The real merit of simplicity

A few weeks ago I emailed my husband before I left work to tell him that I was stopping at Whole Foods on my way home from work and asked him if he would like me to get him anything in particular for dinner. His response: "whatever".

Now, at face value, this could have been the preferred response because it gave me cartes blanches in quickly selecting dinner items and calling it a day. However, "whatever" was in fact the worst possible thing to hear because it meant that the responsibility of making a choice fell to me, ultimately resulting in an extra 20 minutes spent agonizing over the myriad meal options that he may or may not have wanted to eat that night.

Thankfully, an article on LATimes.com this morning discussing research on choice and decision-making elaborated on exactly why the "whatever" response and too many choices in general can be quite problematic. Exploring a notion referred to as "decision-fatigue", the article explains:

In fact, some studies show that having to make too many decisions can leave people tired, mentally drained and more dissatisfied with their purchases. It also leads people to make poorer choices -- sometimes at a time when the choice really matters.

The notion that choice is always good for people -- the more choices the better -- seemed intuitively wrong to Kathleen Vohs, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota. "Clearly there are costs to having too much choice," she says -- and she set out to find what they were.

Vohs, who has studied the effect of choice on consumers for many years, found in a recent project that even making pleasant choices can deplete one's mental resources, making a person less able to concentrate later.

Less able to concentrate on, say, my dissertation proposal that I'm supposed to be working on in the evenings, but can never seem to focus on by the time we're done with dinner?

A similar article discussing our capacity for will power appeared in the New York Times last year, and also noted that initial attempts to practice will power in one area, can deplete our ability to do so in another unrelated area, such as trying to abstain from shopping in the afternoon and from drinking in the evening.

Of course, chalking up my nonexistent progress on my dissertation to fatigue from deciding what to eat for dinner is probably a bit of a stretch. However, the fact remains that I do often feel a notable sense of anxiety at times when I am asked to make extra decisions, however small, that require mental energy that I had hoped to spend elsewhere.

Ironically, yesterday when I stopped at Whole Foods, this time knowing that my husband wanted chicken teriyaki for dinner, I found myself stuck in the store for an extra 20 minutes trying to decide what the heck I wanted to eat. Figures.