Spoilt for choice

It's a perfect rainy stay-in Sunday and I'm surrounded by two of my favourite types of chips; salt/vinegar and banana chips. I've overslept, caught up with family/ friends and procrastinated on cleaning the house and practicing my 1st prepared speech for Tuesday. So that left me with doing a blog post!

There's no denying that having the freedom of choice when it comes to decisions like choice of studies, choice of partners, choice of residence, choice of career, choice of meals, etc, is a privilege.

But there's a downside.

I've always been been  frustrated by the concept of going shopping, especially when it came to things like dresses, shoes and bags. I suspect it is because I get mentally drained too quickly. Recently though I even noticed how mentally frustrating shopping for groceries and electronics are (things which I usually enjoy doing). The only conclusion I came to was that there was an ever-increasingly growing number of choices available for one simple requirement like a box of tissues, toothpaste, a pen or laundry detergent. And in today's competitive markets, making a choice isn't as easy as picking a pink one over an obviously blue one, rather it is like picking one blue shade out of 50 other similar shades of blue.

Reading a label for comparison is not always foolproof since human minds can be easily be manipulated with clever marketing and consumer psychology experts. For someone who obsesses over details, it is mentally tiring to analyse the slightly varying qualities of several brand names, it is time consuming and sometimes we are not even satisfied with our choice of purchase by the time we get home (Ahh I should have picked the one which scored 9.77 instead of the one which scored 9.80 out of a 10 on my personal scale!). Life was indeed simpler when there was just a couple of brands to choose from and we may have even been more satisfied with the purchase since we knew of no other options.

It's not just me, looks like a lot of people were driven to frustration by the same problem so they went on to blog, write articles, publish books and give talks about it!
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/how-should-we-make-hard-decisions/