Carli and I do a brain dump of all the topics we propose to write, with the goal of posting every day. Struck with indecision, while also in the process of writing other pieces, I noticed today that I couldn’t go forward with writing because there were so many interesting subjects. On average, Americans make about 35,000 decisions a day.

Much like the famous Jam Experiment, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a study in 2000 on decision making with jam. Yum. Inside a Draeger’s (I love that store…), they set up a display with 24 samples of varying types of jam. On another day, they limited the sample to only 6 types of jam. While the larger display attracted more people, both groups who tried the jam received the same discount to purchase a jam of their choosing. They found that the group that sampled the more extensive array were 10 times less likely to purchase jam than the group that were only presented 6 varieties.

Psychologists such as Barry Schwartz call this The Paradox of Choice (his book, TED Talk below).

Schwartz identifies two major features that paralyze us when making decisions. He observed that people reported greater dissatisfaction when faced with more choices, as it actually constrains our freedom and energy, often leading to decision fatigue. Consumers are typically grouped into “Maximizers” and “Satisficers”, where maximizers, as the name suggests, ponder greatly about the perfect and best choice. Satisficers are people who are more content with the choices that seem “good enough” and are less likely to doubt their decisions.

French philospher René Descartes calls indecision a type of fear. Written a year before his death, The Passions of the Soul prescribes an inaction of the body stemming from the mind:

“Now I call it a kind of fear, even though it may happen that, when we have a choice between several things that appear to be virtually equal in goodness, we remain uncertain and undecided, without, however, feeling any fear. For this kind of indecision stems purely from the situation, and not from any agitation of the spirits: hence it is not a passion, unless the uncertainty of the choice is aggravated by the fear of making a mistake. But in some people this fear is so habitual and so powerful that often, even though they have no choice to make between alternatives and see only one line of action to pursue or to avoid, it holds them back and causes them to waste time in looking for other possibilities; in this case, there is an excess of indecision, which stems from an excessive desire to do the right thing, and from a weakness of the understanding, which has no clear and distinct notions, only a host of confused ones… the remedy for this excess is to accustom ourselves to form definite and determinate judgements about whatever things we are confronted with, and to believe that we are always doing our duty when we do what we judge to be best, even though, perhaps, we may be judging quite wrongly.”

Less than a century before him in the Selection of Essays (I thank the Baltimore Book Thing for my free copy and the serendipity of coming across these works), French philospher Montaigne’s excerpt in Inconsistency of Our Actions regards the actions of people to be driven by circumstances and immediate emotions more than their beliefs:

“In all antiquity it is hard to pick out a dozen men who set their lives to a certain and constant course, which is the principle goal of wisdom. For, to compromise all wisdom in a word, says an ancient [Seneca], and to embrace all the rules of our life in one, it is ‘always to will the same things, and always to oppose the same things’. I would not deign, he says, to add ‘provided the will is just’; for if it is not just, it cannot always be whole.”

And correspondingly, extending to our permutable existence, he writes,

“What good does it do a man to lay in a supply of paints if he does not know what he is to paint? No one makes a definite plan of his life; we think about it only piecemeal.”

In the same way that his “essais” (in French meaning “tests” or “trials”) were written and iterated over the course of his life, Montaigne declares that ascribing an individual to affix their beliefs to a single denomination or closed tenet is a difficult practice.

We are shaped by our experiences, none two alike. Thus, our convictions are reasonably subject to change and indecision. Experience has also taught us the pain of making a wrong decision, and the immensity of having only ourselves to criticize for the responsibility of our actions.

This may be why we stay in “situationships” that don’t seem to serve us, find it difficult to move forward in career choices, or have trouble figuring out what shoes go with my Steve Jobs-esque turtleneck.

But what do I know (“Que sçay-je?” - Montaigne)? I don’t even know what I’ll have for dinner.

While this is only my second piece, I hope I can be guided in both my writing and everyday decisions. One of my solutions going forward is to limit the number of topics alloted on our growing spreadsheet. Making informed choices should also alleviate some concerns thereafter. In any case, we thank you for making the choice to take some time to read our blog! ;)