Making decisions is a massive portion of our daily lives, from what you have for breakfast, what you say to your friends or what show you watch when you get home. You are provided with so many options and so many scenarios to choose from that you end up making thousands of micro-decisions from the second you open your eyes in the morning to when your head hits you pillow. However, we somehow often still feel helpless in the grand scheme of things as many of our decisions, be it big or small, are influenced by external factors that linger out of sight. So, ultimately, having “too many choices” may only be an illusion.
Although we have so many opportunities to make choices, and also options to choose from, these options are often only accessible by certain demographics. Be it small decisions like what you have for lunch or much bigger ones like what university you go to, these choices are limited by so many factors such as financial capacity, geographical location or your personal ability. Additionally, our society is growing more competitive than ever. This means that in order to just stay afloat, you might be more pressed to make certain choices. From being pressured to learn a more “useful” course at university or take a better paying job rather than one that you are more passionate about, individuals are often pushed towards the more “successful” pathway by their family, peers or society as a whole. We are also limited by the “social contract” in which there are literal laws in place to constrict our choices. Therefore, due to an abundance of external factors and influences, people may not be as free to make choices as they think.
Nevertheless, some might argue that there are still plenty of things that we have a say in, for example, the smaller decisions we make, like what to spend our free time doing or what to buy at the grocery store. However, these less significant choices are still influenced by the people around us, even if we don’t realize it. You might feel obligated to spend your free time with your family or buy what your partner likes at the grocery store. Instinctively, we, as humans, are highly susceptible to social influences and therefore even the smallest of our actions are often dictated by how we want people to perceive us.
Ultimately, although we are presented with an overwhelming number of options, there are only a few that we are willing and able to make when put into the realistic context of our lives.