I remember the days when you used to be able to buy a Dove bar.
I'm pretty sure Dove bar became a Magnum, which was a standard ice cream bar with chocolate around it, and then a Magnum became 500 different types of magnums.
There's a special on at the local supermarket, and so Alison goes to the shops and brings home white magnums, salted caramel magnums, classic magnums, and mint magnums. But when we were in Valencia recently, there were another 100 different flavours.
We crave choice everywhere; we want something that suits our taste exactly, and therefore, the people who provide the things for us have to provide 100 million different versions of that thing so that the individual gets exactly the thing that they want.
Of course, this is not just about ice cream bars; we have 1000 million possibilities, all of us. Free access to all the information the world has ever had right at our fingertips on the mega ultra-supercomputer that sits and pretends it's a phone.
We can sign up for almost any learning opportunity for next to nothing, and we can search everything that's ever been written or done, more or less. We can watch television series or movies more than we could ever have the time in our lives to consume; the same goes for music, and pretty much the same for everything. And what happens when we have all of this choice?
We can't choose.
The research was done on this a long time ago. We present it when we're talking about sales and dentistry, it's called the ‘paralysis of choice’, the more choice you give, the less choice it's possible to take or to make.
What we do instead nowadays is we withdraw into something or somewhere safe; instead of making a choice, we procrastinate and hide from work or tasks. We watch mindless shows on television that repeat automatically at the end of each episode, or we just doom scroll on some sort of social media, which we pretend isn't social media.
We're past the stage of just scrolling on Instagram or just scrolling on TikTok. If you are me, who took the high and mighty road of coming off social media all those years ago, for me, it's just the news. For my wife, it’s Facebook and buying furniture, if you can find it, for your new house.
We all have a reason to be there, we all have a reason to hide, and mostly that's because we have more choices than we know what to do with.
The real ticket here is focus, and the focus is the ability to say no and to block out the things which are a distraction from the main attraction, but it becomes harder and harder for the individual human to try to fight against the strength of the machine.
I identify it in myself now, my ability to avoid doing the most important work that I have to do by maintaining that I'm too busy.
Too busy is a choice.
Too busy is saying, “I don't have the ability to focus on the things that are important”.
Blog Post Number - 4243
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