Our heightened individualism means that, not only do we expect perfection in all things, but we expect to produce this perfection ourselves. When we (inevitably) fail, the culture of individualism biases us toward causal explanations that focus on personal rather than universal factors. That is, the culture has established a kind of officially acceptable style of causal explanation, and it is one that encourages the individual to blame himself for failure. And this is just the kind of causal explanation that promotes depression when we are faced with failure.
As a corollary, the modern emphasis on individual autonomy and control may be neutralizing a crucial vaccine against depression: deep commitment and belonging to social groups and institutions—families, civic associations, faith communities, and the like. There is an inherent tension between being your own person, or determining your own “self,” and meaningful involvement in social groups. Significant social involvement requires subordinating the self. So the more we focus on ourselves, the more our connections to others weakens. In his book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam focused attention on the deterioration of social connection in contemporary life. And in this context it is relevant that the incidence of depression among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is less than 20 percent of the national rate. The Amish are a tightly knit traditional community, one in which social ties are extremely strong and life choices are rather meager. Do the Amish have less control over their lives than the rest of us? Undoubtedly yes. Do they have less control than the rest of us compared to what they expect? I think not. How much do they suffer psychologically from the constraints imposed by community membership and its attendant responsibilities? My suspicion is that they suffer rather little. Viewed from within Amish society, where expectations about individual control and autonomy are very different than they are in mainstream America, community membership doesn’t entail much in the way of personal sacrifice. For the Amish, the unease that the rest of us may feel at the prospect of significant communal obligation is largely absent. It’s just the way things are—for everybody. By elevating everyone’s expectations about autonomy and control, mainstream American society has made deep community involvement much more costly than it would be otherwise.
The distortions incumbent in the desire for control, autonomy, and perfection are nowhere more apparent than in the American obsession with appearance. The evidence is rather compelling that most of us can do little over the long term about our body shape and body weight. The combination of genes and early experience plays a major role in determining what we look like as adults, and virtually all diets tend to produce only short-term changes. These facts about body weight are directly contradicted by what the culture tells us every day. Media and peer pressure tells us that obesity is a matter of choice, personal control, and personal responsibility, that we should aspire to look perfect, and that if we don’t, we have only ourselves to blame. According to the culture, if we had enough discipline and self-control we could combine sensible eating habits and exercise regimes and all look like movie stars. That in a typical year Americans buy more than 50 million diet books and spend more than $50 billion on dieting suggests that most Americans accept the view that what they look like is up to them.
The illusion that each person can have the body that he or she wants is especially painful for women, and especially in societies, like ours, in which the “ideal” body is extremely thin. Cultures that promote the ultrathin ideal for women (for example, Sweden, Great Britain, Czechoslovakia, and white America) have much higher rates of eating disorders (bulimia and anorexia nervosa) than cultures that do not. Even more significant for the present discussion is that in cultures that adopt the ultrathin ideal, the rate of depression in women is twice that in men. In cultures that adopt a more reasonable ideal, sex differences in rates of depression are smaller.
The (admittedly speculative) connection between thinness and depression is this: body weight is something people are supposed to control, and to look perfect is to be thin. When efforts to be thin fail, people not only have to face the daily disappointment of looking in the mirror, they also must face the causal explanation that this failure to look perfect is their fault.
Depression When Only the Best Will Do
UNATTAINABLE EXPECTATIONS, PLUS A TENDENCY TO TAKE INTENSE personal responsibility for failure, make a lethal combination. And, as we have come by now to expect, this problem is especially acute for maximizers. As they do in regard to missed opportunities, regret, adaptation, and social comparison, maximizers will suffer more from high expectations and self-blame than will satisficers. Maximizers will put the most work into their decisions and have the highest expectations about the results of those decisions, and thus will be the most disappointed.
The research that my colleagues and I have done suggests that, not surprisingly, maximizers are prime candidates for depression. With group after group of people—varying in age, gender, educational level, geographical location, race, and socioeconomic status—we have found a strong positive relation between maximizing and measures of depression. Among people who score highest on our Maximization Scale, scores on the standard measure of depression are in the borderline clinical depression range. We find the same relation between maximizing and depression among young adolescents. High expectations and taking personal responsibility for failing to meet them can apply to educational decisions, career decisions, and marital decisions, just as they apply to decisions about where to eat. And even the trivial decisions add up. If the experience of disappointment is relentless, if virtually every choice you make fails to live up to expectations and aspirations, and if you consistently take personal responsibility for the disappointments, then the trivial looms larger and larger, and the conclusion that you can’t do anything right becomes devastating.
