One of my biggest frustrations is trying to buy just about anything today.Over the last twenty years or so the number of choices available has just absolutely exploded.  The internet has made shopping simultaneously infinitely easier and infinitely more complex.

Years ago, before the internet and the availability of on-line shopping, when you needed something you went to your local retailer and looked at the stock on hand. Generally, they stocked only a few models of any given product and you made your decision from that selection. If your needs were more specific, the retailer might drag out the catalog and help you locate the product that more closely met your needs.

Then, on-line shopping arrived on the scene.

Suddenly, rather than having the few models available through your local retailer, you had access to literally thousands of models, from  different manufacturers, through a wide range of vendors and with literally hundreds of available options. The decisions you have to make suddenly became infinitely more difficult. How do you choose among all the models?

The explosion of choice has created an interesting paradox: we equate the availability of choice with increased freedom and autonomy. We believe that given more choices, we can make the best choices – those that will bring us the greatest happiness and more fully meet our needs. Yet, with increasing availability of choice, comes increasing difficulty in making a decision.

Have you ever been in this situation? I wanted to buy a new laptop computer, so I hopped online to my favorite on-line vendor and began to peruse the inventory. There were dozens and dozens of choices. And, within those choices were still more choices – did I want 2GB of memory, or 4? Did I want this graphics card or that one? Athlon, Celeron, Core 2 Duo,Pentium, or Turion CPU? 500GB storage or 1TB? 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM hard drive? And the choices go on.

Are these really even choices? How many of us have the technical knowledge to even understand the meaning of the choices available? Can we make a rational decision with all these choices available?

Why can’t we just have only two or three choices, with a similar number of options and let it go at that? Truthfully, now, are there enough differences between all those options to really impact us? Will a Core 2 Duo, or Pentium Quad Core really make us any more productive?

Apple Computers kind of “gets it”. How many choices of iPhone and iPhone calling plans are there? Need a laptop? Go to Apple’s website. There are three basic models, each having only two or three pre-configured models, and each of those having only two or three options, usually only the amount of memory and the hard drive size.

How about a desktop? Again, three choices: mac-mini, iMac and the Mac Pro and again, only two or three pre-configured choices and three or four options for each of them.

Now pop over to Dell. I counted 15 different laptop models. Each of them has two to four pre-configured models each of which can have nine different options to change with two to four choices to make for each option. In short, the just using the 15 models, three preconfigurations each with nine options and three choices under each option, there are over 1215 different laptops available.

From Apple? 27 different laptops. Which decision is going to be easier to make?

So, what does this have to do with simplifying your life?

I’ll refer you to my previous post (What Does the Simple Life Mean to You?) where I point out that for me, the simple life is a life less hectic. Having to decide between 1215 different laptop models is a long way from less hectic.

Having to sort through all that information leads to increased stress – the opposite of what I perceive as a happy, simple life.

Barry Schwartz (I refer to him in this article) points out that as our choices increase we develop a kind of decision paralysis: we have so many choices that our minds are overwhelmed and as a result we have increasing difficulty making decisions.

He also posits that as our choices increase, our our overall happiness decreases as we increasingly regret or second-guess the choices we’ve made.

Fewer choices, therefore, lead to a happier life and that seems  counter to what we’ve been taught to believe.

In reading many of the websites and books I’ve run across, reducing your choices, by getting rid of the “stuff” in our life that we don’t really need, increases our happiness. And, I believe it does. After all, it just makes sense to me that with fewer choices available, I’m more likely to be happy with the decision I make.

Thanks for reading. What are your thoughts?