a good fren of mine studied in england a long while ago. we had planned to go backpacking together. plans changed - i didn't visit europe.
we planned to backpack vietnam and cambodia etc... plans changed - he went on his own.
we've talked about lots of other stuffs - plans changed.
i don't think i can manage a holiday alone. to what i can recall, i've only managed 'movie alone' once - i console myself that i'm a sociable social-being. but i'm just a coward.
and very soon, we will all be too old to backpack.
Friday, June 27, 2008
settling down
my cuz's brand spanking new bundle of joy has arrived.
and i just realised that my buddy's number 2 is here too. i left sg when they were at number 1.
i feel happy for them... a pang of envy mixed with jealousy. BUT i still want to congratulate them from the bottom of my heart.
and i wonder what settling down means. does it literally mean to 'settle'? - as in to accept your partner for whoever they might be? i'm not suggesting that u pick one and u simply settle, but more like after careful selection, and after u've made ur choice, decided, u settle. sure there are heaps of better ones out there, but u settle for the one u've decided.
it's a decision, or is it not?
and i just realised that my buddy's number 2 is here too. i left sg when they were at number 1.
i feel happy for them... a pang of envy mixed with jealousy. BUT i still want to congratulate them from the bottom of my heart.
and i wonder what settling down means. does it literally mean to 'settle'? - as in to accept your partner for whoever they might be? i'm not suggesting that u pick one and u simply settle, but more like after careful selection, and after u've made ur choice, decided, u settle. sure there are heaps of better ones out there, but u settle for the one u've decided.
it's a decision, or is it not?
Saturday, June 14, 2008
If too much choice makes people unhappy, should people be provided with fewer choices?
I agree with the statement that “if too much choice makes people unhappy, then people should be provided with fewer choices.” In fact, I am of the opinion that too many choices indeed make people unhappy and that the availability of choices should be constrained. I begin the essay by showing that the problem with us modern social beings is that we place too much emphasis on preserving our ability to choose and the insistence on the availability of different choices when making decisions. I speculate that part of the reason why we behave in such a way is that we are socially conditioned to mistake this phenomenon as our freedom and autonomy. I then proceed to highlight the shortfalls of having too many choices in life. This essay ends with my recommendation that choices should be limited and constrained by using cultural-specific guidelines in societies which endorses the importance of culture and by using laws in societies that are unfettered by cultures and traditions.
Almost all of us would rather have some choices to pick from as compared to not having any choice at all. We like to have options made available to us and we like the knowledge that we have the ability to decide upon which option to choose. We like it because this ability seems to empower and liberate us. As autonomous individuals, we want to be in control of our lives. We want to pick the one choice amongst many out there that best suits our preferences or needs. This can be easily observed by making a trip to any supermarket: one will witness the availability of a whole range of different brands of the same product. This goes to show that consumers really like the existence of a wide variety of choices. As the English poet William Cowper aptly wrote, ‘variety’s the very spice of life, that gives it all its flavour’.
The modern American society promotes individualism and encourages her people to not simply accept things the way they are just because it has always been as such. This culture appreciates initiatives from individuals. At the workplace, employees who are able to exemplify these initiatives by the advent of new cost-saving ideas and efficiency-improving processes are favoured and rewarded. It is no wonder then, that as we are conditioned to take pride as autonomous individuals, confident of our ability to harness the required information and make sound judgments, these perceived assets and skills ultimately contribute to the “myth” that we are infallible in the faculty of rationalizing choices and making sound decisions.
