Paradox of Choice

     I suffer from a crippling defect.  Given a range of too many good choices, I have a crisis.  Even for trivial things - in fact I think moreso for trivial things.  Let’s take the example of a restaurant menu.  I can sit and stare over a menu all day, and never be able to pick just one thing.

     Too many equally valued options is a tar pit for me.  Decisions are hard enough already.  The worst is a completely open, no list of choices item like my wife calling me and saying “what should I make for dinner?”  Well, damn.  How do I know what you have on hand in the pantry?  What is less effort, or more fun for her to make?  Do I really give a shit what it is, so long as it isn’t on the list of things I don’t like?  Do I know what all the options are?  I can’t really make a sound decision without being confident that I’m aware of the actual possibilities, can I?

     Wouldn’t life be so much easier if we just had 6 set dinners + 1 night out a week? Here’s my proposal:

  • Mon:  Salad, Soup, Sandwich.
  • Tue:  Asian night - stir fry, pad thai, mu-shu.
  • Wed:  Italian - pasta, eggplant parm, grilled veggies with sauce.
  • Thr:  Taco night
  • Fri:  Indian because I bought her a $50 cookbook for it.
  • Sat: Leftover rodeo

     Now, here’s the thing: This whole arrangement costs me no further mental effort.  There are no decisions to be made.  Dinner is on auto-pilot.  I would expect that Steve Jobs wears the same shirt, pants, and shoes every day because he has discovered something that works, requires zero thought, and he doesn’t get bored of it.  The idea is to put it on auto-pilot and forget about it.

     She can’t cope with it.  It’s boring. Boooooring. Oh so dreadfully so.  Whatever.  It’s not really about my dinner menu though.  It’s about the life of an un-decider who is crippled by the awesome task of picking one single option out of a field of equally good ones.

     If I was truly OCD, I would probably be a list-maker or a spread-sheeter.  I could imagine myself with note cards or post-its spread out on the table in front of me, trying to wring out some final drop of decision-juice from an impossible array of possibilities. Luckily, I’m also lazy.  When faced with the hysterical blindness of looking at too many options, I will quickly realize it’s a no-win game and just play eenie-meenie-miney-moe and get it over with.

    Hell, I have enough trouble just picking definitively what movie I’m going to watch for the Bad Movie Podcast every week.  You want to talk about a menu of awesome choices.  I have to choose from like 1,000 movies I’ve never seen but strongly suspect could be contenders.  It’s HARD.  Super hard some weeks when I’ve narrowed it down to a few aces.

     Eenie-meenie-miney-moe to the rescue.