For years, I’ve been teasing people I know — particularly my girlfriend — about their occasional inability to make a (simple) decision. Well, this may go a long way towards explaining why those seemingly simple decisions aren’t simple at all to some people. At the same time and more or less to myself, because I never really thought about how to articulate it, I’ve suspected that the “too much choice” issue was a big part of the problems in western (I’ll add capitalist) societies.
Quoted from The tyranny of too much choice:
An article in Scientific American, titled The Tyranny of Choice has sparked a considerable debate on the web about the problems faced by western societies as a result of too much choice. In fact the idea is a very old one, I came cross it years ago but it is not mentioned very often by your every day Happiness literature which tends to talk more about internal changes that people can make to the way they think rather than factors from their external environment.
You can sum up the material prior to this article as follows:
- The intent of advertising is to make us dissatisfied with what we have
- If we meet people who have more than we have, or have different spending priorities or saving priorities then we tend to be dissatisfied with what we have
Click the link above to read the rest of the article at the original author’s site.
I started to comment on this…but found myself in a full-tilt philosophical rant, instead. So I deleted the comment and posted most of it in my own journal.
Link here