Being too picky comes as a byproduct of having too many options at your disposal.
For the most part, these many options aren't fundamentally different in many metrics. Just little tweaks here and there, cosmetic changes and minor variations.
On the tail end, we have things like what food to eat or clothes to wear. And up the spectrum of that, we encounter more consequential decisions like career paths.
What I've notice is the department where people have one of the most optionality is in entertainment. Maybe dating comes close too, or on the flip side what to get educated on.
I'm very grateful for the wealth of information that the internet has ushered allowing me to "know" about a lot of things beyond my immediate experience.
Sometimes, I sift through information from a purely utility perspective, i.e is this useful to me, can I use it to improve aspects of my life right here and now?
The main conflict that arises from this pov is many pieces of information seemingly have elements of utility in them but they can't be executed on without first having the right circumstances present themselves.
Say learning about negotiation tactics when you're not currently in a negotiation or studying investment strategies when you don't have capital to invest.
So a mental bag of things to do when xyz happens is stored on the periphery of one's conscious mind. Visited through occasional reflection and never acted upon until the moment passes or is forgotten entirely, since our attention gets captured by newer, shinier information.
Navigating the Option Abyss
Wouldn't be more practical if the reverse happens, as in seeking out the information when the right circumstance present itself?
Maybe. I don't know. I think the main reason why entertainment has much optionality attached to it is people's preferences are highly subjective and constantly shifting.
Entertainment is a dynamic universe that plays on the emotional state of the moment via psychology of novelty and instant gratification.
This abundance of choice in entertainment might actually also be training us to be perpetually dissatisfied with our current options while we wait for the one perfect offering that can't be refused to materialize.
Becoming paralyzed by the wealth of alternatives before us means when faced with too many options, our decision-making capacity becomes overwhelmed. And this paralysis then creates a vacuum that something else inevitably fills.
A bit of a tangible example of this is social media trends that dictate what people think is what's popular.
The more I ponder about preferences from this angle, the easier it seems to understand that these platforms have engineered systems that exploit our choice paralysis by appearing to solve it.
Like being the two sides of the same trade, what feels like personalised options is actually choice architecture designed to keep us engaged while systematically eroding our ability to make autonomous decisions.
So we think we're being helped to choose, but we're actually being trained not to choose at all?
Learning to consciously limit our choices before the choice overload does it for us unconsciously could be a good remedy here.
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