The Psychology of Autonomy and the Ecology of Autonomy
PARADOXICALLY, EVEN AT A TIME AND PLACE WHEN EXCESSIVE expectations of and aspirations for control are contributing to an epidemic of depression, those who feel that they have control are in better psychological shape than those who don’t.
To understand this, we need to make a distinction between what is good for the individual and what is good for the society as a whole, between the psychology of personal autonomy and the ecology of personal autonomy. In a study focused on twenty developed Western nations and Japan, Richard Eckersley notes that the factors that seem best correlated with national differences in youth suicide rates involve cultural attitudes toward personal freedom and control. Those nations whose citizens value personal freedom and control the most tend to have the highest suicide rates.
Eckersley is quick to point out that these same values allow certain individuals within these cultures to thrive and prosper to an extraordinary degree. The problem is that on the national or “ecological” level, these same values have a pervasive, toxic effect.
The problem also may be exacerbated by what Robert Lane refers to as hedonic lag. Lane says that there is “a tendency of every culture to persist in valuing the qualities that made it distinctively great long after they have lost their hedonic yield.” This, he says, “explains a lot of the malaise currently afflicting market democracies.” The combination of hedonic lag with the mixture of psychological benefits and ecological costs of the culture’s emphasis on autonomy and control makes it extremely difficult for a society to get things right.
Clearly, our experience of choice as a burden rather than a privilege is not a simple phenomenon. Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing.
In the next chapter, we will review and amplify the recommendations we’ve made throughout the book, exploring what individuals can do, despite societal pressure, to overcome the overload of choice.
What We Can
Do
Part IV
CHAPTER ELEVEN
What to Do About Choice
THE NEWS I’VE REPORTED IS NOT GOOD. HERE WE ARE, LIVING AT the pinnacle of human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our ancestors could, at most, only dream about, but it has come at a great price. We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn’t satisfy us to the degree that we expect. We are surrounded by modern, time-saving devices, but we never seem to have enough time. We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don’t know exactly what kind of lives we want to “write.”
The “success” of modernity turns out to be bittersweet, and everywhere we look it appears that a significant contributing factor is the overabundance of choice. Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything—to maximize.
I believe there are steps we can take to mitigate—even eliminate—many of these sources of distress, but they aren’t easy. They require practice, discipline, and perhaps a new way of thinking. On the other hand, each of these steps will bring its own rewards.
1. Choose When to Choose
AS WE HAVE SEEN, HAVING THE OPPORTUNITY TO CHOOSE IS ESSENTIAL for well-being, but choice has negative features, and the negative features escalate as the number of choices increases. The benefits of having options are apparent with each particular decision we face, but the costs are subtle and cumulative. In other words, it isn’t this or that particular choice that creates the problem; it’s all the choices, taken together.
It isn’t easy to pass up opportunities to choose. The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results. If the ability to choose enables you to get a better car, house, job, vacation, or coffeemaker, but the process of choice makes you feel worse about what you’ve chosen, you really haven’t gained anything from the opportunity to choose. And much of the time, better objective results and worse subjective results are exactly what our overabundance of options provides.
To manage the problem of excessive choice, we must decide which choices in our lives really matter and focus our time and energy there, letting many other opportunities pass us by. But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.
Try the following:
Review some recent decisions that you’ve made, both small and large (a clothing purchase, a new kitchen appliance, a vacation destination, a retirement pension allocation, a medical procedure, a job or relationship change).
Itemize the steps, time, research, and anxiety that went into making those decisions.
Remind yourself how it felt to do that work.
Ask yourself how much your final decision benefited from that work.
This exercise may help you better appreciate the costs associated with the decisions you make, which may lead you to give up some decisions altogether or at least to establish rules of thumb for yourself about how many options to consider, or how much time and energy to invest in choosing. For example, you could make it a rule to visit no more than two stores when shopping for clothing or to consider no more than two locations when planning a vacation.
Restricting yourself in this way may seem both difficult and arbitrary, but actually, this is the kind of discipline we exercise in other aspects of life. You may have a rule of thumb never to have more than two glasses of wine at a sitting. The alcohol tastes good and it makes you feel good and the opportunity for another drink is right at your elbow, yet you stop. And for most people, it isn’t that hard to stop. Why?
One reason is that you get insistent instructions from society about the dangers of too much alcohol. A second reason is that you may have had the experience of drinking too much, and discovered that it isn’t pretty. There’s no guarantee that the third glass of wine will be the one that sends you over the edge, but why risk it? Unfortunately, there are no insistent instructions from society about shopping too much. Nor, perhaps, has it been obvious to you that choice overload gives you a hangover. Until now. But if you’ve been convinced by the arguments and the evidence in this book, you now know that choice has a downside, an awareness that should make it easier for you to adopt, and live with, a “two options is my limit” rule. It’s worth a try.
