Wood’s World

In modern day western culture, we live in an affluent world full of choice and decisions. Generally, as time progresses, remaining pleased with a decision you made is likely to make you happy. Whereas becoming displeased with a decision you have made could make you unhappy, depending upon the importance and the ramifications of that decision. So the question is, what makes you become unhappy with a decision?

Usually, the unhappiness or stress is caused when it becomes apparent that the decision you made didn’t turn out to be the best one. Who will you blame for this? Yourself most probably, after all you were the one that made the choice. You will end up feeling regretful. Another source of unhappiness is the choosing process its self, the fear of regret and the desperate need to avoid it.

I’ll give you an example to demonstrate this. My farther recently had a decision to make regarding three different pension schemes. Without boring you with the details, I’ll just say that they were significantly different, but none of them were substantially better than the others. This was causing him quite a lot of unrest and displeasure, even though they were all very good financially and most people would have been delighted with any one of the options. The reason for this stress was because of the multiple choices that he had. If he was only offered one of the three options, he would have been very pleased with it. It wouldn’t have caused him months of unrest and worry about which option would be the best one.

So there is this idea that the more you have to choose from, the harder it is to make a choice and be satisfied with it, which leads to more people being unhappy with the decisions they make. We’ve all been in the situation where we order a meal from a restaurant, only to be dissatisfied with it when everyone else’s meals come out and you wish you had chosen one of theirs instead.

In many situations, if we only had fewer options to choose from, sure we might not have as much abundance of choice (some would call it ‘freedom’) but we would probably be more happy with the choice we made because there is less opportunity to think that we got it wrong and then blame ourselves for getting it wrong.

In most cases, I’m quite good at accepting the decisions I make, even if they were not the best in retrospect. But this is because I’ve thought about all this and I’ve seen on many occasions how decision making and regret can make people unhappy. I’d rather be more accepting and have more of an “oh well, nothing I can do now except learn from it” sort of attitude.

I’ll end with this illustration which was shown in a lecture by Barry Schwartz. It’s a great depiction of the old proverb the grass is always greener on the other side. This is another thing that can limit your happiness given a particular choice or sittuation. If you are always thinking about what could have been or could be, you will never live in the moment and always be looking at how you can change a given situation to make it better, rather than enjoying what you have.