Blog 6

During this Spring Break I was travelling. And always when you are travelling at some point you'll get a problem: what are you going to eat? When you are a student this question is even more severe because, at one side, you want to eat something tasty and probably healthy, on other side, you don't really want to spend lots of money.  So you open Google Maps, search "food", open a list and check for the cost. Probably you will get a list of 5-7 places around you that are not so expensive. Next step - to choose just one item from already sorted list. Here your preferences start to work. Maybe you are a soup eater as I am, maybe you hate Italian food or you are lactose intolerant. Only 2-3 places left. And there you stuck. Any of these places is actually better than the other. You have no logical reason to choose one instead of other. So you rely on your intuition.

Finally you are in a cafe. And here is another problem: what do you want to order? You have a list of 6-10 sandwiches/pizzas/soups that are different in just a couple of ingredients. They have nearly the same price, size, nutrition information. So how should you choose? And again you just point your finger on a random line in the menu. 

And only now you start to enjoy your meal. Or maybe not? The food can be fabulous, and you love it so much that you will order it every day for the next month. Or it can be good/satisfactory/nothing special. And here comes a moral torture. Perhaps, you should have ordered not a turkey sandwich but a chicken one because it would be more jucy. Or you should have gone to cafe B instead of A because they would have fresher bread. And so on. When you have too much choice you will be never happy with your actual choice.

When you have just a few options you can easily find the reasons why you don't want others and make your choice fast and it will make you happy, because you know why you haven't chosen other ones. When you have no choice at all you may be happy with it (at least I got something l) or you may be unhappy (I got not the thing I really wanted). But when you have tens or hundreds options to choose from you will always be unsure if your choice was the best because there were so much more, and this uncertainty will make you unhappy in most of situations.

Here is one of my favorite TED talks about the paradox of choice: https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice

So my ideal cafe is the one where you have no more than 5 choices when you easily eliminate something you would definitely not like. But they don't exist. So every trip to the unknown place it always a challenge - just to find food I will be happy with.