Marcos Salazar - Co-founder of Be Social Change & SocialChange.is, Social Entrepreneur, Leadership Researcher, & Expert on Psychology of Gen Y & Millennials

Making Good Decisions Part 3 - Four Essential Tips on Managing the Tyranny of Choice

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This is the third in a series of posts about the psychology of making good decisions in the contexts of life in our twenties and thirties. In the first post we talked about the good and bad things of having much more freedom after college. In the second post  we talked about the cost associated with an abundance of opportunities. In this post we will discuss how with every opportunity there is a cost and the more choices we explore, the worse we can feel about our decisions.

While many times it seems like the overwhelming number of choices today makes it impossible to know if you’re making a good decision, Barry Schwartz has come up with a number of psychological techniques that you can use to help narrow down your options and increase the satisfaction of the decisions you do make.

Set Limits on Your Choices
One way you can manage an excessive number of choices is by learning to set limits on the options you look at. It’s almost auto­matic to think, “The more choices I have, the better off I will be.” However, you have seen how the more options you look at, the more likely you will be unhappy about the choices you make due to oppor­tunity costs and regret. Therefore, it can be healthy for you to set limits on the number of options you look at when trying to make a decision.

After discussing this idea with Deborah, a twenty-eight-year-old from Washington, DC, she told me that even though she didn’t consciously think about it at the time, limiting her options made her feel more satisfied about some of the major decisions she has made since leaving college. “When I was looking for teaching jobs, I applied to one in DC and one in Virginia, then chose the one I liked better.

"When I was searching for an apartment, I looked at two places then decided on the one I liked the best. I think because I spent time only looking at a few choices, I’ve been happier with my decisions because I didn’t wonder about other jobs or apartments. Instead, I’ve spent my time enjoying my current job and apartment and focusing more on the good things about the decisions I made. This is not to say that I won’t look for other jobs or a new apartment in the future. It just means I didn’t waste time worrying about all the other options out there.”

This may sound counterintuitive, but when you learn to restrict your options, you will limit the amount of extra energy you spend on looking at too many choices. By figuring out which choices really matter to you and which are less important, you can focus more time and energy on those decisions whose outcome can bring you happi­ness and fulfillment.

Making Good Decisions - Part 2: The Costs of Opportunity

"Ultimately when you’re in school, the answers to questions like, ‘What’s important to me?’ are somewhat, well, academic," says Chris, a twenty-five-year-old from New Orleans. who I spoke to "You’re in school. You’re taking classes, moving forward in a well-defined system. Then you graduate and suddenly there are a million systems, a million structures to choose from. It’s overwhelming.

"The fact is, life after college is ‘real.’ You have real decisions to make like: How important is money to me? How much time do I want to spend at work? How important is it that I have a job that I love? How can I stay healthy? Do I want a lot of challenge intellectually? Do I want a varied experience? What kind of risk do I want to take in my life career wise? Is it important for me to be busy all the time or do I need downtime? How much sleep do I need?"

Have you had trouble dealing with all the choices available to us during out twenties and thirties? Do you have trouble making decisions after looking at all those options?

This is the second in a series of posts about the psychology of making good decisions in the contexts of life in our twenties and thirties. In the first post we talked about the good and bad things of having much more freedom after college. In this post we will discuss how with every opportunity there is a cost and the more choices we explore, the worse we can feel about our decisions.

Understanding Opportunity Costs in Our Decisions
After college, you’re faced with what seems to be an endless array of choices that can often time be overwhelming They can take the form of small questions such as, “Where should I get an apartment?” “Should I buy a car?” or “Should I pay eighty dollars a month for a gym membership?” to tougher ques­tions like, “Should I move to a new city away from my friends and family for that dream job or find a job that is not so great but is near a lot of friends?” or “Should I take that job that pays well but I don’t enjoy or take a pay cut and work at a job that I love?”

In his book The Tyranny of Choice, Barry Schwartz has found that much of the negative feelings that young professionals experience while trying to make all these deci­sions stems from what are called opportunity costs. This means that the cost of any option we choose involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have provided us.

