Thirty-two years ago I did not own a presentable suit. I was in graduate school and I really hadn’t needed to wear a suit for years. However, I was about to go to Spain to teach at a university. I had been told by a professor who had been there that Spanish universities were much more formal than we were, and that male faculty always wore a suit or at least a sport coat and tie. (That turned out to be wrong. In just a few years they had become much less formal and younger faculty did not dress formally.)
I saw an ad for tailor-made suits from Hong Kong. Someone told me that the prices would be low and the quality was high. I decided to give it a try. I set up an appointment. I asked my wife Phyllis to come along to help me choose.
It started out fine. The number of options of cloth was a bit daunting. There were hundreds of samples. I had in mind a blue suit, so that helped narrow choices to a few dozen. After a little while we settled on a nice blue wool. I figured that I was done. Boy, was I wrong. I now faced a dizzying array of options. Exactly how wide did I want the lapels? After deciding on a three piece suit, I had to decide on the style of vest, the number of buttons, the number and style of pockets, and so forth.
The trousers of the suit presented options I never knew existed. I had to decide on the size and number of belt loops. I even had to decide how wide each belt loop should be. Then we got to the pockets. Suit trouser pockets, as it turns out, are a world unto themselves. I had to decide on the angle of the pocket openings. I kept telling the tailor that none of this mattered to me. All I wanted was a suit! He would have none of it. I was forced to make decision after decision, none of which mattered to a starving graduate student who thought that dressing up meant wearing an ironed shirt.
And then it all started again with a sportcoat and slacks. It was like one of those awful math problems having to calculate permutations and combinations. Finally, the ordeal was over.
All I had wanted was to look presentable on my new job. I didn’t care about the width of the belt loops or the angle of the pockets.
A year or so ago we needed to replace our kitchen sink and faucet. I felt as though I had been transported back to the world of belt loops and picking the number of buttons on a vest. We confronted a wall full of faucets and a veritable gallery of sinks. I had no idea how many kinds of kitchen sinks there are. I’m pretty sure I was better off not knowing.
Our lives are filled with choices. The typical supermarket offers us about 300 kinds of breakfast cereal. Do you remember when picking up a half gallon of milk meant, well, picking up a half gallon of milk? Now we must choose between organic and not organic. We have to choose among fat-free, lowfat, reduced fat, or whole. There is soy milk and milk with acidophilus. Have I missed something?
Psychologist Barry Schwartz has been examining the effects of choice for a number of years. Let me share a few of his findings:
It turns out that some people get a lot more stressed by making choices than others. Schwartz and his colleagues make a distinction between “maximizers” and “satisficers.” “Maximizers” are people who always aim at making the best possible choice. “Satisficers” are people who want to choose something that is “good enough” even though there may be better choices out there.
Listen to this brief description of satificers versus maximizers and see where you think you fall. “When satisficers find an item that meets their standards, they stop looking. But maximizers exert enormous effort reading labels, checking out consumer magazines and trying new products. They also spend more time comparing their purchasing selections with those of others.”
Maximizers try to check out every option. As options multiply, their task becomes overwhelming. Even worse, even after making a decision maximizers are anxious about the options they did not have time to investigate. Ironically, even though maximizers tend to make better objective choices, they get less satisfaction. In his research, Schwartz found that the greatest maximizers are the least happy with the choices they make. Let me quote Barry Schwartz once more: “As might be expected, individuals with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life and were less happy less optimistic and more depressed than people with low maximization scores. Indeed, those with extreme maximization ratings had depression scores that place them in the borderline clinical range.”
Here are some of the items on the test used to give the score on the maximization scale. Each statement can be answered with a score of 1-7, where one means “completely disagree” and seven means “completely agree.” A score of four would be neutral. If you find yourself answering with fives, sixes and sevens, you are a maximizer. I fear some of us may experience a shock of self recognition. I know I did. Brace yourselves.
How did you do? I had some sixes and sevens. I bet you did, too.
