The tyranny of too much choice
Decision fatigue and the prison of option overload
Hello! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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250 dishes - what’s your order?
Last week I spent a few days in New Jersey in the USA for a family wedding. One morning a group of us decided to head to the local mall to a branch of The Cheesecake Factory for brunch.
For those uninitiated with this American institution, whilst The Cheesecake Factory will happily sell you a fat slab of cheesecake (choose from 40 flavours topped with two peaks of squirty cream), contrary to what the name suggests, it is neither a factory nor does it solely churn out cake. Most disappointingly of all, it has no relation to Charlie’s chocolate factory.
The Cheesecake Factory is in fact a fully fledged restaurant chain with 219 branches and my first experience of it was a ride.
I was handed a tome from which to make my dining decision, the menu divided into 21 sections including: small plates and snacks, appetizers, salads, pizzas, lunch, glamburgers, sandwiches, pasta, specialities, fish and seafood, steaks, skinnylicious, eggs and omelettes, weekend brunch, kids menu, desserts, beverages, side dishes and happy hour.
Our server introduced herself and without a smile, informed us we were able to ‘choose from more than 250 dishes made fresh from scratch every day’; my body quietly attempted to concertina itself into the deep-button folds of the modular, faux leather banquette.
I had previously heard of a Zen Buddhist parable describing Hell as a long dining table groaning under the weight of delicious noodle dishes with each diner having only meter-long chopsticks with which to eat1, rendering the task impossible and the spirits destined to exist in a state of perpetual starvation for the rest of eternity.2
The Zen Buddhists are wrong.
Hell is 1) a menu with 250 choices 2) in a restaurant masquerading as a cheesecake factory where 3) only 16% of the entries are even cake related.
What horror was this..?
My hands began to turn the laminated pages of this literary work rivalling the length of some holy scriptures, eyes darting over the words – so many words – without reading any of them. Then I went back to the start and did the same thing again. And then a third time.
Lost in a sea of included in your meal is a selection of any four of the following, I turned to my fellow diners for direction. But we were all floundering in the same boat taking on water from the deluge of options, each experiencing some level of decision paralysis from the enormity of choice on offer.
I would need at least 30 minutes to read through the thing. She came back to us with a notepad and pen poised in under five.
I’ll keep it simple with eggs, I thought.
“Would you like them with potatoes or tomatoes?”
“Oh, OK. Tomatoes please.”
“With toast, bagel or an English muffin?”
“Anything is fine.”
“You need to choose one of them,” she said wearily without looking up from the notepad.
“OK, toast?”
“Would you like that wholemeal or white?”
“I don’t mind.”
There was a pause. The server looked up at me this time.
“You need to…”
“Brown, I’ll have brown.”
Eyes back down, “By brown do you mean wholemeal?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like a drink with that?”
“A coffee with milk please.”
“Would you like a freshly brewed coffee, a caffe latte or a cappuccino.”
“Just a coffee with milk? I guess freshly brewed?
“Aren’t they all freshly brewed?” I muttered under my breath but I think she heard me. Her eyes lifted again, her face an expression of are we really going to do this.
“Sorry, there are just a lot of options. We Brits are not used to this ahahaaa.”
Repeat variations of the above dialogue for 10 people and 3 hours and 47 minutes later, our orders were placed.
Our daily choices
No shade cast on The Cheesecake Factory or the land of the free - I enjoyed my eggs. But the experience felt like a fitting allegory for today’s society and the perpetual onslaught of decisions and choices we are expected to make at every waking moment. Sleep is one of the few remaining blissfully choice-free bastions.
How many choices do you think you’ve made so far today? I don’t just mean big life choices like what job to apply for, where to live or what Netflix series to stream next. But also the persistent and ubiquitous micro-decisions we are barely even aware we are making, all of the time.
Like whether you should open a window, cross the road, get the BOGOF, go for seconds, put on the dishwasher or carry all of those empty cups to the kitchen at once.
For example, this very moment you are deciding whether to keep reading this article to the end and perhaps also whether to become a paid subscriber (hot tip: I have it under good authority that YES to both is a great choice).
Some sources suggest the average person makes an eye-watering 35,000 remotely conscious decisions per day. Assuming most of us spend around seven hours asleep each night, that makes roughly 2000 decisions per hour or one decision every two seconds. The thought hurts my brain.
Research reveals that good decisions require ‘mental energy’ that becomes depleted by repeated decision-making (amongst other things) and impacts decision objectivity and quality.
In one study, prisoners who appeared before a judge early in the morning received parole about 70% of the time, whilst those who appeared before the same judge late in the day were paroled less than 10% of the time (Tierney, 2011).
My Dad was a driving instructor for several years and said a similar thing about the day you take your driving test. Do it in the morning and you are more likely to get a pass than if you drove in exactly the same way at the end of the day. For similar reasons, Mondays are better than Fridays.
According to research commissioned by Noom, 37% of those surveyed found the question of what to eat was the second most difficult daily decision to make. And as our levels of responsibility increase, so do the array of choices we are confronted with.
I have a friend who gets two of their three meals a day delivered to them, readymade. I initially thought this was pure and unabashed privilege, I mean it is. But the more I thought about it, the more I got it.
They are time-poor new parents both with demanding full-time jobs and if it means being able to remove the question of what at least one of the adults is eating from the long list of draining decisions they already have to make that day, then if they can afford the price tag that comes with such convenience, all power to them.
Does more choice equal more freedom?
Do limitless options and a catalogue of choices from which to make every tiny decision improve our quality of life and sense of wellbeing? Is it something we even really want or need?
I came across an article in the Journal of Consumer Research:
‘…in non‐Western cultures and among working‐class Westerners, freedom and choice do not have the meaning or importance they do for the university‐educated people who have been the subjects of almost all research on this topic.
We cannot assume that choice, as understood by educated, affluent Westerners, is a universal aspiration. The meaning and significance of choice are cultural constructions.
Moreover, even when choice can foster freedom, empowerment, and independence, it is not an unalloyed good. Too much choice can produce a paralyzing uncertainty, depression, and selfishness.
In the United States, the path to well‐being may require that we strike a balance between the positive and negative consequences of proliferating choice in every domain of life.’3
I think this is a large part of the reason why I really, really don’t like shopping.
For me there is such a thing as too much choice and once the tipping point has been reached, freedom and autonomy can quickly flip on its head into a prison of option overload.
How restraints and restrictions can lead to more creativity
Some level of restriction and parameters within which to live and work can be a good thing and often leads to more creativity.
Let’s imagine you asked me to write an article about absolutely anything and gave me no further guidance as to what it should be about, how long it should be or who it was for.
Before deciding on a topic which I would inevitably change my mind about, I would probably stare at a blank Google document for approximately the same amount of time it would take for a load of washing to finish (2 hours 20 mins on the eco cycle).
But if you asked me to write an article with no more than 1500 words that recommended short exercises for the body that may help with nagging aches (and that I’ve been doing for years), improve physical and mental wellbeing and that was accessible to all ages, I would at least then know what direction I was moving in.
Next week’s post, by the way.
According to that Noom research, we spend on average three hours a day just deciding the following four things: what to eat, when to go to bed, what to wear and what to watch. If we were able to spend less of our time wading through this energy vacuum, we could create more space for creativity, calming the noise in our minds and doing what we love.
Living in a constant state of decision-making feels like surviving more than thriving.