If you were to have only one door, you’d choose to open it or not and go on with your life. Were the number of doors infinite you’d be in a perpetual state of “deer in a headlights”, unable to move or decide which one to take. That’s a thing with choice – It’s good to have it but too much of it decimates your wellbeing and, although portrayed as the ultimate freedom of wealthy developed world, it is in fact a joy killer and a paralytic. It’s a strange thing in the human nature. We’re always measuring and comparing things, consciously or not. When you have one model of something you’re gonna take it as it is or not take it, and you’re done with it. When you have a myriad of choices, to the absurd point of meaningless detail that have nothing to do with the pragmatics of the choice, something begins to happen.

 

  1. You’ll get stuck in a loop of comparisons even if the difference is really unimportant to the performance and pragmatic use of this object or action. This will cause a time lag of really making a decision even the simplest things such as which toothpaste to get out of 200 varieties offered in your store. These meaningless decisions than take a lot of our RAM for the day as we all have a certain amount of decisions we can make before we start making bad ones. There is a reason why hyper successful people simplify things as their closets and mainly wear same or similar things. These decisions just don’t matter as much as others in the day and business.

 

  1. When/if you finally do make a decision, instead of relief and enjoying the benefits of the decision, anxiety sets in. Why? Because once you chose one thing you didn’t choose all the others and joy goes down proportionally to the number of not chosen options, since you keep moping around about the loss of opportunity (called opportunity costs) and amplify all about your choice where you’re not fully satisfied, day dreaming about the choice not taken that could have gone better. You’re stuck in “what if” land now. How much we value something depends on what we’re comparing it with.

 

  1. Expectations escalate when you have infinite choice, because among all of those options there’s got to be a perfect one, right? When you have only one or two choices you don’t expect much and leave yourself room to be pleasantly surprised. When we presume there is a “perfect option” (there is no such thing) than we raise our expectations to an unreasonable level and set ourselves up for disappointment even if what we’ve chosen is great. There is always a feeling as if you’ve somehow settled

 

  1. There Is a transference of responsibility for dissatisfaction. If there is only one choice available and you’re disappointed, the world is to blame for simply not offering more variety. If there is infinite variety and you choose “wrong” then you’re to blame because the world made it possible for you to find your “perfect” and if you didn’t, so it’s your fault.

 

Seriously, not all decisions you make matter that much. Perfect is not necessary for joy and constant comparisons will take its pound of flesh out of your wellbeing. Is the colour of your walls, the brand of your toaster or the height of your socks really so important that it demands any serous contemplation or energy expenditure? Focus your resources on the decisions that matter and remember that whatever you choose the doubt and envy of the greener grass on the other side is often fertilized by the crap we keep telling ourselves. Sometimes choosing good enough and moving on the next order of (more important business) is your best resource allocation. Most things we obsess about are not that important and are taking the focus away from the few really important ones. No one died from ill-fitting jeans or a wrong colour toaster. Relax, enjoy what you have.