Laura Santos’s Updates

The Paradox of Indecision

Since the beginning of the classes, I have been thinking about what I could write in these three texts. The fact that I could choose any topic I wanted made me very excited. I had many ideas. I could talk about my favorite books, movies, series or music; about interesting experiences, theories, opinions, polemics.

That's when I was faced with a plethora of options, which terrified me!

I have always been an indecisive person, but I realized that there is a difficulty in choosing when the options are too many, which does not only affect those who are indecisive, but most people. My mother, for example, who is super decisive, takes about two hours to choose a movie on Netflix; my father spends an entire day in a bookstore to buy three albums, and my sister has already stopped ordering at Ifood because she didn't know which restaurant to choose. These are cases close to me, but I doubt that this has not happened to you.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this the Paradox of Choice and says that, contrary to popular belief, an excess of options paralyzes people. Because, with so many different alternatives, we believe that there is a perfect choice. But the search for it is extremely frustrating, because we never know if we made the right one. And even when we have made a decision, we still notice every little detail in that path that makes it less perfect, and every little detail in the others that we discard, that makes us regret our choice. So we can never be fully satisfied with any of them.

In short, I have no idea what to write about, so I decided to write about the fact that I have no idea what to write about, and I will probably regret it forever.