The tyranny of choice
Choice is one of the key indicators of prosperity, happiness and hope. Those who have no choices in life have no prospect of changing their circumstances.
This was graphically illustrated in a programme on BBC2 recently, which focussed on life in a remote village in Ethiopia. Even in years when there is no drought, the people survive - living and partly living, in T S Eliot's immortal phrase - on food aid when they have it and on weeds when they don't. This is one end of the scale in the 21st-century world.
At the other is the typical high street or shopping mall. The supermarket offers 38 types of breakfast cereal; 15 restaurants vie for the custom of the hungry, the greedy and the gourmet; travel agents promote a range of holidays from Morecambe to the Maldives.
You'd think that all this choice would make us happy. But a new book by the US psychologist Barry Schwartz, titled The Paradox of Choice, tells us what Christians ought to have suspected all along: that choice doesn't neatly correlate with contentment.
Indeed, the greater our options, Schwartz argues, the greater the stress. How do you choose the healthiest margarine, what to wear for next Saturday's wedding, what kind of burglar alarm to install? These decisions not only demand our time and emotional energy, but they induce soul-searching after the event as we face the possibility that we might have made the wrong choice.
How, then, should we exercise our freedom of choice?
By simplifying our own lifestyles, we can kill three birds with one stone. We can relieve ourselves of stress; have more time, energy and money to give towards providing choices to those - whether in rural Ethiopia or the 'sink estates' of our inner cities - who see no way out of destitution; and obey God's command to 'loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke' (Isaiah 58.6).
To quote Bishop John Taylor: 'let us live more simply so that others may simply live'.
Helen Parry
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