Choose choice

Watching Plan B's Ill Manors the other night I was disturbed by the depth of desperate depravity on our council estates. 

Pity the Plight of Young Fellows

The blanket of stars above their heads in the sky feels like a ceiling 

Slowly crushing down on them as the terror starts progressing

Impressional young children that never had a chance

Growing up in these manors most are doomed from the start

Because the minds of their peers are as ill as their hearts.

Choice came to mind. Or the lack of it. No choice. No real choice. No sensible array of options for analysis, optimisation, selection. Not really. 

We often talk about having too much choice.  It causes confusion, anguish, regret that we have perhaps selected the marginally sub-optimal route. It creates a cognitive burden on our weary minds. 

Watch Ill Manors and you may, like I, feel disgusted with yourself, loathe yourself, embarrassed at the gross extent of your privileged naivety.

Choice - the undervalued gift. A dream for the millions in this country standing with their backs against the wall, forced to select between bad and worse.

Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, refers to two groups: the satisficers and the maximisers.  Satisficing refers to a known decision-making strategy, where the aim is to meet an acceptable threshold, rather than an aspired optimum. Maximisers make exhaustive efforts to drive the greatest positive result, anything short is mediocrity. 

When we feel pressured by the decisions that we need to make day to day, or when we perhaps feel dissatisfied with our selection, it's not a question of too much choice. It's more a question of constraining our satisfaction with unrealistic and impossible goals.

So many of us are maximisers, we want perfection, we want to make sure we have squeezed every ounce of value out of the choice available to us.

But, take the cost of maximisation into account; the time, the effort, the stress, the opportunity loss. Take instead the array of choice as the item to be maximised. Then you may see your success at meeting your life aspirations a little differently.