is more less?

[adge]

have we made a fetish of choice?
Has modernity brought with it a millstone?
I don't just mean in terms of affluence, lifestyle choices too-religion or not, parenthood or not, promiscuity or not, in fact increasingly many aspects of our lives are filled with what i see as a series of burdensome and pointless choices-which electricity provider best serves my needs and do i spend hours trying to work out which one will?
You get the idea, maybe it's just me, but from the colour of my cell wall to the choice of internet provider i'm either too lazy or missing the point of it all.

[verbal gymnastics]

The world, technology, life goes quickly.

Part of me thinks I should look more into better deals for things like electricity, gas etc but another part of me doesn't care. But then I feel I should because the money I save means I can spend it on things I want for me and the family.

And if there is a point to it all then I've either missed it or haven't found it yet.

But then I have trouble finding the way to San Jose. Other people do too because a song was written about it.

Hope this helps

[Jack of All Parades]

Cannot resist popping in if only for a short stint as this question is slyly much bigger and encompasses the very heart of philosophy as I have always understood it to be. We spend our days constantly formulating, justifying and analyzing the 'welter of possibilities' we face complete with 'different possibilities of action, of belief, of ways we could be' as individuals, institutions and societies. These are the gorgeous Socratic Puzzles that fill our lives and they involve myriad choices and the questions they raise and as Nozick says 'sometimes an interesting question motivates analyzing a concept, sometimes a central notion leads to a new and puzzling question, and sometimes these links iterate to form a longer chain of reasoning." Hence possiblities; hence choices; hence a mental life; hence being human and alive.

[SoulForHire]

Having more prevents you from appreciating what you have. Gavin Harrison of Porcupine Tree/ King Crimson described in an interview how as a kid, he would wear out the groove's of his dad's jazz records as he would only get one once in a while. So he would fully absorb each nuance of the record through countless, repeated listens. He then compared that to a recent experience on a plane with his iPod filled with thousands of songs, yet he felt like he didn't have anything to listen too.

Yes. I whole heartedly agree. Abundance can completely turn out to be a major subtraction in experience.

[adge]

you've kind of hit the nail on the proverbial
My angst is that even if we opt out of making certain 'advantages' economic choices, we feel we must be missing out on something, our laziness costs us. By not taking the time to shop around we miss an opportunity, when in fact no such opportunity exists.

The world, technology, life goes quickly.

Part of me thinks I should look more into better deals for things like electricity, gas etc but another part of me doesn't care. But then I feel I should because the money I save means I can spend it on things I want for me and the family.

And if there is a point to it all then I've either missed it or haven't found it yet.

But then I have trouble finding the way to San Jose. Other people do too because a song was written about it.

Hope this helps

[Otis Westinghouse]

Modern life means so much of everything to get your head round, and yet despite all the noise, it's still not so hard to work out what are the important choices and things and what's frippery, distraction or of minor relevance. You can't equate issues of religion or parenthood with electricity providers. The internet provides plenty of ways of making these burdensome choices quicker to execute. A few minutes of googling and getting a sense for what's a good deal, etc., and you're there. Having children is something that should take years to work out (and I would say if you're with the right person but are just not sure if you want to, don't!).

Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious. Just responding to the question. The god thing about getting older, I find, is that it becomes easier to work out what is important and deserves your time and what not, which isn't to say you don't end up wasting too much time on that which is not, but you do appreciate the time you spend on the right things more.

Gavin Harrison should learn to love shuffle more. Or change his music collection (then again if you're drummer for tosh like Porcupine Tree, heaven help you). I created an 8 hour playlist from my 13,500 songs for a long car drive last week, with almost no repeats of artist, and loved every second of it, no different to when I was wearing out Hunky Dory in 1973.

Carpe diem, and all that.

[Jeremy Dylan]

My iPod is like a radio with good sound quality and only good music on it, plus no irritating DJs.

[adge]

