On Choice
Like many immigrants coming to the USA, the first thing that struck me upon coming to this country was the sudden explosion of choice. Coming from India which was then a third world nation with limited choice, I was often confused what to do. A simple thing such as a bathroom faucet became confusing to use, due to the wide variety of shapes, sizes and operational characteristics. Going to the store was no different and often more confusing. Proliferation of choices in the junk food aisle made it hard for me to decide which ones to pick, especially because I was living on a grad students budget.
This confusion became more pronounced as time went by. I still vividly remember this incident from the early 1990’s. On one of my visits to Boston I paid a visit to a friend. My friend was doing his PhD in economics and probably used me as an experiment. We had dinner and he asked me if I would like ice cream. I said yes not realizing what that meant. I thought he would just give me a bowl of ice cream and a spoon and that would be the end of it.
But instead he reels out of a list of choices from which he asked me to pick — “Do you want butter scotch or strawberry or chocolate and a few more?”( Ya! He was an ice cream lover and had the whole store at his house). Then he asks me if I want one scoop or two scoops. Luckily he didn’t have cones, if not he might have asked do I want a cone or a cup and if I had said cone he would have asked if I wanted a plain cone or a waffle cone. Just when I thought I was done, he asks me what toppings I would like and reels out a list of choices. By then I am starting to get annoyed. He is trying to be a great host offering me choice but I am getting confused and not enjoying having to make all these choices as all I wanted was some ice cream. Being an ice cream lover I have never not liked ice cream, but that day I wished I had said no, and not had to deal with the abundance of choice.
Fast forward a couple of years and I am out house hunting with my wife. Our realtor Chris is eager to show us homes and is driving us around on a cold and blustery day in Chicago. He takes us from one home to the other eagerly explaining the features. If you haven’t experienced a Chicago winter it would be hard to explain especially because we were carrying a toddler with us. It reminds of me that great “Karate Kid” dialogue — Jacket on, Jacket off. Then off course we had to strap our son into the car seat and take him off.
The simple facts are easy — size of the lot, square footage of the home the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. But then it gets complicated. Each house has its own elevation. The front and back yards all look different. Some homes have basements that are either finished or unfinished and some are fully excavated or have crawl spaces. The flooring is different in every home from ceramic tiles to different colors of wood to vinyl. Then you enter the kitchen which comes in all sizes and shapes with granite kitchen tops and different types of shelving. By the third home I am totally lost whilst is happily engaged in conversation. For someone who lived in a claustrophobic two bedroom apartment this sudden explosion of choice was mind boggling. We looked at forty homes in bitterly cold weather and you can guess who made the choice of the home we chose to buy. The only thing I enjoyed was being driven around in a 5-series Mercedes. We sure did enjoy our home and lived seven years in it, but I sure didn’t enjoy the process of buying a home. My whole body quivers when I hear of a friend who built their home to spec. They chose to go through the exercise of making a choice for everything.
Recently a friend sent me a link to a Barry Schwartz discourse on “The paradox of choice” that explores this topic in detail. Barry concludes that too much choice in the developed economies is actually leading to dissatisfaction, much like what I experienced on many an occasion. So is choice good or bad. Should we or should we not have choice? When we go to a doc, do we want to to be given a choice on whether to get an X-ray or a Cat Scan or and MRI or do we want our doc to decide for us. When we go to vote do we want to choose between two candidates or be presented with a list of ten. It seems like choice is good in things that we really care about. I believe that it’s probably not that important for things we don’t care much about. So when Amazon or Netflix can pick a movie for us that we will like versus us having to go through a choice of a million it makes our life easier. The next time you have to make a choice maybe you should ask yourself the question whether you want to choose or be told what to do!
