Are too many choices overwhelming?

That's a very interesting topic, Diane. For me, even a large menu at a restaurant can be too much. I went out for dinner with a friend last night to a Greek restaurant. The menu had Greek, Italian and German food - and lots of it. That really puts me off. It's the same thing with cars, clothes, shoes - whatever. So I rather go to a smaller store to buy stuff. Do I really want to choose from 50 different kinds of cereal. No way!

I bought my car because I liked the design. I will not sit there and compare all the technical details, prices down to the cent etc. I usually just decide 'out of my belly' as we say in German.

And you get to be unique, urs, because most people don't share your fondness for the design of an 85' Yugo.

I enjoy the availability of choices....

especially for those who just want to be like the Jones..easier to pick them out

<you know hunt down and take out the SUV drivers for one example>

Seriously though, it has given a greater diversity for individuality, and thats not so bad....if you can make up your mind I suppose.

I was born in '48 and my childhood was much like Diane's My mother made much of our clothing, we had a huge vegitable garden that produced much of our food (my mother was canning from June untlil September), we had soda twice a year on the 4th of July and our birthday, and this was Connecticut. I think a lot of the hystaria that we see today, culturally and politically is a product of anxiety resulting from the overwhelming number of choices people are now required to make, not simply in consumer items but in other areas of life. Many of the choices made are much more significant in terms of life experiences, and are made in a context of much less support from kin or close friends.

I've been wondering for some time whether the ungracious plentitude of choices today and the consequent Information Overload, contributes to Alzheimers.

Most of our choices these days end up being a whole new load of the same crap. When I have kids, the cost of whatever they ask for must reflect a certain level of quality that justifies it. I don't care if they hate me in the moment, after all, I am the adult with the wallet I think the best solution to the societal problem of 'too much choice' is to educate yourself about what is out there, and how much of it is a scam.

Here is another excerpt from Karen Olson:
Our choices seem especially fraught with anxiety now as the clothes, schools, jobs, food, homes, and cars we select are more than ever declarations of who we are. You are not just buying shoes or wine or gifts for the kids; with each decision you are constructing an identity for all the world to see and judge you by. This raises the pressure on making the right decision. You may feel increasingly frustrated by how little time you have to sort through all the options. You may continually question whether you've made the best decisions. Knowing what you really want can sometimes seem impossible.
Urs, I had to laugh when I read your response because that's often the way I react--I just want to make a decision without it being a life-changing project.

Slappy, your sardonic wit will get you into trouble one of these days. How do you know what kind of car Urs drives? How about you? Do you wear any brand names? Lots of gold jewelry?

Quinn, yes, the availability of choices is one of the major perks of our society; but what happens when it becomes inane, with so much trash to chose from that will never make any difference in our lives? Has it become so prevalent that good taste and common sense have become obsolete?

Aquiunk, your post goes right to the excerpt I just posted. I agree about the hysteria; it has become a major decision to pick a jacket or a pair of sneakers in order to "fit in."
Your comment about choices being made without close friends or kin was interesting. Do you think loneliness plays a part in the hysteria of choice?

Noddy, do you have friends who are truly worried that they may have Alzheimers? I do and I have worried about it myself, as I tend to forget so easily that it can be worrisone. I've read that one of the reasons for the increased forgetfulness is due to, in part, the sensory overload we all operate under from all the choices and information overload in our lives. It isn't, according to a couple of articles I've read, Alzheimers, but an overly complicated lifestyle. (What was the question)?

Cheers, cavfancier! You will make a wonderful dad. That is exactly what you have to do in order to educate your children in analysing choices objectively. It works! I know from experience.

When my older son was in second grade, one of the classes had to have a meeting with the parents because some of the little girls were ostracizing the other little girls if they didn't own designer jeans! I had already been talking to my sons about what they saw on commercials and showing them the poor quality of the actual toy, but that meeting made me realize that this had become a sickness; it was no longer simply spoiled kids with too much worthless 'stuff.'

I wonder how much of this goes back to our parents (and/or grandparents)?

I know with my parents and grandparents, any time anyone bought anything the first things that came up were "Oh, back during the depression.." or "Back during WWII.." followed by a story about how they didn't have choices in what to buy. They grabbed what was there or what they could afford.

The fallback reason for every all of their decisions was to give us (my siblings and I) choices or options in our futures to have the things they didn't have. I'd guess a lot of other people in teh baby-boom generation heard the same things too.

Did we create all of these choices as a result?

Sometimes there are just to many choices to select from. I've gone shopping for things a few times and just plain given up in confusion.

Since 99% of everything is crap (to paraphrase and do a quick numerical revision of Bierce's assessment), there's really not a whole lot left to choose from.

But I've never known a life without abundant "choices;" with the exception of my early childhood, before my semi-self-sufficient and televisionless hippie parents discovered the joys of consumerism, I've never known a life without it. Can't say that it freaks me out, particularly. And I enjoy having fresh fruit and vegetables year 'round.

Fresh fruit and vegetables year round is great, provided they are seasonal and locally grown. Fresh fruit roll ups and what not are an abomination...

