I write occasionally. Topics can be anything under the sun, are completely random, and are based on what interests me on a particular day.
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I write occasionally. Topics can be anything under the sun, are completely random, and are based on what interests me on a particular day.
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Everything in life has advantages and disadvantages. EVERYTHING. There is absolutely nothing that comes without its problems, even if they are hidden at first. This is one of the tenets with which I live my life, and helps me from being illusioned when something seems too good to be true. This kind of thinking often leaves me hanging with analysis paralysis though when it comes to choosing things, especially the lesser important ones, and sometimes has me cursing at the vast number of choices available to us in this day and age.
Barry Schwartz talks more about this analysis paralysis in his book, “The Paradox of Choice”, and in a TED talk he gave in 2005.
According to him, having more choices ends up with us objectively doing better, but feeling worse at heart. I won’t go too deep into this, but basically he blames this on 4 key factors:
Regret
Opportunity Cost
Once we have gone with a specific choice; in our heads, we start imagining how life would be if we had gone with the alternative choice, and then self induce ourselves into thinking that life with the alternative would have been better.
Escalation of Expectations
Due to there being more choices, and our choice being the winner among all of them, we automatically have higher expectations out of it.
Self Blame
Since there are so many choices; if it goes wrong, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
And even though it’s been 17 years, I think what he talks about is highly relevant today, if not more. With the increase in the population, the number of consumers has increased, encouraging an increase in the number of people selling things. For any product that comes out in the market, the huge number of consumers available means there’ll at least be some takers. As a result, the sheer number of choices available for every single thing has only increased. Incidentally, FOMO as a concept has also become very popular, with most marketing campaigns today using the emotion of fear to induce customers into buying their products. Coincidence? I think not!
Additionally there’s one other aspect to think about. Cumulatively, choice abundance is leading to a massive headache in terms of the number of decisions that we are having to make on a daily basis. From the moment we get up; be it which clothes to wear, what to eat for breakfast, which Spotify playlist to listen to on the way to work, which Swiggy restaurant to order from for dinner, and so on and so forth. Which means, if you believe in the theory of decision fatigue and limited willpower, that at some point after making a certain number of decisions per day, you are bound to have had enough. And of course naturally for the average person, around 80-90% of those "well made decisions" are going to be mundane, relatively inconsequential ones. In the face of this, examples of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs wearing the same outfit every day, or Tim Ferriss eating the same meal for breakfast every day, do not seem as eccentric as they usually would.
Keeping all this in context, I believe that we’re nearing the ceiling for just the sheer amount of choices available to us before our minds go batshit crazy. This means that the number of people who want their daily life choices simplified are going to increase.
It doesn’t mean that we have to go as extreme as Zuckerberg or Ferris. Rather, I think it can translate to an increase in the demand for curation, wherein rather than outright creating new products, new companies can provide services curating existing products to fit each customer's needs, and then serving them to the customer's doorstep. This would be most relevant in the case of digital content, but could also work in the fields of outfits, meals, books, furniture and home décor, electronic devices, and much more. Stitch Fix does this really well with clothes, wherein all customers have to do is take an online quiz, and then they do the rest. I think there would be potential in starting similar services within other industries.
After all, new products arise when a large number of people have the same problem, and the willingness to pay (WTP) to solve that problem is quite large. Having too many choices can become such a problem for a large number of people, and they are going to want that problem eased for them in many daily decisions, especially if there's an element of personalization involved. This is what I think.
Or of course, I could be completely wrong, and the number of people who think that too many choices are negatively impacting them could be too small. What do you think?
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Everything in life has advantages and disadvantages. EVERYTHING. There is absolutely nothing that comes without its problems, even if they are hidden at first. This is one of the tenets with which I live my life, and helps me from being illusioned when something seems too good to be true. This kind of thinking often leaves me hanging with analysis paralysis though when it comes to choosing things, especially the lesser important ones, and sometimes has me cursing at the vast number of choices available to us in this day and age.
Barry Schwartz talks more about this analysis paralysis in his book, “The Paradox of Choice”, and in a TED talk he gave in 2005.
According to him, having more choices ends up with us objectively doing better, but feeling worse at heart. I won’t go too deep into this, but basically he blames this on 4 key factors:
Regret
Opportunity Cost
Once we have gone with a specific choice; in our heads, we start imagining how life would be if we had gone with the alternative choice, and then self induce ourselves into thinking that life with the alternative would have been better.
Escalation of Expectations
Due to there being more choices, and our choice being the winner among all of them, we automatically have higher expectations out of it.
Self Blame
Since there are so many choices; if it goes wrong, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
And even though it’s been 17 years, I think what he talks about is highly relevant today, if not more. With the increase in the population, the number of consumers has increased, encouraging an increase in the number of people selling things. For any product that comes out in the market, the huge number of consumers available means there’ll at least be some takers. As a result, the sheer number of choices available for every single thing has only increased. Incidentally, FOMO as a concept has also become very popular, with most marketing campaigns today using the emotion of fear to induce customers into buying their products. Coincidence? I think not!
Additionally there’s one other aspect to think about. Cumulatively, choice abundance is leading to a massive headache in terms of the number of decisions that we are having to make on a daily basis. From the moment we get up; be it which clothes to wear, what to eat for breakfast, which Spotify playlist to listen to on the way to work, which Swiggy restaurant to order from for dinner, and so on and so forth. Which means, if you believe in the theory of decision fatigue and limited willpower, that at some point after making a certain number of decisions per day, you are bound to have had enough. And of course naturally for the average person, around 80-90% of those "well made decisions" are going to be mundane, relatively inconsequential ones. In the face of this, examples of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs wearing the same outfit every day, or Tim Ferriss eating the same meal for breakfast every day, do not seem as eccentric as they usually would.
Keeping all this in context, I believe that we’re nearing the ceiling for just the sheer amount of choices available to us before our minds go batshit crazy. This means that the number of people who want their daily life choices simplified are going to increase.
It doesn’t mean that we have to go as extreme as Zuckerberg or Ferris. Rather, I think it can translate to an increase in the demand for curation, wherein rather than outright creating new products, new companies can provide services curating existing products to fit each customer's needs, and then serving them to the customer's doorstep. This would be most relevant in the case of digital content, but could also work in the fields of outfits, meals, books, furniture and home décor, electronic devices, and much more. Stitch Fix does this really well with clothes, wherein all customers have to do is take an online quiz, and then they do the rest. I think there would be potential in starting similar services within other industries.
After all, new products arise when a large number of people have the same problem, and the willingness to pay (WTP) to solve that problem is quite large. Having too many choices can become such a problem for a large number of people, and they are going to want that problem eased for them in many daily decisions, especially if there's an element of personalization involved. This is what I think.
Or of course, I could be completely wrong, and the number of people who think that too many choices are negatively impacting them could be too small. What do you think?
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