The curse of too many choices (Part Three)

Could deliberately limiting our choices actually make us happier, freer, and now more creative? I believe it could and I think this may actually be the most interesting conclusion to our argument about the curse of too many choices. The deliberate limitation of choice can sometimes increase our experience of freedom. 

That may sound contradictory until we distinguish between freedom of possibility and freedom from indecision. If we have 10,000 possibilities in front of us, we possess enormous potential freedom. But if choosing among those possibilities consumes our time, attention, creates anxiety, and leaves us wondering whether we chose correctly, we may feel less free than someone who has deliberately narrowed the field to three.

Imagine deciding that you will have only five restaurants that you regularly go to. This could sound like deprivation, but something interesting happens: the decision disappears. We won’t have to spend 30 minutes searching reviews, comparing menus, looking at photographs and wondering whether something better exists. 

We just choose and because we’ve stopped comparing, we may actually truly enjoy the meal. This could apply to much larger things: clothing, travel, technology, books, hobbies, even friendships. Once we stop constantly comparing what we have with what we could have, what we have can become more satisfying. In fact, for folks with a minimum of common sense happiness isn't simply a function of how much we have, it’s partly a function of how much comparison we allow into our lives, with the less being the better. 

Limiting the number of comparisons we make can make us freer! Suppose we decide, not investigate every new electronic device (phone, TV, etc.), visit every destination, read every book recommended to us, respond to every smartphone notification and on top of this if we don't need to know what everyone else is doing, we haven’t lost freedom, we've reclaimed attention and that may be one of the scarcest forms of freedom we possess. It means that saying no to 95% of available possibilities can give us more time and freedom to engage deeply with the remaining 5%. 

Finally, limitation can make us more creative, something artists have always known. For instance, give a writer an entirely blank page and unlimited possibilities, and the blankness can be paralyzing. Give that same writer a specific subject, a particular length, a deadline and perhaps even a few words that must appear—and suddenly creativity has something to push against. The same thing happens in music, architecture, cooking and science. 

Constraints create problems to solve and problems stimulate creativity. A painter restricted to three colors may discover combinations he would never have considered with an unlimited palette. A cook who has only five ingredients may invent something remarkably original. A writer who decides to write 500 words every morning may produce more than someone who waits for unlimited time and inspiration. 

We could go on and on, but to conclude our discussion, could we find the perfect equilibrium? Let’s see this next…

The curse of too many choices (Part Two)

Are we becoming the victims of having far too much to choose from and far too many options? Consider something as trivial as picking a restaurant. Ten possibilities may be okay, but a hundred is hard work. And once we have selected one, we may still wonder whether restaurant number 37 would have been better than restaurant number 82. The meal itself can become secondary to the nagging thought that perhaps we made the wrong choice. 

This is where FOMO—the fear of missing out—comes into play and becomes very insidious. Every choice simultaneously eliminates countless alternatives. Choosing one book means not reading another. Choosing one vacation means giving up dozens of other destinations. Spending an evening one way means surrendering all the other evenings that might have been.

And so, from that viewpoint, abundance creates a strange psychological equation as the more options we have, the more possibilities we may have to regret not choosing. But with this in mind, there’s another, perhaps deeper, consequence. When in the past, choices were limited, commitment was relatively easy. Once a decision was made, there weren't many alternatives competing for our attention. 

Today, commitment itself can become difficult. Why settle for this restaurant when another one might be better? Why remain with this product when the next model will soon be released? Why stay with this career when there might be hundreds of others more suited for us? Why read this book when an algorithm can immediately offer us ten more? 

This places us at the risk of becoming perpetual and insatiable shoppers—not only of things, but of experiences, relationships, ideas and even identities, and perhaps this is where the real danger lies. A meaningful life requires not only choosing, but accepting the consequences of having chosen and with limited time on this earth we can’t live every possible life. Nor can we visit every country, read every book, meet every interesting person, pursue every career, or experience every adventure. 

Life is, by its very nature, an exercise in exclusion. To choose one path is necessarily to abandon countless others. Perhaps these day’s new wisdom won’t consist in maximizing our choices, but in learning which choices can be safely ignored. There is a huge difference between having the freedom to choose and feeling compelled to choose among everything that is available. 

