When Is Too Much Too Much?

I stopped in at the local supermarket the other day and found myself staring entirely too long at their selection of frozen French fries. I was involved in a decision making process that was way more involved than it needed to be. If there would have been only one choice available, I would have been in and out in a flash. But the choices were immense, and as long as I was going to spend my hard earned money, darn it, I was going to make sure I got the best option available.

And so I stared and compared. My wife is fond of waffle fries, so I reached for the bag of waffle fries. Except that I couldn’t help noticing the bag looked a little lighter than the other bags. Sure enough, you only get 20 ounces of waffle fries and you pay the same as you would for a 26 ounce bag of some of the others. Now granted, cost and quantity were not the only factors involved, but I figured I should weigh them when making my decision.

I would have preferred the spicy French fries, the Zesties, but my wife doesn’t go in for all the bells and whistles. So fortunately I didn’t have to decide between the Zesties and the Zesty Twirls. I was able to rule out the steak fries right away, but I then bogged down by competing types of crinkle cut fries. Same manufacture, but for the life of me I could not figure out what the difference was between them. It was at this point I realized I was taking entirely too much time to choose which French fries we were going to have with dinner that night, but I didn’t know how to get away; I still had to make a choice, unless I wanted to make them at home from actual potatoes.

So I took a few deep breathes and plunged back into the decision making process. It was then that I noticed that there were separate categories for fries. Those I have mentioned so far are all part of the “Premium” line of French fries. There were also three different kind of “Classic” fries, something called “Easy Fries, and also “Extra Crispy” fries. I found myself wishing I lived back in the days of the “Classic” fries, when three choices were all I had and every one of them was a classic.

Did I Mention the new “Bold and Crispy” line yet?

How about Tater Tots?

I realize they’re all just French fries. No need to go into a panic about French fries. And yet I found myself getting a little stressed out over the decision needed to be made. I started to think of all the work I’d already done that day and what I still had to do when I got home and I don’t want to disappoint my family by bringing home something they won’t enjoy.

I finally settled on a bag of French fries, I no longer remember exactly which one. I think I got the thin cut because my wife likes those best, but honestly, they’re a lot of work flipping over halfway through so they don’t burn on the bottom. Being half as big, there are twice as many to flip.

But what this has made me wonder is how much of our time and energies do we end up putting into making such unimportant decisions? We are given far more choices than we will ever need, more choices than are good for us. I somehow seemed to watch TV more when I only had a few channels to choose from. And back in those days, when I didn’t have a remote control, watching or not watching TV was a much more conscious decision.

Today we are given almost complete freedom, but this very freedom is perhaps the freedom of a maze. At every turn we are given options, but we somehow never seem to get beyond the box we are in. There is no exit from it, just a really big set of choices of turns we can make. When with a remote and a television, I seem to wander constantly from station, never leaving the decision making process. I always feel there is something better out there I’m missing. And yet I never seem to find any satisfaction.

Stay tuned as I will be expanding on this idea in my next blog post, on the ways to simplify and those who are willing to make our lives easier.