‘Like a kid in a candy store’: choice paralysis and the tyranny of freedom.
We all want freedom. Freedom makes us happy. But it doesn’t follow that the more freedom we get the happier we get. In his book ‘the paradox of choice’ psychologist Barry Schwartz writes:
“There’s no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.”
This isn’t just one of those things that feels true…it actually is true.
In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper from Columbia and Stanford University published a study about jams. The setup was that on a regular day at a local food market, people would find a display table with 24 different kinds of jams. Then on another day, at the same food market, people were given only 6 different types of jam choices. The result was that the table with more options attracted more people but the table with less jams made more sales. The reasoning is clear…the more options we have the less likely we are to choose.
But it gets worse. When we have more options, not only are we less likely to choose…when we finally do make a choice we feel worse about because we can’t help but wonder if we chose the wrong option. This is why we spend most of the night trying to choose a movie, choose one, then stop it part way in to choose something else anyway. We don’t do well with options.
And it’s the same with life. The modern view of happiness is that we can’t have too many options. We can be and do whatever we want…but sometimes we find that freedom less freeing and more paralysing. This is because, in the end, we don’t want freedom, we want purpose. Freedom is a means to an end. We need freedom in order to pursue purpose and if we don’t have a purpose then our freedom loses it’s meaning too.
This was why Jesus said “Whoever I set free, is free indeed”. It’s only God who can set us free to find our purpose and meaning in him…and when we find this we are free indeed. Our desire for more freedom, is in the end, a desire to find true purpose and Jesus claims to have the answer to both.