2. Be a Chooser, Not a Picker
CHOOSERS ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE ABLE TO REFLECT ON WHAT MAKES a decision important, on whether, perhaps, none of the options should be chosen, on whether a new option should be created, and on what a particular choice says about the chooser as an individual. It is choosers who create new opportunities for themselves and everyone else. But when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become “pickers,” which is to say, relatively passive selectors from whatever is available. Being a chooser is better, but to have the time to choose more and pick less, we must be willing to rely on habits, customs, norms, and rules to make some decisions automatic.
Choosers have the time to modify their goals; pickers do not. Choosers have the time to avoid following the herd; pickers do not. Good decisions take time and attention, and the only way we can find the needed time and attention is by choosing our spots.
As you go through the exercise of reviewing recent choices you’ve made, not only will you become more aware of associated costs, you’ll discover that there are some things you really care about, and others you don’t. This will allow you to
Shorten or eliminate deliberations about decisions that are unimportant to you;
Use some of the time you’ve freed up to ask yourself what you really want in the areas of your life where decisions matter;
And if you discover that none of the options the world presents in those areas meet your needs, start thinking about creating better options that do.
3. Satisfice More and Maximize Less
IT IS MAXIMIZERS WHO SUFFER MOST IN A CULTURE THAT PROVIDES too many choices. It is maximizers who have expectations that can’t be met. It is maximizers who worry most about regret, about missed opportunities, and about social comparisons, and it is maximizers who are most disappointed when the results of decisions are not as good as they expected.
Learning to accept “good enough” will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction. Though satisficers may often do less well than maximizers according to certain objective standards, nonetheless, by settling for “good enough” even when the “best” could be just around the corner, satisficers will usually feel better about the decisions they make.
Admittedly, there are often times when it is difficult to embrace “good enough.” Seeing that you could have done better may be irritating. In addition, there is a world of marketers out there trying to convince you that “good enough” isn’t good enough when “new and improved” is available. Nonetheless, everybody satisfices in at least some areas of life, because even for the most fastidious, it’s impossible to be a maximizer about everything. The trick is to learn to embrace and appreciate satisficing, to cultivate it in more and more aspects of life, rather than merely being resigned to it. Becoming a conscious, intentional satisficer makes comparison with how other people are doing less important. It makes regret less likely. In the complex, choice-saturated world we live in, it makes peace of mind possible.
To become a satisficer, however, requires that you think carefully about your goals and aspirations, and that you develop well-defined standards for what is “good enough” whenever you face a decision. Knowing what’s good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So:
Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for “good enough”;
Scrutinize how you choose in those areas;
Then apply that strategy more broadly.
I remember quite vividly going through this process myself several years ago w
hen competitive long-distance phone services first became available. Because I make a fairly large number of long-distance phone calls and because I was being deluged with unsolicited advertisements from various companies, I found it hard to resist the temptation to try to find the absolute best company and plan for my calling habits. Making the various needed comparisons was difficult, time-consuming, and confusing, because different companies organized their services and charges in different ways. Furthermore, as I worked on the problem, new companies and new plans kept on coming. I knew I didn’t want to spend all this time solving my telephone problem, but it was like an itch that I couldn’t resist scratching. Then, one day I went out to replace a toaster. One store, two brands, two models, done. As I walked home, it occurred to me that I could, if I wanted to, pick my long-distance service in the same way. I breathed a sigh of relief, I did it, and I haven’t thought about it since.
4. Think About the Opportunity Costs of Opportunity Costs
WHEN MAKING A DECISION, IT’S USUALLY A GOOD IDEA TO THINK about the alternatives we will pass up when choosing our most-preferred option. Ignoring these “opportunity costs” can lead us to overestimate how good the best option is. On the other hand, the more we think about opportunity costs, the less satisfaction we’ll derive from whatever we choose. So we should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject.
Given that thinking about the attractiveness of unchosen options will always detract from the satisfaction derived from the chosen one, it is tempting to suggest that we forget about opportunity costs altogether, but often it is difficult or impossible to judge how good an option is except in relation to other options. What defines a “good investment,” for example, is to a large degree its rate of return in comparison with other investments. There is no obvious absolute standard that we can appeal to, so some amount of reflection on opportunity costs is probably essential.
The Paradox of Choice Page 19