Consumer Vertigo

As long as you want something average, satisficing doesn’t require much variety. The old Holiday Inn slogan, “The Best Surprise Is No Surprise,” is all you need - minimum standards of not-bad quality, the old mass-market, one-size-fits-all formula. But nobody is average all the time. Maybe you’re looking for that red cotton sweater because even the softest wool makes your hypersensitive skin itch. You’d be much worse off in a world where sweaters only came in wool, while many other people, those with “normal” skin, would be perfectly happy. They might even argue that shoppers were better off with fewer fibre choices.

Since different people care intensely about different things, only a society where choice is abundant everywhere can truly accommodate the variety of human beings. Abundant choice doesn’t force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation and science fiction.

Schwartz writes that, “the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is”. To the contrary, only the proliferation of choice gives us the opportunity to make the decisions we individually deem most important.

These choices about what and how to choose are not only voluntary but meaningful. They help define who we are. And they preserve the essential value of abundant choice. Most people, most of the time, are less interested in choice per se than they are in the benefits of variety. They want to find what truly suits them.

Hiring an interior designer or wedding consultant is not, as The Washington Post’s  Mallaby suggests, a way of “deliberately avoiding choice”. To the contrary, these specialists are valuable because they don’t simply limit the number of options. They limit those options to ones you’re likely to like. These gatekeepers do not reduce your chance of finding what’s right for you. They increase it.

At the heart of the anti-choice argument is a false dichotomy: We can have a narrow range of standardised choices, or we can live with options that are infinite, dizzying and always open.

Schwartz treats commitment as the opposite of choice rather than its complement. By this logic, a market without contracts is freer than one in which contracts are enforced. After all, what if I sell you my car and then change my mind and want it back?

“Social ties actually decrease freedom, choice and autonomy,” he writes. “Marriage, for example, is a commitment to a particular other person that curtails freedom of choice in sexual and even emotional partners.” So gays who cannot legally marry their partners are somehow freer than heterosexuals who can? There’s something deeply wrong with this understanding of choice. Freedom to choose must include the freedom to commit.

Ultimately, the debate about choice is not about markets but about character. Liberty and responsibility really do go together; it’s not just a platitude. The more freedom we have to control our lives, the more responsibility we have for how they turn out. In a world of constraints, learning to be happy with what you’re given is a virtue. In a world of choices, virtue comes from learning to make commitments without regrets. And commitment, in turn, requires self-confidence and self-knowledge.

“We are free to be the authors of our lives,” says Schwartz, “but we don’t know exactly what kind of lives we want to ‘write.’” Maturity lies in deciding just that.