Although the autonomy to choose and the presence of choices make us feel good about ourselves in terms of empowerment, many studies have gone to show that too much freedom and too many choices generates lower levels of satisfaction. Let us take a student who has to undertake a multiple-choice exam for example. For every question asked, the student is provided with four possible options. He has to then choose one of them as the one correct answer to that question. In instances where the examiner so decides to increase the possible options per question to five without any given explanation, it would no doubt generate a higher level of distress amongst the students. In an exam like this, we prefer to have as small a number of choices as possible because it increases the probability of choosing the one correct answer. Why then do we not want fewer options for the other choices we face in other aspects of everyday living? It can be argued that in a multiple-choice question exam, each question will have only one correct answer; on the contrary, many of the choices we have to make in real life are dependant on preferences and priorities and therefore have no single distinct and correct choice. However, I contend that by appropriate limitation of choices, we make our decision-making process a lot easier and much less burdensome by not having to gather all the information required for every possible scenario every single time we need to make a decision.
Surely, people who are perfectly decisive will be undaunted by the wide array of available choices; but how many people in our society can say with absolute certainty that they are completely decisive in all instances? Matters are made worse if we were to add the element of regret into the picture because as humans, we tend to look back at our lives and ponder over our past decisions: due to the ability of hindsight, if we had known any better, a better choice that should have been made in place of the original choice would result in regret. We can therefore infer that incidences of regret are directly related to the number of options which we have to choose from. Regrets are assumed to be bad and they make us unhappy in this essay.
Another example of how we choose to empower ourselves with choices and having detrimental results to happiness can be seen from our widespread use of mobile phones. Instant connectivity with our friends allows us to make plans on the move, choose who to go out with and what to do. With this versatility comes the option of canceling an appointment at the very last minute if the alternative plan offers a more exciting itinerary. The flipside of this freedom to choose and cancel at will inevitably leads to frequent breaking of promises to friends at the last minute. When this happens often enough, what used to be close friendships are inevitably strained, causing unhappiness.
It seems that the solution to this predicament is simply to reduce the number of choices available. This solution albeit simple, poses many problems for us: who is the rightful authority to arbitrarily dictate and determine how many choices are enough and what these permissible choices are? Another issue to take note of is how easily the wielder of such powers can fall into the trap of committing tyranny and paternalism; the two “evils” which awaits patiently on the other end of the slippery scale. In order to avoid sliding down this slippery scale, I advocate Schwartz’s idea of using culture-specific practices in constraining the categorization of what constitutes as worthy choices. In the United States, where the employment of cultural constraints will not go down well with the masses, I propose the use of laws and guidelines to take the place of culture-specific constraints. In order for this alternative to have any chance at all at being an effective substitute for culture-specific constraints, we need to ensure that these rules and guidelines be democratically derived by the established legislative processes, thereby rendering them representative of the population. They also have to be specifically designed to achieve the purpose of providing assistance to people’s considerations during the decision-making process in a non-coercive and non-oppressive manner.
In summary, I have started the essay by attempting to explain why we enjoy having a variety of choices to choose from. It was argued subsequently that part of the reason why we value the abundance of choices can be blamed on the involuntary indoctrination of social conditions which we have no way of exclusion due to the fact that we are members of the society. I then tried to show how having an abundance of choices makes us unhappy by suggesting that incidences of regret is positively correlated with the amount of choices we have. I conclude with a recommendation of how we can find a good and effective way to reasonably limit our choices. Finally, I end with a reiteration of my view that if too much choice makes people unhappy, people should be provided with fewer choices.
Almost all of us would rather have some choices to pick from as compared to not having any choice at all. We like to have options made available to us and we like the knowledge that we have the ability to decide upon which option to choose. We like it because this ability seems to empower and liberate us. As autonomous individuals, we want to be in control of our lives. We want to pick the one choice amongst many out there that best suits our preferences or needs. This can be easily observed by making a trip to any supermarket: one will witness the availability of a whole range of different brands of the same product. This goes to show that consumers really like the existence of a wide variety of choices. As the English poet William Cowper aptly wrote, ‘variety’s the very spice of life, that gives it all its flavour’.
