modern life (two years later)
I am a fallen woman:
http://twitter.com/subdee
(AOL stuff I promised here ended up over there. There's not much more to the story, anyway...)
Read through Barry Schwartz' ode to limits, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. All kinds of issues with his chapter detailing the specific "excessive" choices of modern life, including:
1. There's a grumpy old man vibe here. In the future we'll probably adjust to the cognitive drain - at least to the point where we stop noticing how non-optimal it is - like the scene in Back the Future II where Martin McFly's son is watching 11 television screens at once.
2. Only thing I'm prepared to agree with is the burden of always looking for the next better career opportunity. And that's only because I kind of hate job applications right now.
3. You know, Barry, women have had to deal with too many wardrobe choices for ages.
4. "Wherever we look, we see almost every arrangement of intimate relations" - if I was still on board at this point, the author would have lost me here. Even the idea that we are somehow worse off as a society because straight monogamy isn't the only way to be!
The psychology of decision-making is interesting though. I feel like Schwatz is on more solid ground in these chapters. Mostly because he's largely recapping established truths. Highlights:
• maximizer vs. satisficer. According to Schwartz, maximizing and depression are strongly correlated.
• maximizer vs. perfectionist: "I think the difference is that perfectionists have very high standards they don't expect to meet. Maximizers have high standards they *do* expect to meet."
• Framing. Not just a is-the-glass-half-full-or-is-it-half-empty thing: also talks about how advertisers reframe to make not purchasing a loss, instead of purchasing a gain (because people are generally more loss-avoidant than gain-seeking).
• Diminishing Marginal Return of Income: here's one of many papers refuting the claim that as you move up the pay scale, more money buys less happiness. (Most of them are mathematical like this one: intuitively, it makes sense. This is the argument behind Obama's proposed cap on CEO salaries, anyway...)
• Optimists are people who forget the past and pessimists are people who dwell in it.
• There has always been choice. (Camus: should I kill myself, or should I make a cup of coffee?)
• However: "Our social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of debilitating and demanding choices"
Overall: Just like I liked Daniel Brook's claim that rising income inequality has created a real problem for highly-educated members of the upper middle classes who now "have" to decide between (meaningful) public-sector jobs and (awful) private-sector jobs that will put the kids through expensive private schools, I like Scwartz' claim that is it's largely the well-off kids at the best universities who suffer the most from having too many choices. And I like it for the same reason: it's aimed at me. See, I'm suffering too!
One thing that is really nice though (no sarcasm here) is reading a book that ends with guidelines for improving your life by changing your attitude, which is written by a man and aimed at men! (At least, Schwatz claims that men tend to maximize more than women. And maximizing leads to unhappiness. So, therefore...) When I was working at the used bookstore, I noticed a definite gender split in the self-help books -- the ones aimed at men focused on improving external circumstances, while the ones aimed at women focused on improving attitude. So here we have another example of how some gender distinctions are breaking down, maybe. (Granted the self-help books at the used bookstore were at least 5 years old.)
http://twitter.com/subdee
(AOL stuff I promised here ended up over there. There's not much more to the story, anyway...)
Read through Barry Schwartz' ode to limits, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. All kinds of issues with his chapter detailing the specific "excessive" choices of modern life, including:
1. There's a grumpy old man vibe here. In the future we'll probably adjust to the cognitive drain - at least to the point where we stop noticing how non-optimal it is - like the scene in Back the Future II where Martin McFly's son is watching 11 television screens at once.
2. Only thing I'm prepared to agree with is the burden of always looking for the next better career opportunity. And that's only because I kind of hate job applications right now.
3. You know, Barry, women have had to deal with too many wardrobe choices for ages.
4. "Wherever we look, we see almost every arrangement of intimate relations" - if I was still on board at this point, the author would have lost me here. Even the idea that we are somehow worse off as a society because straight monogamy isn't the only way to be!
The psychology of decision-making is interesting though. I feel like Schwatz is on more solid ground in these chapters. Mostly because he's largely recapping established truths. Highlights:
• maximizer vs. satisficer. According to Schwartz, maximizing and depression are strongly correlated.
• maximizer vs. perfectionist: "I think the difference is that perfectionists have very high standards they don't expect to meet. Maximizers have high standards they *do* expect to meet."
• Framing. Not just a is-the-glass-half-full-or-is-it-half-empty thing: also talks about how advertisers reframe to make not purchasing a loss, instead of purchasing a gain (because people are generally more loss-avoidant than gain-seeking).
• Diminishing Marginal Return of Income: here's one of many papers refuting the claim that as you move up the pay scale, more money buys less happiness. (Most of them are mathematical like this one: intuitively, it makes sense. This is the argument behind Obama's proposed cap on CEO salaries, anyway...)
• Optimists are people who forget the past and pessimists are people who dwell in it.
• There has always been choice. (Camus: should I kill myself, or should I make a cup of coffee?)
• However: "Our social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of debilitating and demanding choices"
Overall: Just like I liked Daniel Brook's claim that rising income inequality has created a real problem for highly-educated members of the upper middle classes who now "have" to decide between (meaningful) public-sector jobs and (awful) private-sector jobs that will put the kids through expensive private schools, I like Scwartz' claim that is it's largely the well-off kids at the best universities who suffer the most from having too many choices. And I like it for the same reason: it's aimed at me. See, I'm suffering too!
One thing that is really nice though (no sarcasm here) is reading a book that ends with guidelines for improving your life by changing your attitude, which is written by a man and aimed at men! (At least, Schwatz claims that men tend to maximize more than women. And maximizing leads to unhappiness. So, therefore...) When I was working at the used bookstore, I noticed a definite gender split in the self-help books -- the ones aimed at men focused on improving external circumstances, while the ones aimed at women focused on improving attitude. So here we have another example of how some gender distinctions are breaking down, maybe. (Granted the self-help books at the used bookstore were at least 5 years old.)