I don't buy it. But then I do tend to actively limit options rather than expand them. Maybe that means I am not to be trusted.
I had to pick a new shower head at Target today and couldn't decide for 30 minutes whether to get the basic chrome 4-function one ($25- the old one broke because the plastic became brittle, so it had to be chrome) or the high-end double head one which cost twice as much ($50). Even worse, there was no signal in the store so I couldn't call home to ask for guidance. This is going to affect my mornings for the next 10 years, I have to get it right! I hate having choices, if there had just been one I would have been fine with whatever it was. Curse you American consumerism.
Sounds like the difference between this and this.
Actually I thought of the same thread, Di. Oh, and of M-choosing.
Although, wait. I am less drawn to the dichotomy between wanting perfect and being content with good enough. The dichotomy between fulfillment through social interaction and fulfillment through interacting with information resonates more. A comment section like this being a wild and crazy intersection of the two.
The world is divided into two kinds of people: people who divide the world into two kinds of people and people who don't.
I don't tend to feel tortured by the road not taken after one has been taken, but I have almost constant anxiety about the loss that will be caused by future life-decisions long before the options are clear.
* Not you, Jammies. You're the pilot episode of Veronica Mars of my heart.
I love this footnote. "Pilot episode of Veronica Mars" is more or less equivalent to "best thing ever," but using it as a declaration of love seems a little incongruous:
I'm never getting married. You want an absolute? Well, there you go. Veronica Mars, spinster... I mean, come on, what's the point? Sure, there's that initial primal drive. Ride it out. Better yet, ignore it. Sooner or later, the people you love let you down.
Damn, I really killed this thread with my Pavlovian response to "Veronica Mars", didn't I?
Any time someone refers to Veronica Mars, all I can hear is Humphrey Bogart's voice saying "Marrrzz."
I'm sure if I ever watched VM, this problem would go away.
I sympathize, SP. Most of the hard choices for me are ones where I know it's going to matter, but I don't know how to gauge it. I was so paralyzed by the 700 (!) varieties of bathroom fixtures available that I sent an e-mail to my plumber's wife begging her to just pick something simple. She did a 90% fine job. The 10% annoyingness is that the power of the spray far exceeds what my tiny shower can tolerate, and there is no adjustment. So towels have to be placed strategically to prevent leaks.
I like Penelope Strunk (even though I don't fundamentally buy the "Aspbergers" thing). But this column was a little simplistic. You can't just frame it as happiness vs. optimizing choices (what does "optimizing" even mean when it makes you unhappy?). You have to take one step further and get into the role of status-seeking, competition, and ambition. Settling means being a loser. Except it doesn't.
I know many of you find Penelope Strunk to be a boring, Aspie-faking, gimmicky marketing personality.
Penelope White, though, is awesome.
I vaguely recall Schwartz's argument as becoming more applicable as wealth increases (though presented as applying to everyone at all times). This is from summaries I read, not from his book, so it might not be a fair characterization.
Most of the choices you're confronted with in everyday life are fake choices (twenty different sort of fast food outlets), or things you can't meaningfully choose between (which of the 70 doctors near you do you want as your g.p.) because you're not competent or informed enough to choose between them. All the rest is largely happenstance and any life altering choice can only be seen in hindsight.
I never trust people who advocate choice; they always turn out to want to sell me something.
Agreed, Martin. From the country whose politicians are obsessed with the idea of giving people "choice" in health care, this drives me insane. I mean, what about improving health care standards across the board so that nobody cares where they go to get it? It's a conjuring trick: make the punter watch the "choice" so they don't notice what you're doing with the quality.
However, in some more trivial cases there is a large "choice" which is essentially meaningless because it's all within incredibly narrow boundaries which have been set in advance by some industry conference or something.
An example: this year it's almost impossible to buy kitchen tiles in Britain which aren't some shade of brown. That doesn't mean you can't find 40 different kitchen tiles in different shades and different patterns (and different prices) within walking distance of your front door. But if you want blue tiles, you're shit out of luck.
And this, I think, is down to the traditions of "fashion", which has always been set by the industries for their own convenience. If the tile industry let me go into a big box DIY place and see a range of actually distinct options, they'd feel they were losing control.
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... I mean, what about improving health care standards across the board so that nobody cares where they go to get it? ...
People (understandably) don't like changing doctors even if the new one is just as good as the old one. Thus the political pressure for "choice" which mostly means allowing people to keep their existing doctors.
I don't see living an interesting life as "seeking the most perfect option". For me it is experiencing a range of options; sampling not optimisation. Aging has made me realise that achieving notable proficiency in any one field means being a dabbler at best in others. This is something I find a bit unfortunate (as in, all those lives never lived) but can accept. I still like to get a feel of what the different options are like. This is one of the main pleasures I get from travelling -- experiencing different ways of life, however limited that experience may be.
In other fields (like a dentist or what's for dinner) I'm happy to settle as well. I don't see them as important enough to improve beyond a certain baseline. [My dinner baseline is probably quite high :)]
19 is fabulous. I just wish that they were selling more than one.
Agreed, Martin. From the country whose politicians are obsessed with the idea of giving people "choice" in health care, this drives me insane. I mean, what about improving health care standards across the board so that nobody cares where they go to get it? It's a conjuring trick: make the punter watch the "choice" so they don't notice what you're doing with the quality.
