#Choice March 18

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Today contribution to the 30-Day Letter Writing Coach4aday Challenge is on CHOICE.

The challenge involves composing a letter to yourself when you were an earlier age. The goal is to focus on a value, habit, or choice that needs to be adopted or made.

Over the past few years, I have begun to encounter anxiety over making simple life choices. Reflecting on what was causing that got my curiosity up to research causes. Today’s letter is what I discovered.

Day 18 Letter-Decisions

March 18, 2023

Dear 2023 Dan

Today’s letter is going to try and explains some of the indecision and anxiety you have been recently encountering with simple life choices. Decisions about what media to consume, what beer to purchase, and what type of tennis shoes to own just seem to take longer than they use to.

Your self-assessment keeps pointing to this condition being caused by aging, but you will hopefully learn at the end of this correspondence that is not the reason. In America today there has never been a time where you the consumer have as many choices. Those days in your past as a college student and you debated on whether to purchase Wranglers or Levi’s jeans have morphed into countless top 20 jean lists. Or how about the days you rotated those rabbit ear aluminum foil covered TV antennas to see if you could get one of 3 TV Stations available in the 1960’s.

Today your Spectrum TV Guide has channels ranging from 2 to 1200.

All of that volume is beneficial in one regard it sure gives you the consumer a chance to find exactly what you are looking for. Yet social scientists have discovered two big things.

1. Choice is good for us, but its relationship to satisfaction and happiness is complicated.
2. More choices require increased time and effort to decide and that can lead to anxiety, regret, excessively high expectations, and self-blame if we get it wrong.

Simply put sometimes having more options does not equate to happiness and feeling comfortable. Shrinking the list, you consider is not a bad selection.