Choice Fatigue

There's a concept that comes up once in a while in my work called "choice fatigue". I'm not exactly sure where it originated, but I think it's widely used in marketing. Essentially, it's the idea that humans enjoy choice and variety up to a point. Once you hit a certain number of choices, however, people are overwhelmed. They stop thinking clearly and are confused by so many options. This is what I have been experiencing for the past few days.

This last Christmas, I convinced my wife and my parents to go together and get me one of those mega 160 gig iPod Classics. It's awesome. I carry it with me pretty much wherever I go. Anyway, I finally have an iPod big enough to easily hold every track from every CD that I own, plus digital songs that I've purchased, plus audio and video podcasts, plus any movies or TV shows that I've transferred to it from my DVDs....and I still can't even fill half of it.

I listen to music quite a bit while I work. For the past several years, I've listened to perhaps 20 or 25 albums that I've got on my computer. Once in a while I'd buy a new CD and I'd add it to the collection, but I'd also frequently remove songs that I was no longer in the mood for. That was quite a bit of choice to manage, but it seemed to suit me fine. This week, however, I've started listening to my iPod while I work. I don't yet have every CD transferred to the iPod, but I already have 6470 songs at my fingertips. That is simply too many songs to handle. The idea of having my entire music collection at my fingertips is wonderful in theory, but in practice it makes me nervous and schizophrenic. I really enjoy listening to entire albums from top to bottom, but I find when I have literally HUNDREDS of other albums available, I get antsy and impatient. I spend the day skittering from album to album. A little Cake...then maybe one or two tracks from The Black Crowes. It's requiring more mental energy than I would've expected.

My brain, which enjoys order and routine, keeps trying to find some sort of systematic way to process this tangled mass of possibilities. I find myself thinking things like, "Maybe I should try to get through my entire CD collection...one album each day" or "just restrict yourself to one letter of the alphabet today". It must be some form of latent OCD trying desperately to push to the surface.