It’s not question of equating the trivial with the profound,
Rather that the very ubiquity of choice both in the economic and social spheres is actually altered how we are and how we live our lives.
Lets take the point about parenthood and by association marriage as a useful example on this.
50 or 60 years ago (in the UK, though the same can be said of much of the West) marriage was
pretty much a forgone conclusion for most people and by default so was parenthood.
There was a kind of template you got married-for the main part before your 20’s and you became
a parent not long after. That was the model, and even though there was choice in terms of partner, or
number of children, it was a fairly circumscribed range of options-if you got a girl pregnant-you married,
if you were gay-well homosexuality just wasn’t factored into the equation-you married. Divorce was possible, though rare because of the social stigma still associated with it and the financial difficulties of being a one parent family.
Now, of course, things are very different-i was talking to a friend the other day and asked him if he thought
he would get married and couldn’t see a ‘justification’ for it. Marriage has become a lifestyle choice, not
an inevitability and so has the possibility of having children.
Having children doesn’t necessarily mean getting married either, that’s another option to be considered.
If i get married, it doesn’t mean for life, if i’m in a relationship, it’s not forever-maybe something better will come
along, (but that goes for my partner too) maybe i don’t want a relationship, but am i sure i don’t? Maybe i wan’t
to have as many sexual encounters as possible with no responsibility-it’s another option.
If i want children, will i postpone parenthood until i’m in my 30’s, if it turns out i can’t have children will i opt
for adoption or IVF etc.
So this supermarket of choice extends from the trivial to the most important aspects of our lives-we've gone from a one size fit's all society to a bespoke society in a generation or two.
What's interesting isn't merely that this is the case, but that we tend to think more choice leads to a greater sense of fulfilment or satisfaction.

Modern life means so much of everything to get your head round, and yet despite all the noise, it's still not so hard to work out what are the important choices and things and what's frippery, distraction or of minor relevance. You can't equate issues of religion or parenthood with electricity providers. The internet provides plenty of ways of making these burdensome choices quicker to execute. A few minutes of googling and getting a sense for what's a good deal, etc., and you're there. Having children is something that should take years to work out (and I would say if you're with the right person but are just not sure if you want to, don't!).

Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious. Just responding to the question. The god thing about getting older, I find, is that it becomes easier to work out what is important and deserves your time and what not, which isn't to say you don't end up wasting too much time on that which is not, but you do appreciate the time you spend on the right things more.

Gavin Harrison should learn to love shuffle more. Or change his music collection (then again if you're drummer for tosh like Porcupine Tree, heaven help you). I created an 8 hour playlist from my 13,500 songs for a long car drive last week, with almost no repeats of artist, and loved every second of it, no different to when I was wearing out Hunky Dory in 1973.

Carpe diem, and all that.

[adge]

MP3's are great, but do they give more satisfaction that say a walkman?

My iPod is like a radio with good sound quality and only good music on it, plus no irritating DJs.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Of course they do! A friend described shuffle as like shining a torch into a vast, dark trove of half-forgotten treasure. I love shuffle in the car. The excitement of what's next. My 8 hour playlist was similar as I could barely remember what I'd put in it.

Sure marriage, kids, etc. are matters (mostly) of choice, which is a very good thing. I just hope you and others don't apply the same sense of ennui to these things as you feel, understandably, regarding the choice of internet provider.

One choice I would recommend is to place the quote (only where needed) ahead of the response to it, and not below!

[ice nine]

It's like having cable and there's nothing good on to watch.

[Jeremy Dylan]

It's like having cable and there's nothing good on to watch.

If there's nothing good to listen to on your iPod, it's your own fault - you programmed it. I'm never without something to listen to on my iPod - even though I can only fit about 2/3 of my music library on it. Plus audio books, radio shows and podcasts.

[adge]

Of course they do! A friend described shuffle as like shining a torch into a vast, dark trove of half-forgotten treasure. I love shuffle in the car. The excitement of what's next. My 8 hour playlist was similar as I could barely remember what I'd put in it.

Sure marriage, kids, etc. are matters (mostly) of choice, which is a very good thing. I just hope you and others don't apply the same sense of ennui to these things as you feel, understandably, regarding the choice of internet provider.

One choice I would recommend is to place the quote (only where needed) ahead of the response to it, and not below!

Said with all the rigour and conviction of a re-animated corpse.
It's not a question my ennui, if this pluralism is the kind of panacea it's touted as, shouldn't incidences of clinical depression and anxiety be falling exponentially? actually the opposite is happening, depression and the more extreme indicator -suicide are increasing.
In an age of greater affluence, personal autonomy and control, how do you account for the rise of these things, even allowing for things like pharmaceutical incentivisation and manipulation psychological categorisation etc, the reality is we are not witnessing an epidemic of happiness or fulfilment of the kind your MP3 anecdote might imply, but rather a kind of freebasing towards existential anxiety.
Could it be that ironically the more we have and the more choice we have, the greater our expectations?
Have you ever heard anyone say 'there's nothing on tv these days'?

My argument regarding individual choice regarding marriage, sex, parenting etc isn't based on some puritanical desire to return to some half witted conception of a pre 1960's golden age, rather it's a concern about the kind of mindless rap that accompanies any discussion of choice, when what is required is an understanding of it.

You can have another go at de-constructing the deeper meaning from the question about mp3's if you want, maybe this time you could use the analogy of Crack

[Otis Westinghouse]

I think it's about time you changed your internet provider.