3. The Monologue

More Stuff

We live in times that demand of us to make choices constantly. From the moment we get out of bed to the moment we go to sleep we are confronted with an ocean of it and we are expected to swim or we drown in its variety. What we wear, what we eat, where we go and by which means, every article that we want to buy has to be chosen from hundreds, thousands, even millions of varieties whose difference in price, taste, utilities may be huge or small, almost indistinctive from each other.

The dogma is: Choice is good, choice is necessary and fundamental to the human mind.

But why is it that more and more people seem confused and overburdened with the act of choosing recently? If this is something so natural to us, why has it become so difficult? Is there something like too much freedom of choice? Do we have to be protected from ourselves?

Sheena Iyengar from the Boston Business School summarizes the difference in the Japanese culture in a talk at TED. The Japanese see it as a duty to protect those who don’t know any better.”

Her studies have shown that confronted with too many options, people commonly tend to make bad choices.

As editor one has to make constant decisions about how to tell a story. But recently the focus has changed. We have to choose now from a seemingly infinite array of software, applications, effects, patches, plugins, upgrades, codecs and settings to make a product. Everything is possible but what is best?

If we had unlimited amounts of time, we could spend it freely on making the best decisions, but most of us live in a constant rush, deadlines, time pressure and so we have to make bad, ill-informed or even random decisions all the time. We are reaching the limit of the capabilities of the human mind, how many decisions can you make per minute?

Nobody can say what will be in 5 years from now, but if the market doesn’t react to this trend of increasing speed and pressure to make choices in every part of our life, it will surely drive everybody crazy.

The answer can’t be to give us more variety of stuff we don’t need. We have to protect ourselves from the overflow. A phone with thousands of functions only for the sake of it is not good enough anymore, because it is overburdening and forcing us to spend time on it.

As the Canadian Journalist Carl Honore puts it in another TED talk: “Don’t overload yourself” and “Less is often more.”