We are a people who have always believed in freedom. Freedom means the ability to choose. We have always assumed that more choices meant more freedom, and so having more choices must be a good thing. We assume that the more choices we have, the happier we will be. It turns out that it is a lot more complicated than that. Certainly, having no choices is not something any of us wants. And yet it turns out that having more choices is only good up to a point. It is probably better to have six choices than to have two. But having 60 choices is a kind of tyranny, too. The number of choices we have is a classic case of absolute diminishing returns. After a point more choices adds little benefit, and at a later point adding even more choices actually makes things worse.
If you are a maximizer, having 60 choices becomes a kind of hell. Not only will maximizers spend enormous energy making decisions that are not terribly important, but they (or should I say, we) are more likely to regret the decision once it is made. There is a particularly dismal branch of inquiry known as regret theory. Maximizers are more prone to regret their decisions. In modern consumer society with thousands upon thousands of choices, the chances of making a choice we will regret are everywhere. The promised land of unlimited choices turns out to be a land of regret and unhappiness.
It gets even worse. We also know that even if we make what we think is a perfect choice, the satisfaction wears off pretty quickly. Let’s say we go car shopping. We study all the reports. We test drive a handful of cars. Let’s say we choose an expensive, top quality car--a Lexus, perhaps. At first we love driving it. But pretty soon we get used to it. The thrill is gone. Very few things turn out to be as wonderful as we imagine and expect them to be. Having high expectations virtually guarantees that experiences will fall short.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can escape the tyranny of choice.
We actually know a lot about what makes people happy. We have all the wisdom passed down through the great religious traditions. We have wisdom passed down through literature and the arts. We also have a lot of empirical research about what makes us happy. And they all say pretty much the same thing.
Having more stuff to choose from simply does not make us happy. If it did, people in rich countries would be the happiest people on earth. But we’re not.
What does make us happy is actually pretty simple.
The greatest key to happiness is our relationships. Our relationships with family and friends are critical to our sense of satisfaction in life. And yet we know that the number of close relationships we Americans have is dropping at a frightening rate.
We human beings are relational creatures. We are hard wired this way. We need one another. We need to feel loved, accepted, and valued. We need to belong. Yet we have created a consumer culture that destroys close relationships while flooding us with meaningless choices.
People who are in a committed relationship, who have good friends and are close to their family are happier. People who are part of a religious community are happier than those who are not. In this day and age that destroys community, participating in a religious community like ours is more important than ever. We need each other.
We don’t need more choices. We need better relationships. In fact, we need fewer choices. We need less freedom. Deep relationships with a life partner, with family, with friends, involve commitments. And commitments mean giving up options. Commitment means fewer choices; it means less freedom.
Ironically, it is only when we choose to limit our choices that we free ourselves from the tyranny of choice.
There is another great lesson from our religious traditions that is borne out in modern research: gratitude matters.
And yet gratitude is a discipline and a practice. We so easily get trapped into thinking about what we do not have. Yet look at us! Look at how we live compared to how most human beings live today and how most human beings have lived in the history of humanity.
Religious traditions have always taught us to give thanks. When I was a child I was taught that a prayer should include giving thanks. There is great wisdom in that. When I look at my life, really take time to look at it, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. I have a wonderful family. I have terrific friends and colleagues. I am blessed to do work that I love. I live surrounded by beauty. My cup runs over. So does yours. So does yours.
A great irony of our time is that in the pursuit of prosperity, freedom and choice we have created an elaborate prison of our making. We hve more choices in our lives than ever, yet these choices actually make life worse. We are less happy now than we were two generations ago, even though we have doubled our material wealth. As a nation, we are probably lonelier now than any human beings have ever been.
Today we need to be saved from the tyranny of choice—choices about things that don’t matter. Choosing among 300 cereals and choosing the width of belt loops is madness. It is a waste of time, a waste of life.
True freedom, true happiness, can only come when we choose to pay attention to what really matters.
People matter. Community matters. Love matters. We must nurture our relationships, including our relationships in this beloved community we have created.
We must practice gratitude. Rather than read labels and compare products, let us appreciate the abundance of our lives. We have been given so much, so much.
Let us cling to those we love.
Let us make time for one another.
Let us give thanks.
Choose love.
Choose gratitude.
These are the choices that really matter.
Amen