The Paradox of Choice: Why More Options Make Us Less Happy

The one moment I will never forget is when my grandmother came up to me and asked me to help her buy a mobile phone. After we reached the stop, within no more than thirty seconds, she looked at me and said, Choose for me!" I laughed. Surely, with so many phone models on display, she would want to consider which one had the best features, prices, cameras, etc. But no, she just shook her head and said, “Back in my day, there was only one phone, the one in the house. No question as to which one is better.”

Many years down the line, I found myself in front of a shelf in a supermarket, trying to decide among eleven different brands of olive oil – extra virgin, cold-pressed, organic, rosemary-infused – from three different countries. I stood there for ten minutes holding my mobile phone, reading about olive oil reviews. I walked away without buying any of them, not because all of them are bad, but because there is always that sense that somewhere on the shelf, there is the ‘right’ one that I haven’t discovered yet. This phenomenon is named. As explained by psychologist Barry Schwartz, it is called the “paradox of choice,” and once you know about it, you can spot it everywhere.

The Promise That Fails To Come True.From an early age, we have been brainwashed into believing that choice is freedom. The more choices, the better control we can exercise over our lives. The freedom of choosing one’s profession, one’s partner, movies from Netflix, or 30 different types of coffee in the morning proves that an individual makes the best of his life by making the right choices.

Nevertheless, there comes a time when too much choice turns into a bad thing for us. We Cannot make up our minds, and instead of feeling glad about our choice, we keep wondering what we have missed. The studies of Schwartz, along with another famous experiment by Sheena Iyengar about offering jams to buyers, revealed an interesting truth. People were less likely to buy jams when 24 varieties were offered than when 6 were.

Remember that time when you were on a streaming service for twenty minutes, scrolling through one program after another until you finally gave up and just decided to watch something you had already seen? That was choice fatigue.

Why Our Brains Betray Us Here

Our Minds weren't built for infinite menus. For most of human history, choice was simple because scarcity made it simple. You ate what was in season; you wore what your family made. The person you ended up marrying was from the same village, not through an application with two million choices. The brain is programmed for decision-making with shortcuts, not by sitting down and figuring out the marginal utilities of one hundred similar options.

Two things happen when there is too much choice. First, the cognitive load of comparing everything exhausts us before we even decide. Second, and much more painfully, we begin to think about the roads we did not take. It is known in psychology as "counterfactual thinking", and it is the silent robber of satisfaction. While having only two sweaters to choose from, you were satisfied with what you chose. With thirty sweaters to choose from, you still wondered whether sweater number seventeen would have been a better choice.

That is how, surprisingly, people who have fewer choices report being happier with their choices, not because of a better choice but rather because there was no place left for regret to live.

Living with Less, on Purpose

She comes to mind often, especially when I am mindlessly scrolling through choices for an item as inconsequential as a throw pillow. She wasn't unhappy with her one phone, her on brand of flour, her one route to the market. There was a kind of peace in that limitation, a peace that all our "freedom" seems to have quietly taken away.

This does not imply that choice is bad. People do not wish to live in a world where everything has one taste. The issue here is not the choice per se but unbounded choice, choice without any filter or bounds at all. The solution, it turns out, isn't more freedom. It's better boundaries.

Some of the happiest decision-makers I know use quiet rules to protect themselves from this trap. They pick two or three options and refuse to look further. They ask a friend to just choose from them. A timer is set for fifteen minutes in order to make up one's mind, to stick to the decision made, whatever the circumstances may be. "Good enough" is considered to be not just good enough, but a mature, contented state of being.

The next time when you are caught up in front of a wall of virtually indistinguishable products, try to narrow down your field of choice deliberately. Pick three. Set a timer. Ask someone else to choose. Allow yourself the privilege of walking away from a good decision rather than always striving for the best.

Because in the end, the point wasn't to have the most choices. It was to be at peace with the one you choose. And peace, as my grandmother understood before psychologists ever wrote a study about it, has nothing to do with your options. It has everything to do with stopping the search.