So. Many. Choices.
I remember when (I suddenly sound like my Granny) we used to have to be at home on Thursday nights at 9:00 PM if we wanted to watch Grey’s Anatomy. We couldn’t consume Meredith and Derek with all their accompanying angst on a Sunday afternoon when our hearts had enough bandwidth for absorption of their twisty lives -- it was Thursday night or bust. And if it was “bust,” we’d arrive the next Thursday night at 9:00 PM painfully in the dark. Now, we can watch a whole season on a dawn-to-dusk Saturday, if we’re so inclined. Or we can catch the latest episode at halftime of the Super Bowl, if we choose.
Our world is built like Furr’s cafeteria. We can order up exactly what we want.
This is true across the entertainment spectrum. Gone are the days of enduring four songs on an album to get to the one we bought it for. Instead of listening to music we don’t like, we can curate a playlist downloading only songs we love. Then an algorithm on our cell phone sends us more iterations of the sound, style, and vibe we have gravitated toward and our obsession of what we’re obsessed with grows. We double down but we rarely venture out.
With only the patience required to declare our preferences, we can assemble a life that gives us nothing we don’t care for. Ours is a pick-and-choose world.
Fingertip customization gets almost any food we’re hungry for dashed to our front door. We can augment the color of our eyes, the size of our lips, the background of our photos, the firmness of our half of the mattress, the temperature on our side of the car. We can design how . . . and when . . . and from where we work. While this all sounds (and can oftentimes feel) pretty fantastic, a made-for-me world comes carrying compounding costs.
For starters, muscles without hills to climb atrophy. Without resistance—the stuff that makes us antsy, or bored, or frustrated--our spirit lacks a sparring partner. Like a bicep that’s never bothered, our insides shrink in size. Disinclinations keep us healthy by forcing us to stay curious, attentive and sharp. They force us to work a bit.
In addition, when we are always surrounded by what we prefer, we stop growing. Our palette never expands if we only eat what we know we like. We need our tastes to be tested, our biases to be bent. This is how we learn. This is how we improve. “Agitation is the opposite of stagnation,” said suffragist, Ernestine Rose, “the one is life, the other is death.” Hers was a life that hadn’t time for being anything other than candid. She got straight to the heart of the matter. “Meh” and “yuck,” disagreeing music, and a bed we can’t set its firmness to by a number might be the way of forward progress. It keeps us from growing deaf and blind.
Finally, decision making about the unimportant things makes us worse deciders about what matters most. When we do it all the time, our “choosers” get worn out.
“In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective,” iconic philosopher, business management teacher and leadership guru Peter Drucker observed, “it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time –literally—substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.”
Business strategist and minimalist, Greg McKeown adds, “We are unprepared in part because, for the first time, the preponderance of choice has overwhelmed our ability to manage it. We have lost our ability to filter what is important and what isn’t. Psychologists call this ‘decision fatigue’; the more choices we are forced to make, the more the quality of our decisions deteriorates.”
Managing the mundane becomes both overwhelming and exhausting.
Religiously curated lives can numb us to empathy and discovery while conning us into energy expenditures that have little ROI. Be wary when and where you point and pick.