Notes

We Have a Choice
People don’t like to be told what to do. People don’t like to have constraints. People like originality. For all these reason, people seek the comfort of having a choice; they love choice so much they demand they be offered more choices. Then when their choice doesn’t live up to their expectations they cry and ask why. Why is it that I have so many options to choose from, yet I’m still unhappy? People seek individualism through what they wear, specifically their shoes. It explains why consumers want more choices when it comes to shoes, they believe that having more choices will magically allow them to purchase the right pair and move on to live a happy life. The concept of choice is designed to allow people to have more freedom, but what it does instead is make them more dissatisfied.
Why? Well let me explain. Stores try to maximize their sales by offering as many different options of shoes to choose from as they can. When you walk into a store you are presented with more pairs of shoes than you could wear in a year. With not enough time to try on each pair of shoes we are constrained to find the right pair. We become nervous and feel a great amount of pressure. People believe that having more choices leads to more freedom which results in more welfare.
As we stare at the tall wall of shoes, we can’t help but feel intimidated. So many options to choose from we don’t know where to begin. You’ve found 6 pairs of shoes that you like, but now you can’t decide on the final pair. Should I go with the one that has the blue laces or red? The one with a stripe on the side or with a white bottom? As we’re trying to make this decision our mind becomes frustrated knowing that whichever pair we choose we will have to wear for the next year of our lives. This fear of not picking the best pair of shoes leads to paralysis instead of liberation. We have too many options to choose from we don’t know what to choose.
Eventually we manage to overcome our indecisiveness and choose a pair of shoes to be worn for the next year of our lives. As we wear the shoes out the store we start to question our decision. Are you sure it was the right choice? The little voice in our head keeps questioning our decision. At the first sight of dissatisfaction with our new pair of shoes we start to feel regret. Even though we managed to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, the regret has still caused us to feel less satisfied.
We’ve finally settled in to our new pair of shoes, accepting our decision. As time goes on we become less and less content with our pair of shoes. Pointing out every flaw we see, the little voice in our head tells us we should have picked the other pair of shoes. We had so many options how could we mess it up? As we look for someone to blame we can’t help but blame ourselves for making such a poor decision. There weren’t just 2 options, there were over 50 options, surely one of them had to be right is what we think to ourselves.
The New Yorker put it best when they wrote “Everything was better when everything was worse.” What this means is that when there were less options to choose from people had low expectations. When there were just 2 brands of shoes you could blame the companies for not giving you more options. Today, due to the amount of choice people have, we have high expectations for the decisions we have to make like buying a new pair of shoes. Having high expectations and being let down can lead to depression. It explains why clinical depression has been rising in the era of the industrial revolution because of our expectations which are directly correlated to our choices.