Every Yes Contains a Thousand Nos

I have multiple hobbies. So during my leisure time, I’m often caught between whether to engage in one hobby or the other. And it happens that I end up wasting a lot of time just battling between the choices. I guess people who have multiple hobbies can relate to that.

Also, when it comes to writing this newsletter, a similar thing happens—I am caught between ample choices on which topic to write about. And time gets wasted, of course.

I’m sure many of us encounter such scenarios on a regular basis. Whether it’s deciding what to watch, what to read, what to eat, or where to go on vacation. Such choices are not life-altering, nor are they going to define our lives; the stakes are low. Yet, the indecisiveness feels real. The anxiety we feel about them is real.

Such is our life now. We have too many options. In his book The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz states that modern abundance has created a kind of cognitive overload.

One of his primary arguments is that more options do not mean more freedom, instead they become the reason for our indecisiveness.

Psychologists call this analysis paralysis. When people are faced with an overwhelming number of options, the effort required to make a "correct" choice becomes so high that people often choose nothing at all.

The more options there are, the more "positives" we feel we are missing out on from the rejected items, which limits the satisfaction of our final choice.

Now, let’s zoom out a bit. As mentioned earlier, making a choice regarding what to watch, what to eat, or how to spend our leisure time is not going to have a significant impact on our lives. But what about the big choices? What about the decisions we have to make about who we want to become (career), who we want to be with (relationship), where we want to live, and what values we want to attain and live by?

These decisions have a lasting impact on our lives, and often they are irreversible. That is to say that we will not get another chance to have that experience. Let’s say if I picked a TV show to watch from my shortlist of 20 options, then I’ll have another chance to watch the remaining 19. However, it won’t be like that when it comes to career and relationships.

When it comes to life-defining choices, we have to realise a brutal truth: choosing one thing means the death of all other possibilities.

In her novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath sums it up brilliantly with a fig tree analogy. (see the screenshot below).

It’s very convenient to read this and interpret it as a warning about indecision. But what Plath captures is not just laziness or fear, but also the burden of unlived life. Because choosing one thing means you’ll have to mourn the futures that are lost. It’s an emotional response to the abundance of options (or futures in this case).

This is so resonant and enduring because Plath reveals the limits of being human and leaves us to confront those limits.

And she’s not wrong. Choosing does mean foreclosure. The moment we pick one fig, the others begin their inevitable decay. One can't be an engineer and a journalist and an Olympic champion and live on three continents simultaneously. Time is linear, and our bodies are singular. Every yes contains, within it, a thousand nos.

It’s certainly sad because we all desire so many things. But that doesn’t change the reality that we can’t have everything we desire. And it’s only going to be more uncomfortable when we resist this finitude.

The most discomforting aspect of this is the belief that by not choosing, we somehow keep all options alive. But Plath's image reveals the lie:

The future and choices are going to fade away whether we choose or not. If anyone thinks that by not choosing an option, he is keeping all options alive, then that is a pure illusion.

When we make a decision, the other choices are going to fade away, and if we don’t choose, then we are going to lose the other options, maybe a bit slowly. But we are going to lose them anyway.

In Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard explores two ways of existence: the aesthetic life (living for the moment, avoiding commitment), and the ethical life (choosing and committing to a path). The aesthetic life may seem appealing, but Kierkegaard warned that it leads to emptiness. By refusing to choose anything, he says, you never fully live or experience anything.

There’s a paradox in choice paralysis. Not choosing anything in itself is a choice. Jean-Paul Sartre would likely call this self-deception, or "bad faith." This happens when we deny our own freedom, either by blaming outside forces for our choices or by refusing to choose at all. Not choosing any option is choosing the decay of all options.

So what are we supposed to do? Well, there’s no neat answer. But maybe instead of an answer, we should understand what choice paralysis reveals about how we relate to our own lives.

We should not mistake it as an argument for urgency or recklessness.  And it also doesn’t mean that we should not imagine our lives or be ambitious. We need to realise that figs are going to rot regardless of our choice, and we have to remember that we are starving, so it’s never wise to be indecisive.

This also reminds me of the last two lines of The Summer Day by Mary Oliver:

The question itself is almost unbearable because it forces you to confront the singularity of it—one life.

Maybe that's the real source of the paralysis. Not the difficulty of choosing between options, but the burden of accepting that we only get one chance; that every choice is also a kind of death—the death of the selves we might have been and the lives we might have lived.

Maybe we have to learn to make peace with that. We have to see this paralysis as our confrontation with something fundamental about existence: that to live is to choose, and to choose is to lose, and we have to do it anyway.

So what do you think? Is choice paralysis really about the difficulty of choosing, or is it about our refusal to accept that choosing requires loss?

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