Choice Overload: How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction

By Pastor Marcia Moret Sietstra

Spirit of Peace UCC

Prov. 8:1-4, 22-31; Rom. 5:1-5

Last week I was shopping at the huge, new HyVee grocery store, and I ran into an old friend.  She said, “Have you found that it takes a lot longer to get your groceries than it used to at the old HyVee?  There’s just sooo much to choose from.”  And then with a laugh, she said, “I find myself just getting the same things that I bought at the old store!” 

I smiled, because she was illustrating a premise of the book I just finished reading, entitled The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz.   Schwartz makes the case that after a certain point, too much choice becomes a burden, and he’s not talking only about the things we choose to buy.  But let’s begin with his first example.  Several years ago, Schwartz went to a Gap store to buy blue jeans.  Like my husband, Schwartz tends to wear his jeans until they’re falling apart, so it had been quite a while since his last purchase.  A young salesperson walked up to him and asked if she could help him.  He said, “ Sure, I want a pair of jeans—32, 28.”

“Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” she replied.  “Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed?  Button-fly or zipper-fly?  Faded or regular?”

He was stunned, and sputtered something like, “I just want regular jeans.  You know, the kind that used to be the only kind.”  Well she didn’t know, but she went and checked with an older salesperson and was able to figure out what “regular” jeans used to be and point him in the right direction. 

The trouble was, with all these options now available, Schwartz was no longer sure that “regular” jeans was what he wanted.  Maybe the relaxed fit would be more comfortable.  So he went back to the salesperson and asked what was the difference between relaxed fit and easy fit and regular, and she showed him a diagram of the various cuts.  Still unable to make a choice, he took one of each into the dressing room and tried them all.  He examined each one in the mirror, and sometimes went back out to search for the salesperson and ask her opinion.   Now very little was riding on this decision, but by this time he was convinced that one of these options had to be the right one for him, and he was determined to figure it out.  In the end, he couldn’t.  Finally, he just chose the easy fit, thinking that perhaps “relaxed fit” implied that he was getting soft in the middle and needed to cover it up.

Now the jeans he chose were just fine, but it occurred to him that day that buying a pair of pants should not be a daylong project.  By creating all these options, the store was giving people of various body types a choice, a good thing.  But by vastly expanding the range of choices, they had also created a new problem.  Buying jeans was no longer a five-minute task; it was now a complex decision in which one felt obliged to invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt and anxiety over which choice was the best.

Buying jeans or groceries is a trivial matter, but this overload of choice applies to every area of American life today. Which cell phone should I buy, one with a camera and text messaging because that phone is free with a calling plan, or do I buy a basic phone that is not free, but which will pay for itself in 9 months with a cheaper calling plan?  I’ll need a calculator to figure out which of the 73 phones and 29 calling plans is the best deal overall, and then I’ll need to factor in a possible move to another part of the country where this cell phone company might not have good coverage. Remember when choosing a phone meant deciding between desk or wall mount, and which one of 5 colors you preferred?

How about choosing your last car?  Did you visit several dealers, check Consumer Reports, compare American to foreign made, consider mileage, carbon emissions, resale value and talk it over with friends?  How long did all of this take? My dad used to go to the same car dealer, one of only two in town, and always bought a 1 year old 98 Oldsmobile.  The dealer called him when he had a nice one on the lot.  It probably took an hour or two at most.

Think  about something much more serious—choosing a medical insurance plan.  In the past, a company often chose a health plan for the company; now many of us have to choose from among a menu of plans, each with a unique set of deductibles, co-pays, prescription plans, and even different groups of participating physicians.  The employer no longer hires one person to study all these optins and choose a company plan; often it is up to each employee to figure it all out.  Presumably, shifting the choice to the employee was a good thing, right?  We Americans like freedom and control, but having so many choices becomes a tremendous burden when we face more options than anyone has time to thoroughly consider.  Americans are experiencing an explosion of choices, to a level unprecedented in human history, including choices about what kind of relationships to be in, and what kind of religious and other activities to participate in. 

The author of this book says this:  Choice is generally good.  Without choices, people feel like they have no control over their lives; they feel powerless.   Choices help people feel liberated and more in control of their lives.  But when people have so many choices that they end up investing enormous amounts of time in making countless choices every day, people begin to suffer from overload. 

Two of the symptoms of choice overload that psychologists see today are increased anxiety, and something called decision paralysis, which means it is so difficult to weigh all the options and make a decision, that you become paralyzed and put off deciding.  The way to avoid making a mistake is not to decide.   Anybody here ever go round and round with your spouse about where to go on vacation, and end up going nowhere because you couldn’t decide?  Any of you have a room that needs painting, but you can’t decide what color so it remains unpainted year after year? Think for a moment…I bet there is something you are avoiding taking care of because you just can’t decide what to do. Some young adults are so confused by the dizzying assortment of options in their lives, that they seem unable to make any serious decisions.  

