Do We Really Have That Many Choices?

Because we have never faced that many options before.

We all hear all the time that our problem is that we have too many choices. If we had fewer choices, our lives would be better. I’m afraid I have to disagree. It’s important to differentiate choices from options.

I remember the first time I visited the USA. I was 16 years old, and my dream was to be an American. I went to Walmart, and I couldn’t believe how many options for the same product you could find there. I stared at the milk fridge for at least half an hour.

In Brazil, at the time, we had only two options, full fat and non-fat, nothing else. There, there were at least 50 options. And it was the first time I ever tried vanilla flavoured milk. I can guarantee you that having that many options at that moment made my life better.

Recently, I was talking with my mum about another family member. This family member is only 18 years old, and “she is lost in life”. And I have an idea how she feels because 14 years ago, I was there. But, our generations are different.

When I was 18 years old, social media was only starting, and we didn’t have smartphones, and I can’t imagine how it is to grow with a tool that allows you to compare yourself to other people 100% of the time. So in that sense, she has it worse, and I feel for all the 18 years old of today because it’s not easy. They need help.

My mother was saying that her problem is that she has too many choices. My mother thinks that she didn’t have many choices in her life and that now, my generation and this girl’s generation have too many.

My mother started working when she was 15 years old in a bank in Brazil, then when she turned 18 years old, she went to college to get a Social Worker degree, she paid for that herself. At the same time, she met my father at the bank and married him when she turned 19 years old.

She made two of the major decisions of her life around her 18s. That’s it; her life was settled, now she would work as a Social Worker for over 35 years and be married forever to my father.

I understand why she feels that our problem is that we have many options, but in reality, we just have more time to make the same choices she made younger. This girl from my family and I still have to make two big choices: what we will do to make money and who we will marry.

The changes in the workplace from my mother’s generation to our generation are that now there are many more types of degrees, and the concept of entrepreneurship is a reality (primarily due to the internet).

My mother never had YouTube, I saw the start of YouTube and people posting there for fun that later became millionaires, and now this girl from my family can wish to be a professional YouTuber. But she still needs to get a job to make money, for that she doesn’t have a choice. She still needs to work to make a living (the same as my mother and I did).

The changes in the dating world from my mother’s generation to our generation are that now people can choose not to get married and be freer about their sexual identity and gender.

At the moment, being single is something that is still growing more and more towards acceptance. “The normality” is still finding someone to be with, even if you aren’t legally married and if it’s with someone from the opposite sex or same sex, or whatever gender. But most people are still getting married or coupleling, and most of us can’t escape this choice as well. So we still don’t have (much of) a choice. Shani Silver is the perfect writer to read about the Single Revolution.

We indeed got more time to make these decisions, but we still can not choose not to make them.

The girl from my family doesn’t know what to choose, so she is paralysed (like I was). The options are overwhelming, but she has only one choice, she needs to put her shit together and do something to make money and earn a living, if not by getting a job now, by getting a degree that could lead to a job (which I disagree and will write more about in the future.)

The pressure to figure out her dating life is much lower than her professional life because women have entered the workforce, and things have changed forever. I grew up with my mother telling me first to get married to a good career and then a good man.

We think we have more choices, but we only have more options for the same choices: how we will make money to survive and who we will marry (or not marry). The same thing for the milk, at the end of the day we want milk, we just can find it in different packaging, but the essence is the same.