Options – Do we have enough of them?

Choices, alternatives, options. Call them by any name you want. If you live in a competitive world, you are familiar with them. And as you are reading this post, I bet you live in a competitive world.

With a little thinking, we can easily reach to a conclusion that we work mostly for having more and more choices in our lives. For us, choosing anything is not as important as having the option of choosing something else. Even if we know that the thing (or person) is precisely something we want, we don’t go for it unless we have some other options to choose from.

This looks very natural when we keep a way out. Something to fall back on. Or “Plan B”, as they call it. But do we stop there? Won’t you like to have virtually unlimited options in every field of your life? Even nowadays, this seems to have become the catch line of many advertisements. All the companies want to provide their customers maximum possible number of choices. “Now choose from 99 colors”, “Pick your favorite from thousands of designs” and so on.

But how good it is? In my opinion, having choices kills your creativity, focus, determination, stamina, and most importantly – your killer instinct. When you are obsessed with having more options, you get diverted from doing what you wanted to do with your most preferred option. When having an option to retire, less people choose to work. When having an option to lose, most people won’t go for that last winning punch.

Too many options make you too comfortable for living a good life. And yet, they don’t seem to be enough. Life is not about what set of choices you have, but it is about what you choose from it.