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“I just want to be able to give my kids a choice”

That’s what I believed and to a large extent I still do but I’m driving down my road to go to a coffee shop to do some work undisturbed for once and I hit the traffic lights and I can’t decide whether to go right or left.

In truth it’s a pretty insignificant decision because the difference in time to go right or left is minor but I am having to make a lot of choices at the moment, having to make a lot of decisions and we only have so much ability to do that.

Multiply that a billion times over and you have our lives now, our everyday.

The first thing we do is open a laptop and look at these emails – decisions and choices, decisions and choices. Shall we do this piece of work first? Shall we look at the spam from our favourite supplier? Shall we buy something? Shall we do the online shopping? Shall we, shall we, shall we?

This is why we invented interruption marketing, to try and take the choices away, to put something in front of someone as loudly as possible so that got their attention away from everything else.

The problem with interruption marketing is that it’s an ever escalating, ever inflationary process and we have reached a point now where it’s almost impossible to make a noise loud enough to be heard without setting off an atomic bomb.

And so instead we paralyse.

We choose anaesthetic to take the choices away. We drink, we smoke, we take socially acceptable (or socially unacceptable) forms of medication, we connect to the feed.

In a world of too many choices we choose to put ourselves in situations where we don’t have to make any.

And what about our kids, how can they possibly decide?

Congratulations, you did the right thing, you worked hard at school, you got the grades, you ticked all the boxes now your choices are infinite. Isn’t that great? You can do anything you want.

How do you choose then?

The fear of making a mistake and the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of making the wrong choice in the face of a billion choices is overwhelming and often destructive.

I am told by the powers that be now that I have to give my patients every possible option.

I work in an environment (privileged to do so) where almost every patient can have almost every option.

Not surprising in the face of that that many people decide to do nothing.

Blog Post Number: 1946