the Secret to Happiness is Low Expectations

I must say that I absolutely loved this podcast! I was watching it in the MIL Lab and caught myself laughing out loud a few times at the various cartoons and the honesty and reality of what Schwarz was saying. I believe the paradox of choice and its 4 negative effects that he highlights, strongly relate to our purchasing behavior.

Analysis Paralysis. When there are way too many choices, we get paralyzed by analyzing all our options and find it impossible to make a decision. Sometimes the easiest choice is to not make a decision at all! Like cell phones. I still haven’t picked up a new one (after 2 years of my old LG that won’t die), because there are way too many phones and options, and not to mention carriers and contracts. I also find that once I do make a decision, I’m not only wondering about what could have been, but I’m also frustrated at how much time it took me to make that decision. This past Christmas, I exchanged some PJ pants from Kohl’s that I had gotten as a gift. I spent a good 45 minutes in the store trying to find something else that I wanted for the exchange. I finally decided on a shirt, but wasn’t completely satisfied. I ended up returning to Kohl’s the next week to go to more of the departments (mainly the picture frames) and returned my already exchanged item for a frame and another shirt. The fact that I remember this in detail, tells you how frustrated and annoyed I am by the whole ordeal. Just give me cash next year….or a gift card to a smaller boutique. From a business perspective, I think that there is a nice niche for boutiques (instead of large department stores like Kohl’s) because you only have so many options when you are in a boutique, and it makes for an easier decision if you don’t compare to all the other stores.

Opportunity Costs = Less Satisfaction. Like I mentioned before, once you make the decision, you keep dwelling on what might have been. It makes you doubt whether or not that was the best option. It reminds me of a story that one of my past professors told about how he offered his young son a lollipop one day and the kid was so excited. The next day, he offered his son a choice between 2 lollipops, and the kid chose one of them, but was noticeably not as happy as he was the day previously. It’s ironic to us, because we are so used to thinking that more choices are a good thing, but in fact, it makes us less happy with our decisions.

Escalation of Expectation. I loved how he said that the secret to happiness is keeping low expectations. I find it very true! Whenever I go watch a movie, I prefer to go on the first day with one of the reasons being that you can make your own judgments, and not have to listen to all the hype from friends or critics. I find that the movies where I go in with high expectation, I usually find to be quite disappointing whereas movies like Iron Man (that I had no expectations for), I found to be refreshingly awesome. I realized that a lot of my friends were disappointed by the Dark Knight which I found amazing (after I watched it the opening night), but they were all the ones who saw it our rave reviews. I’m starting to think that I should stop saying great things about movies, as well as set low expectations for movies that I watch. I want to be “pleasantly surprised” as Schwarz would say; something which has disappeared after all of our many choices, and thus higher expectation for the perfect product.

Self-Blame. We have to blame ourselves if we are unhappy with our decisions especially since there are so many choices. I believe this self-blame will lead us to avoid decision making, because we don’t want to hold the responsibility. It makes me think that it puts a lot of pressure on the household, and that each spouse must really support the other, in all the decisions that have to be made (ex: food, laundry detergent, vacation, schools for children, etc). All in all, more choices is not better, and huge makeup stores like Sephora are great in number of choices, but overwhelming to the point where I’d rather not make a decision, or I face the risk of being stuck unsatisfied and wondering if I could have made a better choice.