Man shaking head in confusion

TOO MANY CHOICES: Avoid getting scattered by choosing less

Last updated: March 17th, 2019

How many books can you read at one time? How many can you actually carry with you anywhere? Walking into a library stacked with rooms full of shelves packed to the rafters with all sorts of categorized wonders was like Alice dropping down a rabbit hole. Choosing a book used to take a lot of time and felt like a consecrated gap in the time/space continuum. Just walking the aisles and running your hands down the clean covers of the many-times-borrowed, or sweeping the dust off those forgotten took you into so many other worlds that you forgot what you actually came to find as all the others beckoned.

What did I come for? Oh yes. Where will I find it? The librarian points and you go to the correct aisle and find something that seems to appeal. Removing the book from the shelf, carefully reading the back cover, then the inside front (of hardcover books) then the introduction and maybe a bit of the first page to see if the writer’s style suited. As it grabs you, you find a stool, or go sit at the available tables and engross yourself a little while longer—time and place have disappeared.

The same goes for Ye Olde Booke Shoppe where time, besides the hustle and bustle of other shoppers and traffic in the streets, seems to stand still, or move to another dimension. Then you either bought the book or borrowed it from the library and carried it home to read until finished, thoroughly enjoying or not, and then set out to look for the next.

But it took effort and time. You had to make decisions, set aside time and chores, get dressed to appear reasonably acceptable to other traversers of the road, walk quite a distance, take a bus, or climb in your car and drive to wherever, look for parking then wend your way to the door. And you went with the goal of finding that one particular piece of many words that would hold you captive and take you into another world for a long time. Often, on reading the book at home, you realized that it wasn’t exactly what it set out to be in the first reading, the author drags, loses the plot or hasn’t properly researched his subject matter. But the thought of going back, the distance and effort and time to do so, has you attempting to make sense of what you have, trying to enjoy it and maybe learn something before actually throwing in the towel.

It meant being goal-directed, engaged in the chore of finding a book and mindful of the consequences of choosing incorrectly.

Not so any longer. Thousands of books await the flick of a finger on a keyboard—you can do it nude or on the toilet (the bath not too good an idea, electronics and water seem to have an aversion to each other). Not sure what you want to read? Doesn’t matter, just grab a whole bunch in a more or less genre and flick through them haphazardly until something sticks—I enjoyed the last book by this author, grab more…but I also want to read…grab it…then there is…grab that too…and while I’m at it I may as well grab these because I am interested in…

And onto the ebook reader of some manufacturer it goes. Not one or two but hundreds. And when it comes to disappearing into the words? Not for too long. If it palls after the first chapter, flick to the next, and the next. And thus we become more and more scattered, less and less engaged and mindful.

The availability of books on the Internet is only an example of all the other areas in our lives that we’re bombarded with so many things to choose from it impedes in our wholeness, our peace and equanimity. Movies, clothes, food, houses, cars…even life partners!—myriads of choices that we can make from the comfort of our own home and have them easily delivered.

A potato is a potato, not so? So you want fries, do they have to be crinkle-cut? It’s a potato, dammit, just eat the thing! A tomato in any other guise is still just a tomato. Jeans are jeans—a piece of cloth cut to fit legs and butts of various shapes and sizes with stitching, pockets, buttons and a zip. They cover the bottom half of a body and can be worn until they disappear into so many holes they are unrecognizable. A car is simply a four-wheeled contrivance to get us from point A to point B while chewing up the environment and pulling money out of said jeans pocket. It’s not a status symbol, it’s simply a thing made up of metal, nuts and bolts and guzzles fuel. How many shades of orange are there, and does it really matter?

When there are too many choices, we become scattered—our attention grabbed by the next gadget, the next unique way of preparing food, the newest vehicle model with all the gadgets, the latest model computer—we become dissatisfied and our lives turn into a constant search for an ever illusive peace and happiness.

Refusing choices is also a choice—a wise and empowering one. Know what you want, make sense of it, research it, then go out and look for it, however long it takes until you find it. Then be happy with it.


Image man shaking head in confusion ex Shutterstock
  1. I almost finished reading this article but I got distracted by the “you may also like” section :p Great points

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