The modern American society promotes individualism and encourages her people to not simply accept things the way they are just because it has always been as such. This culture appreciates initiatives from individuals. At the workplace, employees who are able to exemplify these initiatives by the advent of new cost-saving ideas and efficiency-improving processes are favoured and rewarded. It is no wonder then, that as we are conditioned to take pride as autonomous individuals, confident of our ability to harness the required information and make sound judgments, these perceived assets and skills ultimately contribute to the “myth” that we are infallible in the faculty of rationalizing choices and making sound decisions.
Although the autonomy to choose and the presence of choices make us feel good about ourselves in terms of empowerment, many studies have gone to show that too much freedom and too many choices generates lower levels of satisfaction. Let us take a student who has to undertake a multiple-choice exam for example. For every question asked, the student is provided with four possible options. He has to then choose one of them as the one correct answer to that question. In instances where the examiner so decides to increase the possible options per question to five without any given explanation, it would no doubt generate a higher level of distress amongst the students. In an exam like this, we prefer to have as small a number of choices as possible because it increases the probability of choosing the one correct answer. Why then do we not want fewer options for the other choices we face in other aspects of everyday living? It can be argued that in a multiple-choice question exam, each question will have only one correct answer; on the contrary, many of the choices we have to make in real life are dependant on preferences and priorities and therefore have no single distinct and correct choice. However, I contend that by appropriate limitation of choices, we make our decision-making process a lot easier and much less burdensome by not having to gather all the information required for every possible scenario every single time we need to make a decision.
Surely, people who are perfectly decisive will be undaunted by the wide array of available choices; but how many people in our society can say with absolute certainty that they are completely decisive in all instances? Matters are made worse if we were to add the element of regret into the picture because as humans, we tend to look back at our lives and ponder over our past decisions: due to the ability of hindsight, if we had known any better, a better choice that should have been made in place of the original choice would result in regret. We can therefore infer that incidences of regret are directly related to the number of options which we have to choose from. Regrets are assumed to be bad and they make us unhappy in this essay.
Another example of how we choose to empower ourselves with choices and having detrimental results to happiness can be seen from our widespread use of mobile phones. Instant connectivity with our friends allows us to make plans on the move, choose who to go out with and what to do. With this versatility comes the option of canceling an appointment at the very last minute if the alternative plan offers a more exciting itinerary. The flipside of this freedom to choose and cancel at will inevitably leads to frequent breaking of promises to friends at the last minute. When this happens often enough, what used to be close friendships are inevitably strained, causing unhappiness.
It seems that the solution to this predicament is simply to reduce the number of choices available. This solution albeit simple, poses many problems for us: who is the rightful authority to arbitrarily dictate and determine how many choices are enough and what these permissible choices are? Another issue to take note of is how easily the wielder of such powers can fall into the trap of committing tyranny and paternalism; the two “evils” which awaits patiently on the other end of the slippery scale. In order to avoid sliding down this slippery scale, I advocate Schwartz’s idea of using culture-specific practices in constraining the categorization of what constitutes as worthy choices. In the United States, where the employment of cultural constraints will not go down well with the masses, I propose the use of laws and guidelines to take the place of culture-specific constraints. In order for this alternative to have any chance at all at being an effective substitute for culture-specific constraints, we need to ensure that these rules and guidelines be democratically derived by the established legislative processes, thereby rendering them representative of the population. They also have to be specifically designed to achieve the purpose of providing assistance to people’s considerations during the decision-making process in a non-coercive and non-oppressive manner.
In summary, I have started the essay by attempting to explain why we enjoy having a variety of choices to choose from. It was argued subsequently that part of the reason why we value the abundance of choices can be blamed on the involuntary indoctrination of social conditions which we have no way of exclusion due to the fact that we are members of the society. I then tried to show how having an abundance of choices makes us unhappy by suggesting that incidences of regret is positively correlated with the amount of choices we have. I conclude with a recommendation of how we can find a good and effective way to reasonably limit our choices. Finally, I end with a reiteration of my view that if too much choice makes people unhappy, people should be provided with fewer choices.
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