February 16th, 2006
Thanks to the people who are reading my new story. I like feedback, even negative. So if you have comments or criticisms, don't hesitate to let me know - b_porter@yahoo.com.
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You know what is really poking my penguin these days?
Overchoice. That's when you have lots of choices ... so many choices, in fact, that you are paralysed into no choice at all, or worse: Never happy with the choice you have made.
Do you have the same problem that I do? Here's an example:
I'm talking about things like the cereal aisle at the supermarket. Frankly, my hesitation is ridiculous; there's absolutely no reason on Earth why I should be burning more than five minutes in a vain attempt to find that breakfast cereal that will leave me satisfied that I have made the best choice. I stand around, looking at the brans, then the wheats, the myriad oat-and-granola combos, bend down to look at the gigantic bulk bags of no-name puffy things (that are not so cost-effective when you have to drown them in sugar to make the edible, by the way) and then I straighten up and go back to the beginning to start weighing my options again.
There are just too damned many of them. And I know I'm not alone, because as I stand there bending and craning, peering and pondering, there are usually a couple of people there too who are rather self-consciously doing the same thing. We can't all make up our bloody minds, and I am here to tell you that it is not our fault! We are having this uncomfortable trouble because of someone else's sneakiness.
("Oh brother," I hear you cry, "Here we go again with the 'other person's evil intentions' ... can't he just let it be this one time?")
Well, no. Not this time and not ever. Sorry. If you want to know why, it is because we could go crazy ignoring all the assholery of the world. As the Fourth Law of Human Stupidity states in part, "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals ..." And that means that by ignoring stupid banditry, we are doing the whole world an injustice. So, sorry, this has got to be deconstructed. My readership is down—way down—to maybe half of what it was; I get maybe 30 or 35 people a day reading my blog now. So you can always join those folks tired of reading my rants ... at least for today.
By the way, if you haven't read The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla, then I very strongly suggest you do. It may change your life. It changed mine.
Where was I? Oh yes: Too much choice, example of breakfast cereal. You know why there is so much choice in the world, don't you? It's because some clever marketeer discovered that you can appeal to a wider audience, including a wider economic window, if you offer the same or similar product with several different "features" or "options". Car manufacturers had wet dreams about it once they realised it. And, furthermore, you can sell more of something if you borrow a well-known name from something else. Now, I'm not an expert in calculating market potentials, or threshholds ... I know next to nothing about the rationale behind branding or the point of highest return (and the way to market to those folks "under" that curve) ... but I do know that from a purely consumer point of view, their attemtps to maximize their profits are a source of stress in my life and the lives of at least a few other people. (You can spot them because they are standing, paralysed, in front of the coffee shop counter.)
We are living under the myth that choice is good in all things. And we have somehow pushed the outside of the envelope into the idea that more choice is better. And more more MORE HAHAHAHAHH!!!! (Ahem) But what we have glossed over is the fact that more choice sometimes means more stress, more indecision, more unhappiness because for everything we eventually choose in our life there is a miasma of things we couldn't. There are so many of them and only one of us, after all.
And we seem to have collectively forgotten that there is a valid choice always available to us, and that it is sometimes the only right thing thing to choose, even if it is the hardest thing to choose:
Nothing at all.
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