Quite, and 'choice' is usually extremely anti-egalitarian in these contexts. Which is, as far as I can tell, precisely the point.
I know many of you find Penelope Strunk to be a boring, Aspie-faking, gimmicky marketing personality.
"Personality" is exaggerating a bit. She's more like an ELIZA for people seeking to reduce themselves to the pluperfect twenty-first century personality: the salesperson who has nothing to sell but herself, transparent, impervious.
In case 13 was too subtle, her last name is "Trunk", although I suppose I don't mind settling for "Strunk".
The Amazon reviews of her are interesting . . . Ordinary people looking for job advice who are left wondering why they should listen to somebody who's been fired from most of her jobs.
Just last weekend I had a conversation about the happiness-responsibility tradeoff. Wanting more information before making a choice is pretty context-dependent. For work or for stuff having to do with schooling choices, actually with healthcare also, being persistent about wanting more information makes a lot of practical sense. Usually this is because relevant information is actively hidden or not easy to find.
If that habit seeps in too deep, though, IMO that's a problem, since the relevant information interpersonally (the character of other people, the nuances of an interaction) is not amenable to persistent, pessimistic inquiry.
So I don't see optimizing vs settling as a deep personality trait, rather as a style choice that it's best to be able to control.
I think I've said before that I like reading PT. Partly I like her writing, and partly I like her willingness to post personal material. I get the feeling that I wouldn't much care for her in person. I loved her gentle putdown of Gretchen Rubin, though.
Isn't The Paradox of Choice about how people, seeking to be happy, try to increase the number of alternatives available to them, even though having more alternatives makes them less happy? Trunk totally misreads this in the passage quoted (and indeed in the rest of her piece).
I'm also not sure what it would mean for someone who, like her, wants to have an interesting life as she defines it (a life in which she is interested in lots of stuff, and gets to pursue things that interest her), but instead has a "happy" life. Wouldn't she be unhappy if she were bored? Doesn't her pursuit of an interesting life constitute happiness? It's a weird feature of the "happiness literature" that happiness gets reified to such an extent that it's independent of individual notions of a good life.
I'm also not sure what it would mean for someone who, like her, wants to have an interesting life as she defines it (a life in which she is interested in lots of stuff, and gets to pursue things that interest her), but instead has a "happy" life.
She doesn't have a happy life. She's been unsuccessfully pursuing happiness for the past 3 years in this intense little research-oriented way, and in this post she is concluding that that search is hopeless.
Would anyone want to join a networking site called "Brazen Careerist"? Not exactly something you'd want to advertize . . . And that's her personal brand, not her users . . .
27: Someone should have clued her into the truism that pursuing happiness isn't the way to be happy. I suspect that by pursuing her version of an interesting life, she'll be much happier than when she was working through a happiness checklist.
I dunno, I just thought her post confused way too many issues to be applicable to how I see the world.
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I'm fourth in line for tickets to Obama's town hall meeting here in Lorain, Oh. I'm not sure how they decide who gets to ask questions, but I'm working on mine. So far this is what I have:
"Mr. President, are you troubled by the allegations [fact?] that Goldman Sachs short sold mortgaged backed securities, and this is part of why they weathered the financial crisis? If you are troubled, how does this effect your policies toward executive compensation."
"Mr. Preside, how do you respond to charges that your economic team is too close to Wall Street. I'm thinking specifically of Timothy Geithner's handling of the AIG bailout and the possibility that he tried to hide the fact that AIG paid back some banks 100 cents on the dollar using bailout money, banks that otherwise would have otherwise not been paid at all."
Also, I'm worried that I may have to give up my place in line to get Caroline to one of her after school activities.
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26.2: It strikes me that maybe what she is calling "happiness" is really more "satisfaction." Some people are generally satisfied with what they have and this makes them happy. Other people are bored by this and are happy to not ever be satisfied.
I think of that They Might Be Giants song (cover) when I think of dissatisfied people.
Now it's over I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want,
Or, I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do.
The tune to that song is the tune to which I memorized the list of investigative questions for a quiz at some point.
"Which one? What kind? How many? Whose? Where when what why? To what degree or extent? how much and how often?"
I can't remember the real words now, but the part of the song about "I came back as a bag of groceries..."
I'm holding out for a prosthetic forehead.
Some people just can't be satisfied with the foreheads they have. They seek out more choices.
Actually, I'd settle for a piece of string and a rock to tie my string around.
Buuuuuuut, LB, that's what everybody wants. Is happiness to be found in conformity? Discuss.
I think a policy of rocks and string for everyone can be made to appeal to centrist voters and leftists alike.
Also to cats! Or my cat, at least. I have a feeling he's an anarchist in his heart but certainly in favor of subsidized and regular meal times.
Cats are like college professorstenured radicals that way.
I saw a professor licking his butt just this morning.
A commenter came up to me and said, "I'd like to change your mind..."
32: It's good to see Steve Burns doing well. Blue's Clues just wasn't the same after he left.
This quote from Flippanter in 22 is a beautiful piece of prose: "the salesperson who has nothing to sell but herself, transparent, impervious."