ever
By Daniela Diaz

I have a friend who returns just about everything she buys. Often she will go back to a store three or four times to exchange an item she bought for a different option. Whenever she brings a new purchase home, a stylish handbag or a pair of shoes, she deliberates her choice for hours, wondering what the acquisition says about her, if the color is right, if the fit is flattering, if another style would have been more “her.” This is not a pleasant process for her. In fact, she seems constantly plagued with some torment over the most mundane of shopping decisions.

My recent investigations into this behavior have offered me some insight into this “affliction’s” prevalence throughout America’s culture-defining free enterprise system. In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz analyzes how the “the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction.” He describes how the process of buying jeans has become a stress-filled occasion for him because of the multitude of styles he is given to choose from. It takes him twice as long to decide which style to buy, and in the end he is left with a feeling of dissatisfaction with his jeans out of fear that his choice was wrong.

Buying jeans is admittedly a frivolous business, but it serves as a poignant metaphor for the fleeting ambiguity of our enjoyment or fulfillment when we acquire something, be it a car, a home or a partner. We live in a consumer culture so fraught with choices that the senses grow numb, the object of desire lusterless. “Freedom” has begun to mean that we have access to a glut of alternative selections. It was once a social innovation, but today it makes us complacent, anesthetized to the violence of our times, unfulfilled slaves to capitalism, constantly buying and trying to fill the gaping void in our souls created by continuous indecision. Schwartz maintains that “clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress and dissatisfaction…even to clinical depression.”

It has happened to me, on more than one shopping trip, that the abundance of options becomes entirely too much of a challenge. I end up walking away without buying anything, even when I was seeking the vendible out of necessity. Bad decisions, no decisions: this cycle becomes ingrained in determinations that impact our lives more acutely than a pair of jeans. Clearly, we must deal with this social phenomenon. Hence, Schwartz’s book and others such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which examines the importance of following one’s own instincts, have become popular.

Schwartz proposes a list of solutions for combating what he terms “the problem of excessive choice.” In it he outlines the importance of narrowing our options, taking more time to make decisions, accepting that there is no “best” decision, controlling our expectations and ignoring what other people have chosen. By inviting these constraints into our decision-making process, we increase our chances of choosing appropriately for ourselves, and therefore we increase our chances for happiness.

For me, such discipline seems harder than it sounds, especially since I grew up in this world of exorbitant variety. But I have vowed to try one or two of these steps each time I’m faced with a purchase decision. Only problem is, I don’t know which ones to try first!