The Impact of Too Many Options in Modern Life
Are We Liberated or Burdened by Excessive Choices?
Mar 24, 2009
About ten years ago, I went to The Gap to buy a pair of jeans. A salesperson walked up to me and asked if she could help. “I want a pair of jeans — 32-28,” I said.
“Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” she replied. “Do you want them stone-washed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?” I was stunned. A moment or two later I sputtered out something like, “I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind.” It turned out she didn't know, but after consulting one of her older colleagues, she was able to figure out what “regular” jeans used to be, and she pointed me in the right direction.
The trouble was that with all these options available to me now, I was no longer sure that “regular” jeans were what I wanted. Perhaps the easy fit or the relaxed fit would be more comfortable.
With a pair of jeans of each type under my arm, I entered the dressing room. I tried on all the pants and scrutinized myself in a mirror. Whereas very little was riding on my decision, I was now convinced that one of these options had to be right for me, and I was determined to figure it out.
The jeans I chose turned out just fine, but what occurred to me on that day is that buying a pair of pants should not be a day-long project. Purchasing jeans was once a five-minute affair, now it was a complex decision. Buying jeans is a trivial matter, but it is an example of a much larger issue. When people have no choice, life can be almost unbearable.
As the number of choices increases, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings us is powerful and positive. But if the number of choices keeps growing, negative effects start to appear. As choices grow further, the negatives escalate until we can become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates us; it might even be said to tyrannize. The thoughts triggered during my shopping trip led, a few years later, to my book, The Paradox of Choice.
The Explosion of Choices
Modern life has provided a huge array of products to choose from. Just walk into any large supermarket or drugstore looking for hair-care products and you’ll likely be confronted with more than 360 types of shampoo, conditioner and mousse. Need a pain killer? There are 80 options. How about toothpaste? You have 40 types to pick from.
In addition, we now have to make choices in areas of life in which we used to have little or no option. We have to decide which telephone service providers and plans, internet service providers and retirement pension plans are the best for us.
Our physicians make us take responsibility for medical decisions instead of telling us what to do. Modern cosmetic surgery allows us to change virtually any aspect of our appearance. The telecommunications revolution has created enormous flexibility about when and where many of us can work, which forces us to decide every minute of every day about whether or not to be working.
An explosion of tolerance for “alternative” lifestyles has given us real choices about whether to be monogamous, whether (and when) to marry, whether (and when) to have kids, and even whether to have intimate relations with partners of the same or the opposite sex (or both).
Choice and Well-being
It seems a simple matter of logic that increased choice improves well-being. But the opposite may be true. While the gross domestic product, a primary measure of prosperity, more than doubled in the last 30 years, the proportion of the population describing itself as “very happy” declined. In addition, today, as a society, more of us than ever are clinically depressed. By some estimates, depression in 2000 was about 10 times as likely as it was in the year 1900. Suicide rates are also on the rise.
