Barry Schwartz gave
an interesting presentation called The Paradox of Choice at the TED conference. His argument is that greater choice leads to unreasonably high expectations, which subsequently leads to greater likelihood of disappointment. As one example, if you go to a grocery store to buy salad dressing and they only sell one, you'll buy it and expect that you might like it and you might not. You will probably not be disappointed by it because you had relatively low expectations. On the other hand, if you are choosing from among 175 different salad dressings and you choose just one, you have basically decided that you picked the absolute best salad dressing out of a very large population, which means that your expectations will be very high. Choice leads to unhappiness, by way of high expectations.
There is also
a study that shows Denmark leads the Western world in terms of happiness and the reason is because Danes have low expectations.
BTW, TED conference talks are awesome. They're available as podcasts or on the ted website (
www.ted.com). My favorite is the
Hans Rosling presentation that uses statistics in the most compelling way I've ever seen.