Another symptom of choice overload is decreased satisfaction with life in general, and with the choices we make.  Here’s the odd thing:  the more time you invest in making a choice, the more likely it is that you will experience regret when you finally choose.  You’d think we’d be more satisfied with the outcome after considering so many options.  But studies say just the opposite:  the more we stress over a choice, the more we tend to feel regret because we are now acutely aware of all the advantages associated with the other options we had to pass up.  Each choice has its own advantages and opportunities, and no matter which option you choose, you will lose the advantages and opportunities associated with every other option you did not choose.  The more options you have, the greater amount of regret at lost opportunities.  You see why this book is a fascinating mix of psychology and economics!

Here’s another interesting thing about people who try hardest to make the “right” choice.  Schwartz calls them maximizers.  A maximizer is a person who needs to be sure that every decision is the best that can be made.  They tend to put in much more time making decisions than a person who is willing to settle for “good enough.”  That’s what Schwartz calls a “satisficer,” one who is satisfied with good enough and doesn’t bother to study more options after finding something “good enough.”  Satisficers don’t have to fit on every pair of jeans to find the best one; they stop when they find one that is good enough.  Satisficers do the same thing with an investment plan.  They pick one with a decent rate of return and stick with it, rather than researching the deluge of investment options offered to them.  A satisficer has standards, but as soon as he finds a choice that meets those standards, he stops.  A maximizer has a hard time stopping until they have considered every option thoroughly.  Because satisficers settle for “good enough” and spend less energy and time on decisions, they report feeling less stress, less regret at lost opportunities, and less depression than people who try harder.

But here’s the problem: even if you are a satisficer, you are given an overwhelming number of choices every day.  Here’s why choice overload is such a problem for all of us:  We are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom of choice because it uses up so much of our time…time that could be spent on more worthy things.  The proportion of the population that describes itself as “very happy” has declined steadily in the last thirty years, even as our prosperity has increased.¹ Clinical depression is estimated to be 10 times what it was in the year 1900.²  More than a quarter of Americans report being lonely.  Americans report having far fewer friendships today than in past decades.  They no longer have time to develop relationships.  That’s one reason being an active part of a church is so vitally important.  One of the things we do is provide a community in which each of you can build relationships.   But even the church must compete for people’s time.  All churches struggle as people have fewer and fewer volunteer hours to give to their church.  Time spent dealing with choice is time taken away from being a good friend, a good spouse, a good parent, and a good church member.

If spending time making choices is part of society’s time problem, how do we solve it?  I want to offer 2 brief suggestions from the book, and then one of my own:

1. First, Schwartz recommends that we practice voluntary constraint on our freedom of choice.  Decide which choices in our lives really matter and focus our time there; let other opportunities go by.  This is what my friend was doing in the grocery store. It took too much of her valuable time to look at all the new products, so she had decided to stick with what she knew to be satisfactory.  These were second-level decisions that she wasn’t going to bother with. When you limit yourself to going to 2 stores when you shop, you are practicing voluntary constraint on your choices. 

2. Second, practice looking for “good enough,” and stop when you find it.  Occasionally an extended search may be warranted, but in general, there is no one “right” or “best” decision, only many possible decisions that can turn out fine.  If you are tempted to spend enormous amounts of time studying all the options, consider what you are missing by giving so much time to this process.

3. The third recommendation is mine.  It is to think about what is a worthy use of your time…for what purpose were you created?   Our purpose in life is not to maximize achievements or accumulation of stuff.  We were made for something more valuable—to be in relationship with God and with each.   If we refuse to spend a lot of time on making choices, we will have more time for what really matters.  We may even find the time to practice mindfulness of the small wonders we experience each day.   

I want to end with this gentle reminder from our Proverbs text this morning.  It is about Wisdom. Wisdom is personified as a woman. This wisdom is not the booming voice of the world’s wisdom.  It comes to you as a quieter voice of God that gently calls beneath the loud voices of this world and offers glimpses of what is holy. 

Wisdom whispers to you that you are loved before you do anything to deserve it, so you don’t need to think so hard about all those decisions that plague you.  Wisdom whispers to you that God gives you grace, undeserved favor, so it’s OK if you make some mistakes.  Wisdom whispers to you that you were made for something far greater than accumulating and achieving; you were made for love, for relationship, for community.  May those be the areas that you spend time on in the days ahead.  Amen.