I’ve quoted Barry Schwartz’s presentations before in my own workshops on the concept of choice, now NPR is picking up the scent of The Paradox of Choice. Is choice always a “good” thing? Read and watch more here.
The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.” — Barry Schwartz
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S contends that the ‘abundance’ of choice makes us more miserable. It seems to me that what ‘makes us more miserable’ is the myth and misunderstanding of freedom. Granted, western culture has a huge number of options in; materials, ‘values’, roles and occupations that one can choose but is that representative of freedom? . Even if the expression of freedom were manifest in selecting from these options misery often arises in the; angst of deciding which option, the frustration in not actually achieving the desired, sometimes impossible, option or the disappointment of the option being un-fulfilling. Though this is sad sadder still is the possibility that freedom so defined is not what freedom is. Is freedom actually getting and doing what ever you want when you want? Doing what you want when you want might be called accomplishment and the lack of the same failure and it might be nice to have the opportunity to try but, and it is a real ‘but’, there are limits, like time and space and gravity and one’s own ontology, to possibilities and those limits deflate the idea that freedom is to be understood as ‘what ever one wants whenever one wants’. Alternatively, one can consider the proposition that freedom is not a ‘getting’ but the being who one truly is as expressed in the phrase ‘the image of God’ initially described in the Genesis 1&2 account where people are described as; good, life-ful, communal, workers, caretakers, moral, responsible, communal, creative, and just themselves and not disappointing.