Ch-Ch-Ch-Choices

I've been kind of obsessed with this concept lately, the paradox of choice. This is a TED Talk by Barry Schwartz (I'm also a bit obsessed with TED Talks). He wrote a book. He talks about it.

My first year here in Peace Corps found me relatively content. Plugging away, doing my job. In retrospect, I realize often times where I found myself, was not born out of my choice. I didn't choose to come to Azerbaijan specifically, to come to Balaken specifically. I had one clear counterpart I was supposed to work with, I had only one option for independent housing. I was sent here. So I came. And because I'm the kind of person who tries to find the silver lining in everything, I made myself pretty happy.

Year two rolls around, and with it, a lot of choices. I have more teachers, more students, more classes, more projects, and more friends. Who do I spend my time with? What classes do I teach? Who do I work with? Which club do I teach?

And currently, there are even more choices.

As I look at whether stay in a house I've been in for a year and a half, or live in an apartment closer to work with better utilities.
As I look at whether or not to adopt a pet to help ease the loneliness.
As I look at whether or not I made the right choice to stay another 6 months...as I watch my friends leave.
As I see in the future the impending decision of what graduate school to attend, and once again, where to spend my life for two years.

We're sort of trained to believe 'the more the better,' and with that, the idea that the more choices we have the luckier we are.

Schwartz tells his point of view through an anecdote about buying jeans. All his life he bought the same kind of jeans...crappy, fit kind of odd, but once he broke them in they weren't so bad. He went to the store to buy a new pair, and was overwhelmed with several different styles of jeans. The salesperson asked, "What kind would you like?" He answered, "the same kind I always buy." An hour later, after trying on multiple pairs, he left the store with a bag in hand. The jeans fit better than the normal pair, and were actually of a better quality, but he found he was less satisfied than he usually was when he bought his new jeans.

Why?

He realized that with so many choices, he expected one of the pairs to be perfect. When none of them were perfect, his expectations weren't met and he was disappointed. When he expected the one pair of jeans to be crappy, and he got a crappy pair, his expectations were met. And he was satisfied.

The key to happiness is lower expectations.

This statement gets even more shocking when you think about expectations of people. I tend to have very high expectations of the people I am close with. Careful...

The more choices we have, the more chances there are to make the wrong choices. This causes anxiety. I agree with Schwartz in his theory that the escalation of depression rates might have something to do with the explosion of media and technology, and the subsequent barrage of choices we have raining down on us each day.

I'm currently working my way through The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the book - well audiobook - is definitely better than the movie). Tomas, a notorious womanizer, is dealing with his affection for Tereza. He doesn't know whether to let her live with him, or kick her out. He says he wishes he had two lives, so he could live out each of the possibilities, and then decide which is the best choice. Or, if he knew that he was going to live this life again, he could make a different choice in the next life, and he'd know that eventually he'd make the correct decision. But as we only live one life, we only get one choice, and we'll never really know.

It's easy to walk down a path that's been laid out for you. And if you are a generally positive person, you're going to have a generally positive time of it. But the moment you hit that fork in the road...

I guess you flip the coin, and the best of it. And more importantly, don't look back.