Choice & Choosing
I ended the last post with the statement: A generation that loves choice and hates choosing.
I fall victim to this mentality over and over again. I WANT CHOICE! From restaurants to choose from to when I am in those restaurants, I want choice and options. I don't care that I chose an Indian restaurant, I want to see fries on the menu!..... I mean that is what I am thinking.... I live and grew up in a generation, a time period where choice is king. I have the power to choose. Thus, I am king... right?
If we have all this choice, why is it so HARD to choose? Again, I find myself second guessing every purchase, transaction, or in other words every CHOICE I make. Life should not be so difficult. That is until the choice was a good one. Then my human inclination toward habit kicks in. O that felt good, lets do that again! Then your choices become stagnant and you become really really picky..... no?
Back to yesterday's post, it was in the context of relationships. We live in a generation that LOVES choice. Yet when it comes time to pick, we find ourselves debating the nuances of this and that, the particulars of microscopic details that really don't have root.
Yet this internal debate makes us more particular, more individualized, less decisive. So we wait and wait, never taking action. Is this why we don't marry? We wait for this IDEAL woman that we hope will come along, while the choice is right in front of you?
I shouldn't be one to talk as I am still single...
Interestingly, I stumbled upon Tim Ferriss' Blog and the first post is about the Choice Effect: Why are you single? The post is written by Claire Williams who write The Choice Effect: Love and Commitment in an Age of Too Many Options in the book she digs into the question of being single for women. She gives 5 tips to 'taming the Choice Effect':
- Criteria
- Concentration
- Common Sense
- Calculation
- Choose Already
If you went into an ice-cream store and saw a child ordering an ice cream cone with 7 different scoops, you’d tell him he was idiot (or not, because that is mean and he is small). Don’t be that kid. You don’t get to have everything. And, to be fair, you don’t want to. College buffet lines were fun at the beginning, but a plate full of pasta-pizza-ranch-dressing-Fruit Loops loses its appeal after a while. So choose.
What stops so many of us from making a commitment is our fear that once we make a choice we have to close the door on all the other options. If we marry Andy, we will never date Charles. True. If we become an architect, we will never be a ferret trainer. Also true. However, if we do sack up and choose to become an architect, then we have a whole host of new and shiny choices to think about! Should we make a doghouse or a people house? Should the house be blue or red? Should the building be small, medium, or big?
Choosing doesn’t limit choices—it just changes them. So feel free to pick that city, that career, that partner, knowing that even commitment brings a whole new set of options – children/pets/red and blue houses – to be excited (and angsty) about.
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