So don't eat 'em. There, one choice eliminated already!

There is an anthropologist, Grant McCraken, at McGill University who has published extensively on this issue. He has two books "Plentitude" and "Transformations" that address the core of Diane's question. He has published them on line as well as in paper and they can be found at:

http://www.cultureby.com/

These are full length books that were written for a professional audience so they may be a bit obscure for none anthropologist but IMHO they are well worth reading. For one you need Microsoft Reader for the other Adobe Reader, both of which are downloadable.

Heh heh, patiodog, I agree wholeheartedly! McGill eh...my alma mater...will check out the articles. I don't think he was my anthropology prof...

I have no idea how that reply was posted three times.

I agree with pdog about the fruits and vegies. I love getting avocados and apples year-round.

But, I also think that the masses of options we have in america is unique. And we have high numbers of depressed, anorexic, anxious, traumatized citizens (,etc), not to mention our unusually high violent crime rate.

I remember learning about how, since the industrial revolution, life continues to get easier. We have gadgets for eveything, people to clean our own **** up. We even have people to raise our own kids. Yet we have an almost unlimited number of options for clothing, cleaning supplies and toenail polish. Back to basics sounds betterer and betterer.....


Interesting topic, Diane.

I started a topic on "The Manor House", a show on PBS that is super cool. Watching that for just the first two hours brought so many of these questions into focus. The "upstairs" and "downstairs" people alike commented on how it was nice in some ways to go back to a "simpler time". But the people who really got off on it were the Lord and Lady of the manor -- the scullery maids didn't like it so much, nor did the hall boy, the footmen, the kitchen maid, the unmarried sister of the Lady, etc., etc. And these were just volunteers for 3 months, who knew they were going to get their 15 minutes of fame out of it and go back to their regular lives.

I certainly think this is interesting to discuss, but am somewhat skeptical of where it leads. We don't really want to go back in time, do we? To deal with polio and smallpox instead of anorexia and learning disabilities? I think it's silly that we have 10,000 different kinds of soap, too, but I personally am happy to have the choice to decide which of those kinds I like best, and then boringly buy it over and over.

No! I don't want to go back in time, I don't want to give up medicine and such. I do think I'd like to have a garden patch (if only I had a spot here), use low-tox cleaners, eat whole foods, limit my TV watching..... of course you'd never get me to give up my computer and the internet.

Wow. Interesting replies and perspectives.

Acquiunk, McCraken's book is fascinating. I can't possibly read all of it now, but I copied a couple of paragraphs that seem to pertain to this issue:

In this universe, the new plenitude is a rude, unwelcome, and increasingly frequent guest. When, as Polhemus puts it, "difference, rather than consensus, [becomes] the order of the day," uneasy lies the crown.[224] It is harder to spot the pretenders, the upstarts, those who would conspire and assemble against the reigning couturier. The prince of fashion once had the advantage of perspective. From the commanding heights of his position at the top of the hierarchy, he (until Chanel, usually a "he") could spot the enemy a long way off. Now competitors can come from within, riding a new aesthetic or ethos into fashion. (Yves St. Laurent, meet Claude Montana.) Monarchs also once had the advantage of setting the rules of engagement and controlling the field of battle. This too is more difficult. (Claude Montana, meet FashionTelevision). Historians and fashion designers do have something in common. Both find the most fundamental rules of discourse under review.
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Some intellectuals complain of a "jumbling" so intense it is no longer possible to classify the world around them. It is too various. It teems so. One of the leading lights of anthropology says with a certain giddy unease, "something is happening to the way we think about the way we think." What he means is, "we are less and less sure how to think at all." For the world, in his words, has become "fluid, plural, uncentered, and ineradicably untidy."[233]
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The first paragraph, to me, gives some of the advantages of abundant choice; the 'kings' of society have been unseated. We commoners are no longer so easily identified. There is much more variety, not only in material things, but in our ability to decide in which group we prefer to belong. It is no longer Dior or Lincoln, but a multinational menu of identities.

The second quoted paragraph expresses the lament of all our choices. How do we decide? How can we even think when there is so much choice that it is impossible to know enough to make an intelligent decision? By having so much, have we eliminated our usual list of priorities and allowed ourselves to depend on what the most effective commercial tells us?

We could really get far afield by asking what our demand and desire for accessibility to all season fruits and veggies does to agricultural practices? Certain pesticides are illegal in the States, but are sold to poor countries. Those countries sell us their fruits and veggies. We ingest the pesticides anyway and the poor countries are polluting their farm land and rivers with nasty, long-lasting poisons and we are risking our health because of our appetites. How many of you wash fruits and veggies very carefully? You should, you know.

It is all these ramifications that can drive us crazy as we try to decide what to get--what we want and what we need. Have any of you ever stopped yourselves from making a purchase when you realized that you had no use for the product? Does too much choice also contribute to impulse buying?

It is getting late for me and all these questions are making me dizzy. I'm off to lighter threads.

Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. See you tomorrow.

Diane, you have the core of it. When you finish Plentitude read Transformations, here he discusses what we do with plentitude.