Choice Is Good, Right?

All of Time and Space. Everywhere and anywhere, everything that ever was ... where do you want to start? – The Eleventh Doctor

Don’t ask me. I don’t bloody know.

I flick through the early morning Sky channels and heartily scoff at the choice of programmes before me. I could play into the stereotype and watch Jeremy Kyle give deluded human fecal matter a platform to advertise the virtues of oral hygiene. There’s always Come Dine With Me, which will no doubt still be on when the universe enters a temporal collapse and the second Big Bang occurs. Early primordial soup metabolism will no doubt be narrated by Dave Lamb. What else? Dog the Bounty Hunter, pah. Catchphrase, Teen Mom, Mother Truckers, Four Weddings, Miami Ink, Friends. I don’t have to stand for this, I remember! I’m not a slave to channel providers- I’m in the 21^st century and I can watch whatever the bloody hell I want.

So I put on Netflix, the streaming service that tries to tailor your tastes to its large back catalogue of film and TV. I flick though and I’m thinking this is much better. What shall I watch? It puts everything into handy genre categories for me. Am I in a TV Comedy, Gory Drama or Cerebral Thriller kind of mood? Its 8:20 am, a bit hard to tell really. Netflix even recommends programmes based on what you've seen before. Liked Sherlock and Luther? Here, you’ll probably like Spooks, lucky we have 85 episodes for you to enjoy isn't it? Isn't it?!

Ten minutes later I still haven’t chosen anything.  I count easily 10 TV shows I’ve been trying to get around to watching, several films that got rave reviews I’ve had my eye on, the new Werner Herzog documentary a friend recommended; but I just can’t make a commitment.  I glance over at a shelf of unwatched DVDs. The penultimate seasons of The Wire look forlornly back at me. Never did get round to watching Band of Brothers, nor Mad Men. My shiny super-dooper box set of Blade Runner: Final Cut remains unopened, gathering dust and remorse. There’s too much stuff. Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it. It's too much.

Oh woe is me. Such wretchedly bourgeois bullshit I know; diddums.  And yet choice, as understood by educated, affluent Westerner types, is perceived to be a universal aspiration. Surely it fosters diversity, autonomy, and self-advancement? It’s hard to argue with that. Choice seems to be the Swiss-army knife of actions. It allows people to separate and individuate themselves, to express themselves, and to experience themselves as active agents who control their destinies and influence their worlds. It is put simply, freedom.  So choice is good yes, more choice however isn’t always better.

Let's say your self-esteem has shaken baby syndrome- so you decide to buy a new pair of jeans. New jeans will obviously make people love you more. Where do you shop? Appreciating the fact that children are terrible at sewing, are you comfortable with Primark or will you go somewhere a little more upmarket? What size jeans? What colour, what design, what brand? You see literally thousands of pairs of jeans, somehow none of them are ‘you’. Paralysed by choice you stumble around. Maybe a nice cup of coffee will help settle you. By the way, do you want decaffeinated or decaf coffee? Large, medium, or small? Organic or regular? Half and half or whole, 2%, or non-fat milk? Brown sugar, refined sugar, aspartame, or saccharin? For here or to go? Cash, debit, or credit? On the way out someone bumps into you, and coffee is all over your shirt. It’ll probably leave a stain, but that’s okay as life is meaningless.

I digress.

For me, DVD and book purchases fall into two main categories: the ones you buy because you really want to watch them- and the ones you buy because you vaguely think you should. A year ago I bought Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, partly because I'd heard it was a good, interesting book but mainly because I figured reading it would make me cleverer. I’m sure everyone has experienced that awkward moment at a party where there’s a discussion about Darwinian imperative and irreducible complexity and you just don’t know anything? I never read it though. A few months ago, having forgotten I already owned a copy, I asked a friend if I could borrow his copy. That's twice I haven't read it.

And I haven't read it  because there’s too much competition from all the other books I've bought but never read. Popular science books. Biographies. Classic works of fiction. Cult sci-fi and horror stories. How-to guides. Photography books. Graphic novels. I can't buy one book at a time: I have to buy at least three or four. Which makes it exponentially trickier to single out one to actually read. When I buy books, all I'm really doing is buying pop-culture wallpaper.

The point is when you have too much choice, you become obsessed about what your decision will say about you. Boy, I’m glad I finally purchased Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; I’m 1069 pages away from being a more erudite person. Then when you have made the choice you worry that it is wrong. Shit, I should have bought Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban; I’d be a happier person.

Choice can also foster selfishness and a lack of empathy-people focus on their own preferences, ideals and tastes at the expense of the bigger societal picture. I know this because I’m extremely guilty of it. I read blogs, people share things with me over Facebook and Twitter, but it turns out, I have no idea what is going on in the world. I’m shit hot when it comes to the new videogame releases  or what the best ‘Epic Fail’ videos are , but it was 3 days before I found out that Kim Jong-il, one of the most condemned leaders of recent history, had in fact died.  It was weeks before I got my head around the Eurozone crisis, or begin to understand the political strife in Egypt.  How does someone who is connected to the internet, who reads a lot and has a genuine interest in current affairs, miss out on what’s happening (besides being a dipshit)?  I was too selective, the breath of what I found interesting enough to click on was too narrow. The problem with being able to decide in seconds what to flick away, we are learning very little about things that we know nothing about. We end up incapable of talking about anything outside our little world of interests.

Fuck it, in the end I settle for Jeremy Kyle.