paradoxofchoice book cover by Barry Schwartz
The main thesis in the book is that we have too many choices in our modern, affluent societies. So right off the bat we are talking about the middle-classes of the developed countries, not all of humanity. Schwartz contends that we have too many choices, and that this overabundance of choice, contrary to all those free market nostrums about the freedom to choose, the more choices the more competition the better for the consumer, that there is a downside – a serious price, both individually and collectively — to the kind of society that we have created.
Schwartz develops a theory about two different types of behavior: maximizing and satisficing. The former is the person that is obsessed about making the right choice. They spend loads of time researching the various pros and cons, opportunity costs involved in every decision. Their more neurotic tendencies mean that before the decision is made, they will anticipate regret and afterwards, will, even if their choice wasn’t too bad and worked out for them, will still harbor some regrets – for they know too well all the things that they missed out on.
In contrast, the satisficer constrains the amount of informational input that goes into every decision: they are not going to compare prices from 100 stores and read 20 consumer reports or reviews…they have decided what the minimum standards are for what they need, and most anything that falls into that range is good enough. After making their decision, they do the psychological work of justifying their decisions, meaning that they convince themselves that this was a good decision.
Schwartz’s contention is that everyone falls somewhere in the spectrum between the maximizer and the satisficer, or more precisely, are one or the other depending on the type of decision and the area of our lives.
I have found that when it comes to things like cheap laptops, I am a satisficer: I tell myself my budget limit, and as long as I can get a cheap but functional PC that fits that bill, it doesn’t matter what features it has, or what brand it is. I don’t agonize forever about the specs, and whether or not it will be the best choice for the various tasks that I will use the computer for. I don’t care if it looks good.
However, there are many things in which I am a maximizer, and, if Schwartz is correct, maximizing carries within it an inherent danger. The way he puts it, there is no way to distinguish cause and effect between maximizing the behavior and the psychological/emotional substrate in which exists. That is, I don’t know if I was already neurotic to begin with and maximizing made it worse or whether or not the society in which we exist — where the glut of choices and the endless array of maximizing enablers (I’m talking about you, Pricegrabber.com and Ebay.com)— creates this mentality. Schwartz doesn’t have the answer to this, and he suspects that it’s a two-way street, and I concur, adding only that it differs so much for each individual. The etiology, if you can call it that, is very individual and does not admit of easy generalization.
There are three areas of life in which I was or still am a hopeless maximizer, and I can safely say that for the most part, this has been, as Schwartz says, a prescription for misery.
1. Deciding a major in University
I switched from philosophy to sociology, then to applied math, and then almost to film, and then to pure mathematics. I was always looking for the right fit. I had considered a bunch of different majors, including physics and Russian literature. I loved philosophy but started hating the other students, who I didn’t think were on my level, intellectually. They seemed like poseurs, people who thought they were deep just by hanging out in philosophy classes. None of them seemed to have any real intellectual firepower; they were fairly ignorant when it came to the other realms of knowledge. I remember one philosophy student whose knowledge of physics was little more than that planetary, Bohr model of the atom. Of course, the real philosophers, the professionals – know much more, many of those who are philosophers of physics know as much physics as your average PhD in physics. But I hated the students. Same with sociology. It was too easy, the other students were a bore.
I wish I had done physics, and I would have if I weren’t so lousy at experiments and doing those nitty gritty problems. I suppose I was always more of a math person anyway, but in any case I finally chose math because you didn’t really have to talk much, and no one else liked to talk either. It was all nerds, and so no one spouted anything stupid. You just couldn’t, I mean if some mathematical assertion you make is off base, people will know sooner or later. There was nothing being debated that couldn’t be settled, objectively and definitively, with a few lines of calculation or reference to some book.
It took me a long time, and it was a tortuous route. I had to have the perfect mix — something intellectually challenging, not full of bullshit, not full of stupid classmates, and perhaps even employable after college.
2. Careers.
Torn between doing something that pays and something artistic. In the realm of the arts: should I be a writer, a journalist, a filmmaker, a photographer, or a musician? Which one would pay the best, and be the most stable? Which one has a better chance of making it in Shanghai? What about New York? Or should I just go back to doing a PhD in something mildly scientific and mathematical, like public health or bioinformatics? Schwartz mentions the issue of non-reversibility, which is to say, the more you treat something as reversible, the less committed you are, psychologically, to making it work, to making it something you enjoy. There is a refund policy on everything, there is an exit strategy and escape clause in the back of your mind, which means that you give yourself the license to think about all those other options – precisely because they still ARE options.
Hence, I keep thinking about going back to math-related fields, even though my age and lack of training have really made the proposition a fairly impractical thing.
There’s another point Schwartz makes that is worth mentioning here: expectations and control. If the learned helplessness theory of depression has any merit, than depression is caused by a lack of control, and obviously I don’t mean just once, but when it happens enough that people, for whatever reason, begin to think that this is an inherent feature in their lives. They give cosmic explanations for their failures, meaning they blame society or the Fates or the short-sightedness of other people (these people can’t understand or help or appreciate me) for whatever happens to them. And they tend to also locate the faults in themselves, in some kind of unchanging, immutable flaw that they can never change. Optimistic people tend to just see these things as one-time unfortunate circumstances (that HR person was in a bad mood, which is why I didn’t get hired).
I think that I had too high expectations of myself. My parents, my teachers and my peers always thought I was smart, that I had something going for me. I was placed in the gifted and talented classes. I excelled at a range of subjects. I was (am) well-read, knowledgeable. I can write better than most people. I can compose songs on guitar. I can do calculus in my head (well not anymore). I know what Hilbert spaces are, and I know what Augustine’s life in Carthage was like. I They said I was a Renaissance man, some say I’m a polymath. It doesn’t matter. I felt like I was groomed for success, and right now, I don’t feel successful. I feel underused, and under-appreciated. I most definitely feel underpaid. I feel like I am wasting my talent. Talent for what, I don’t know. I feel like I spend most of my time trying to find some skill I can sell for a pittance, whether its editing or copywriting. Most of the time I have to hide who I am and what I am. I cannot be too intellectual. I cannot use too many big, polysyllabic and obscure words. I cannot fully celebrate the pleasures that the life of the mind affords — at least not with others. I never thought that I would be the President of the US, but I did think that I would amount to more than this. I thought I would have a PhD and some kind of respectable job and status in life. And I thought I could control it, because I always had. I studied hard and worked hard and got A’s. I impressed teachers. I was in the driver’s seat.
I don’t think that way anymore. Nowadays, I seem to have less initiative. I don’t really believe that anything will come out of my life. I think that if I worked harder and tried harder and marketed myself or whored myself out a bit more things would go more smoothly. But I don’t think that I will be graced with great success, artistically or financially. I think I am doomed to be something or someone middling. One day, perhaps in a few years or decades, I will exclaim, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: I coulda been a contender! Don’t get me wrong, I think I will be ok in the long run. I won’t starve. But I won’t be the wildly successful person I thought I would be. Of course I still think that time is on my side. I’m 31, there is hope yet. But I have to find the right thing, and I have to put it all into that one thing. And there I go, back into that labyrinth, back into that endless arbitraging of skills and intellectual assets, trying to find the loophole that will allow me to come out ahead, in anything, anything at all. To be good at something and therefore remembered is all that matters.
Now I am too worn out, mentally, to write about romantic relationships, another area where I do a neurotically unhealthy amount of maximizing. But I will save that for some other time. My McDonald’s breakfast just arrived, and with it (or anything with cheese on it), a slight respite.
