When I was 12 growing up on the east side of Bridgeport, once in a while on a hot summer evening my brother and I would walk 10 blocks to Dairy Queen on East Main Street. We didn’t have enough money for a sundae with fudge and nuts or a sundae in a mini New York Yankees batting helmet. Small cone. Vanilla or chocolate – that was the decision. It was an easy decision for me. I preferred vanilla.
Today, there are 50 flavors of ice cream. Things have become cheap, and even if you don’t have a lot of money, there are a bazillion options. You can spend oodles of time scrolling online to try to make the best decision, and just when you think you’ve decided, other options reveal themselves.
In one way, it’s a blessing. We should be grateful we can spend so much time deciding on the style of our 12th pair of shoes, rather than how we are going to afford to pay the rent or feed our family (though some still do). What a wonderful world we get to live in.
But are all these options with products, people to be in relationships with, what to eat, what to do on Saturday night, what to drive, what to watch – is all this affecting our ability to focus our brainpower on one thing? Is it hurting our ability to go deep? Is it hurting our desire to commit to one thing for long?
Social, consumerism, and all the rest – each of us deals with all of it differently.
Has the explosion of information and choices, unmanaged by us, made life too complicated?
Is inner peace more difficult with all this if we leave ourselves wide open each day to all of this?
Very timely post Larry and one I’ve thought about more recently as the pandemic comes to an end. The words pursuit of happiness come to mind along with inner peace. Focusing and ignoring distractions, all very difficult. Thanks for posting everyday and I am grateful to have the time and means to read and reflect.
I find it easier to find peace in a place of solitude. There is too much “Noise” out there to break free from it all. Marketers ruin everything that is good…. they just exploit it with more noise. lol
This resonates with me. It takes a lot of effort to filter out the noise. On one hand we don’t want to remove ourselves from this world. On the other hand, most of the noise really is trivial. What I don’t like is how much minutia we have to deal with just to function in todays world. I “have”to have 50-100 online accounts and passwords, be on my kids’ school WhatsApp groups, and Virtual communities. So many details that I don’t really pay attention to any of it and miss the important things in the name of being fully informed. All of these things are very convenient but I’m not sure if life is better. Thanks for your ever thoughtful posts.
100% truth. The world has become so “instant”. Nobody makes choices for themselves anymore. (Guilty a lot of the time myself). There are too many options, too many resources, too many opinions, too much chatter, too many distractions, too much social ridiculing and judging. What happened to getting offended and pouting for half an hour about it, and then moving on with life?? It’s exhausting for our generation I think. On that note…..I’m getting off the internet and back to work! 🙂
The paradox of choice! The more choices we have, the more time we spend deciding and the more anxiety we get hoping that we don’t make a decision that we’ll regret.
Thank you Larry for the shout out!! I’m grateful for Think Daily everyday. My strive for inner peace is a beautiful process. With that I’m able to be more open minded to the world, people and issues around me. Social media doesn’t rule my life!! Have a blessed day!!
I sell HVAC to homeowners. WAY too many choices out there. And the web is chock full of terrible information, it confuses them more. What can you do…it’s the world we live in now I guess
Good one Larry. We need to simplify and get back to having great experiences rather than great posessions.
There is a great book about this called The Paradox of Choice. It seems like more choices would make us happy, but it doesn’t. It gives us anxiety in the form of “FOMO” or Fear of Missing Out. Less choices actually make people happier and make them more confident in their choices.
I’ve experienced in my journey
Simpler is better
And less is more….