One of the great challenges of the twenty-first century might be to learn how to deliberately impose limits upon ourselves—not because we lack freedom, but because we have discovered that unlimited freedom can itself become a form of bondage. Can this give us more comfort and liberate us from the burden of choice. Let’s discuss it tomorrow

The curse of too many choices (Part One)

It’s been my strong belief for a while that being exposed to an infinity of choices might, in the long run, be one of the great unintended threats to humanity, or at the very least to most developed societies. When I was young, life was simple because I was poor. For instance, the only sport I knew and could practice was skiing because up in the mountains where I grew up, that was the only thing we knew. No soccer, no swimming, no rock climbing and certainly no paragliding!

Choosing, in and of itself, is both an exhausting and time-consuming exercise, without even mentioning the overwhelming—and often powerful—fear of missing out that stands tall as a by-product of a boundless array of options. 

For most of human history, the problem was largely the opposite. Choices were limited. Where we lived, what we ate, what we wore, how we traveled, if we really had to, what work we did, even whom we were likely to marry, were determined to a considerable extent by geography, family, social class and circumstance. 

Those limitations were certainly not always desirable, but they had one extraordinary advantage: they spared us from having to make thousands of decisions every day. Today, the situation has been dramatically reversed as we can now choose among hundreds of restaurants, thousands of books, millions of songs, endless destinations, countless products, innumerable career paths and an almost infinite number of ways to spend our time. 

The internet has transformed and further amplified the universe of available choices from a village into something approaching infinity. At first glance, this looks like an extraordinary privilege and luxury, but is it really? At some point, abundance stops feeling like freedom and begins to feel like a burden, as well as a paralysis, and that we’re going to explore in my next blog… 

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Four)

In melding meditation with affirmations, there is an important caveat about the latter. It starts with a well-known problem associated with simplistic positive affirmations. For instance, if someone who feels completely inadequate repeatedly says: “I am extraordinarily successful, confident and powerful!”, their mind may respond: “No you're not.” 

This contradiction will actually make the exercise counterproductive. In what I’m proposing, the approach sounds different because my affirmations have been embedded into a broader meditation practice and in my accumulated life experience. 

An affirmation like “I can continue learning and growing” is much easier for the mind to accept than “Everything I want will come to me.” The first one produces some useful mean and I don’t think that its effect becomes less effective with age. 

In some respects, older folks like you and me might in fact have an advantage that we didn't have in your 30s or 40s, as we’ve got decades of experience to draw upon. 

When we all agree that difficult or challenging experiences can become sources of growth, we are not merely repeating a motivational slogan, but we are pulling from an accumulated lifetime of experiences that can be substantiated. 

Our mind can now say, “Yes. I've actually seen this happen”, giving our affirmation considerably more credibility and it may be the main reason why my current practice feels different from the positive-thinking philosophy I encountered in the 1970s. 

In these days, the message was largely, “Believe that you can.” Today, my practice is in fact closer to, “I have lived enough to know that I can change—and I intend to keep doing so.” 

That's a much deeper proposition. Still, I would remain careful about attributing every positive development I’ve experienced since 2020 to meditation and affirmations. I will admit that life contains too many variables for me to establish that from personal experience. 

That's actually more interesting to me than believing that a simple affirmation will somehow magically attract a desired outcome. In reality, I've discovered something potentially much more useful: I have developed a way of deliberately influencing the person that will make my future decisions which is a very powerful form of self-development.

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Three)

Positive affirmations added to meditation can significantly change the equation, and that’s where my personal experience comes into play. An affirmation repeated after 20–30 minutes of meditation is a different animal after one has just spent considerable time reducing mental chatter, sustaining attention, becoming more aware of thoughts, without automatically following them, settling physiological arousal, and entering a state in which one’s attention is unusually concentrated. 

Both can be a very effective combination. It’s probably less as programming the subconscious and more as repeatedly training where my attention and behavior go, creating a fascinating feedback loop. For example let’s say that my affirmation is about becoming more patient (something I’ve been working on). When I meditate, I become calm, I repeat the affirmation while visualizing or emotionally experiencing patience. Now, just a bit later, I encounter an irritating situation.