Making Good Decisions - Part 1

When you have to make a choice and you don’t make it, that itself is a choice.

—William James

How do you know you are making the right decisions? A lot of the time you don't. Sometimes you have to just go with your gut or go with the information that is available at the present moment and hope for the best. What this means is that with any decision there is a certain level of risk. Of course, major decisions often times have more risk, so we usually spend more time contemplating those decisions. However, there is a great deal of psychological research showing that more contemplation is not always better.

This series of posts will try to get at the psychology of what makes a good decision in the contexts of life during our twenties and thirties. We will also talk about strategies you can use to make better decisions and ultimately be as happy as possible with the choices you make in your personal, social, and professional life.

Struggling to Make the Right Decision With So Much Freedom
“I think the hardest thing for me has been all the choices I’ve had to make,” Leslie, a twenty-five-year-old from San Francisco, told me. “I went to graduate school right after college, so I hit a terrible job mar­ket with a bachelors and an advanced degree, about ninety thousand dollars worth of debt, and no real direction. I’m too young for the professor jobs I want (that I went to school for).

“I’ve been in a bind trying to figure out where to go and what to do. Which car should I buy (within the one thousand range of course) and where should I live? Should I move into the cheap place in the bad neighborhood, in with a semi-new boyfriend, or take my chances with a roommate? It has been hard to decide which jobs to take, how best to look for the jobs I want, and how to get further training.

“Mainly, I don’t know what to do with myself. I just don’t know what path is right and I don’t have a lot of room for mistakes because my expenses—medical insurance and student loans—are so high that I have to make a cer­tain amount of money. I feel that I have no room for mistakes (because of my crushing debt as well as incredible fear of failure), yet I also have no idea about and no preparation for making the right choices.”

If you took a step back and looked at the time since you were born all the way up until this point in your life, you can see that your life has been a journey in the direction of progressively more freedom—that is, a movement toward a life of higher and higher lev­els of personal choice. As you matured from infant to child, then from child to adolescent, and eventually adolescent to emerging adult, each transition created a wider range of options to choose from while at the same time decreased the number of constraints imposed on your choices.

Free­dom can certainly be beneficial to your growth and personal develop­ment because it allows you the opportunity to explore all that you want out of life. However, as Leslie explains, you can experience major difficulties in dealing with the plethora of new lib­erties and countless choices that this freedom-filled period creates.

Post-College Depression: Part 3 - The Tyranny of Choice and High Expectations

This is the third post in a series of entries I will be writing on Post-College Depression.

In the first post of this series I talked about what post-college depression is and typical symptoms and causes. In the last post we discussed how a lack of a sense of control over one's life can result in millennials and emerging adults from Generation Y developing post-college depression. Today we will talk about how the tyranny of choice and high expectations can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression after college.

After graduation we have the freedom to be the master of our own fate and can choose any direction we want to go with our lives. However, just because we have more choice does not necessarily mean that we are always better off. In fact, today’s overabundance of choice can actually plunge emerging adults into the post-college blues pretty quickly after graduation.

Because we have grown up in a time of increased choice and higher levels of experienced control, there has also been an increase in expectations about control.

As Barry Schwartz explains in The Paradox of Choice, we believe, "...we should be able to find education that is stimulating and useful, work that is exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative, spouses who are sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting...With all the choice available, we should never have to settle for things that are just 'good enough'" (2003, 210).

In addition, we not only have grown up expecting perfection in our external lives, but also expect it from ourselves. We expect to be able to manage every aspect of our life and when we fail or seem to lose control, we blame ourselves intensely, making us susceptible to developing learned helplessness and post-college depression.

As Schwartz has found in his research, "Unattainable expectations, plus a tendency to take intense personal responsibility for failure, makes a lethal combination."

Are You a Maximizer or Satisficer?
One possible factor in determining whether you will develop this kind of learned helplessness is whether you are a maximizer or a satisficer. A maximizer is someone who strives to make the best possible choice in every instance while a satisficer simply looks for the choice that is "good enough."