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What is a choice or What does it feel to know that you have a profuse amount of options available to choose from ? In today’s era, going to a shopping mall or looking for any recommended movies to watch on Netflix, we are provided with abundant choices. Is the copious amount of choices in modern society a boon or does it burden us with endless deliberation ? This article explores more on the fine line between freedom and frustration in the age of choice.

The Benefit of Choice –

Having freedom of choice motivates people to do work in which they are good. It empowers them and improves decision making capability. It improves happiness and overall satisfaction of individuals. 

Again having options is good for consumers like us. If we don’t have multiple brands for a particular product, then the market would lead to monopoly and we would suffer as the price of the product would increase and consumers wouldn’t get good service. 

In the corporate world, employees feel more satisfied when they are provided with anatomy i.e freedom of choice. The urge to choose a development model, till the release of the product, if an employee worked freely without much intervene of managers or higher staff members, it leads to employee satisfaction and higher rate of product yield.

The Downsides of too many Choice –

On the other hand, It leads to wastage of time. It increases dilemma and it develops self doubt. It triggers anxiety and sometimes leads to regret and second-guessing.

In the modern time, anything we want to do may be exploring travel destinations or buying a simple smartphone, choosing a career path or shopping from e-commerce platforms, we have an abundance of options available. We choose the best from all the options that we have at the cost of our precious time and yet we have this tiny bit of doubt whether our choice is good or I should look for more. Because of these choices we are losing our attention span and we ended up with unlimited scrolls and we couldn’t reach a particular decision. Sometimes we leave the task as we couldn’t find a solution from a long list of options just to start the same process again the next day. 

Practical Example from My Personal Experience – 

Simple example I can put here. I was looking for a dress to buy for my birthday. I was looking on the Amazon site for almost 5 to 6 days and I couldn’t decide which one to buy. Finally when I came to a decision, it was too late to order as the dress would reach after my birthday. So I had to visit local shops to buy a dress for myself. Can you imagine how much time I wasted on just a simple task ? 

Let’s go for another example. Recently we visited almost 10 different banks and financial organizations to get a loan to buy a house. The offers available in all the places were different and everyone tried to attract us with their best offer. Finally we chose one bank to take a loan which was suitable for us and from where we could get the best benefit. So yeah even if we spent some time in understanding the benefits a bank is providing, still it would help us in a longer period of time as our loan would last for 15 to 20 years.

Practical Example From a Case Study –

“The Paradox of Choice” a book published by Barry Schwartz in 2004 has given a practical example of a study conducted by Professor Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University where the study says with 6 jars of Jam, the customers stopping to taste is 40% and buying rate was 30%. But when they increased the jars to 24, customer engagement increased to 60% yet the buying rate decreased to 3%.

Conclusion –

If we look for such examples we can find plenty of them. We can see both the positive and negative side of the given option. It all depends on how we are going to utilize them and how to get the best for ourselves. For a short term period, it might feel like a waste of time but for a longer period of time it would help and save us. Sometimes the choices we make are not good for us, we are aware about it, we still can’t do much about it other than regretting it. This is kind of a rare scenario. I hope you guys can handle it well. What do you think about this topic ? Do share in the comment section. 

Featured Image: Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash