The misery of plenty

Published 07 June 2004

The Paradox of Choice: why more is less Barry Schwartz HarperCollins, 265pp, £14.99 ISBN 0060005688

Barry Schwartz writes: "Because of a ubiquitous feature of human psychology, very little in life turns out quite as good as we expect it will be."

The default human condition is suffering and loss, and what few rewards are available - Schwartz's example is a Lexus - quickly turn to ashes in the mouth. Having the Lexus is not as good as buying the Lexus and, furthermore, possession quickly exposes one to the remorse of not having bought a Mercedes.

Schwartz, a professor of "social theory and social action", wears his jeans until they are falling apart. As a result, he was not exposed to the explosion of choice in the jeans market until six years ago, when he wandered into a branch of Gap. He just wanted "regular jeans", but the concept of regular had been lost in the marketing mists. Try going into Starbucks and asking for a cup of coffee. In Gap, Schwartz was confronted with the anguish of almost infinite choice and it made him unhappy.

But choice, on the face of it, is a good thing. It is an aspect of freedom. Obviously, one is more free when choosing to buy either a Lexus or a Mercedes than when being obliged to accept a Trabant. One's autonomy is enhanced and, psychology tells us, humans are happier and more effective when they feel in control of their own destiny.

At some point, however, choice begins to subvert autonomy. Recently, in New York, I was despatched to buy a carton of Tropicana. But the name of Tropicana is so legion in America (no pulp, tangerine, you name it) that, paralysed with indecision, I froze before the fridge.

So the paradox in Schwartz's title is that choice is first good and then bad. It is especially bad for those people he calls "maximisers", who always seek out the best. They spend hours, days, weeks wading through the excess of choice in the modern world, make their selection and then descend into bitter regret when something better comes out. Maximisers have a particularly rough time with computers.

"Satisficers", in contrast, are prepared to settle for "good enough". They seek out what does what they want and buy it as soon as they find it. They therefore suffer less regret than maximisers and waste less time. At one level, this book is simply a self-help guide to becoming a satisficer and it concludes with an 11-step programme (make your decisions non-reversible, regret less, practise at attitude of gratitude) designed to quell the anguish of choice.

One problem you might have at this point is deciding whether you are a maximiser or a satisficer. Schwartz leans heavily on those questionnaires that tend to be all psychologists have by way of raw data. I have always found these puzzling, not to say impossible. Every question could be answered differently depending on my mood. How, for example, should I rate the statement "I am satisfied with my life" on a seven-point scale? Now about five, yesterday about two, and there are times when I've been up at seven and down at one. All right, so I'm an average three and a half, but then what does "satisfied" mean and is there a difference between "my life" and "life"?

Leaving that aside, it is plain that Schwartz's central point is unarguable - an excess of choice makes us unhappy and we would be wise to limit the number and range of choices we have to make. As he acknowledges, however, the modern world is designed to draw us into the desert of infinite choice. Americans encounter 3,000 advertisements a day. Doctors, recruited into the ideology of consumer choice, now ask patients how they would like to be treated. The stress induced by trying to answer the question will undoubtedly make your condition worse. At every turn we have to ask ourselves "What's right for me?" and, at every turn, the answer evades us because there is no answer. What's right today will be wrong tomorrow.

Schwartz, perhaps deliberately, does not delve into the truly momentous implications of all this. Wealth and its inevitable accompaniment, more choice, are not making people happier. Misery is on the increase. Certainly, very poor countries are more unhappy than rich ones, but once they pass the subsistence level, happiness does not grow. And beyond a certain point, it begins to decrease significantly. "The American 'happiness quotient'," observes Schwartz, "has been going gently downhill for more than a generation."

In the past 30 years, US GDP has more than doubled, but 14 million fewer people describe themselves as "very happy". Again, we might doubt this because of the use of those questionnaires, but here the results are backed by hard facts. Depression and suicide are increasing across the developed world. The one choice we are not being offered, it seems, is fulfilment.

This undermines the view that there is anything stable or lasting about modernity. We can't live without it - having driven the Lexus, few would wish to go back to the horse-drawn buggy - but we can't live with it. Certainly we can soften its effects using methods such as Schwartz's 11-step programme, and most people come up with some home-made equivalent to help them get off the treadmill of consumption. Nevertheless, over time the truth that our modernistic striving is largely in vain must sink in. The Lexuses will rust and the questionnaires will go unanswered. Whether you will then be able to get a decent cup of coffee and a regular pair of jeans remains to be seen.

Bryan Appleyard's Understanding the Present: an alternative history of science is published by Tauris Parke

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