Previously, the event might have triggered irritation and then automatic reaction, but after months of repetition, If I begin to get the same irritation, I can recognize it and that gives me pause before making a more deliberate choice. I won’t probably not even remember the affirmation consciously and that's a part that can feel almost mysterious, but it might be that the conscious mind doesn't have to be present at every step for a learned pattern to influence behavior. 

Then there’s another ingredient, and that’s emotion, a particularly important element in my case. An affirmation such as “I am becoming more patient” is one thing, but if repeated while I’m in a deeply peaceful state, accompanied by a genuine feeling of appreciation for the people and experiences that shaped me, it may turn into something quite different. 

I’m not merely saying the proposition, but I’m now associating it with a particular internal state that gives me something that through attention, followed by emotion, plus repetition, gets a true change in my behavior. That’s a much more potent learning combination than simply repeating words. 

My meditation/affirmation sequence may be doing several jobs simultaneously, and there is a remarkable circularity where meditation makes the affirmation more receptive. 

My affirmation gives my meditation a direction, while my behavior provides evidence, that evidence strengthens the affirmation and finally, my stronger belief makes subsequent meditation more meaningful. If anything, this explains in part why, after several years, I describe the results as “stunning.” 

Tomorrow we’ll conclude with the limitation I can see in part of my approach...

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part Two)

In trying to find out how this synergistic practice has impacted my life, so far, I need to distinguish between the fact “this produced real changes in me” from “there is a mysterious force causing external events to happen.” The first is compatible with what we know about attention, learning, motivation and behavior. The second is a bit esoteric and would require evidence that goes beyond my experience.

What may have happened in my case is that when I arrived in the US, positive thinking that was a big part of personal development techniques, gave me an anchor in which by thinking positively and believing in myself I could pursue my goal while not letting obstacles define what was possible. 

Whether or not every claim made by the positive-thinking movement was justified, that philosophy had a very practical consequence: it affected what I repeatedly paid attention to and what actions seemed in the realm of my possibilities. 

I also had an important advantage as I wasn’t merely reading about positive thinking, but was living in an environment that rewarded initiative and adaptation, so some of those beliefs were reinforced by my direct experience. My struggle to professionally adapt (US corporate life, 

American culture and language) and my steadfast focus, helped me succeed as belief-triggered action engendered results, which reinforced my convictions and helped me tackle more action. The whole process becomes a virtuous circle. This said, an affirmation repeated when one is busy, distracted, skeptical, emotionally agitated, and simply negative or dystopian is essentially a sentence competing with thousands of other thoughts. 

One case in point is Donald Trump who has long cited the late minister Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, as a profound personal and spiritual mentor, saying that he could listen to Peale "all day" and said he was one of the greatest speakers and influences in his life, but some members of the late Peale’s family have distanced themselves from the president, expressing discomfort with how Trump utilized Peale's religious teachings to project a purely materialistic, aggressive and malevolent public image. 

Tomorrow, we’ll try to understand how meditation can mesh with affirmations from positive thinking…

Fusing meditation and affirmations (Part One)

When I first came to the US in the 70s, I was impressed with the movement towards “Positive Thinking” that was part and parcel of the business culture, at least that was what I thought, compared to Europe’s built-in pessimism and cynicism. 

Perhaps, it’s after reading “Think and Grow Rich” that I got behind that way of thinking, and I must admit that it did help me adapt to the American way of working, and ultimately brought me success. Fast forward to 2020 when I successfully returned to meditation and after a couple years, I began to meld affirmations linked to my desires and goals with that process.

The results have been stunning since then. Is this a fluke or can it be explained someway? Still, I can’t think I should dismiss it as a bizarre phenomenon. There is a quite plausible psychological explanation for why meditation and affirmations can work in synergy when fused together—and my particular story supports this. 

Still, on the other hand, there’s a very reasonable hypothesis that my practice has changed the probability of certain thoughts, emotional responses and behaviors occurring—and those small changes, repeated thousands of times, have produced surprisingly large differences over several years. 

In the next blog, we’ll dig deeper into what might have really happened through my practice, so make sure to stay with me...