Too Many Choices

I don’t know where I first heard the phrase “paralysis by analysis,” but it comes up a lot in my mind. Today, it came up when looking at the five (5) polycarbonate* bottles in the dishwasher. My thought was this: I only have one coffee thermos, and as a result, it gets washed out on a more or less daily basis. With five water bottles, though, I use one, use another one, forget to wash, next thing I know I’m sitting on five bottles which have been sitting unlaundered for a week and starting to smell a little odd despite having had nothing but filtered tap water in them.

Similarly, I’ve got too many shoes, especially for a guy. It didn’t help that my last company was buying me a new pair of steel-toed Docs every year, but over the course of the last six or seven years, I’ve accumulated a lot of shoes in the attempt to settle on the ideal pair of grown-up casual footwear – and now there are so many shoes that are not quite right that it only makes me look for the one pair that will be just right.

Even worse is my fixation on trying to find a team to support in the Premier League – I have arguments for Newcastle Utd, Aston Villa, Man City, even Chelsea – not to mention a passing interest in the likes of Spurs, Everton, or Fulham – but nothing that clinches the deal and makes it clear which is going to be the team I follow. (And if you look at how the list has grown in the last year and a half, when the original question was “Spurs or Magpies?”, you can see what I mean.)

This is actually the reason why a lot of Apple products function the way they do, especially in the iPod range. They are functionally simplified in the name of clarity and ease of use. A lot of other stuff could be shoehorned in there, but one only has to look at the Zune to see what happens when you try to do too much too fast. And along those lines, I find myself moving more and more stuff into the guest closet, trying to pare down and get to just the stuff I need.

I think like much of my life, this is just a word problem writ large, and if I can solve it, not only will I get an A, but another piece of the puzzle will fall into place. By the way, Jimminy Christmas but Newcastle and Villa are filling up the net today…

*I’m not nearly as het up about the whole “OMG the bisphenol-A is coming to get us all” – it’s been out there as a known potential issue for years, and those fainting panic-bunnies in the European Commission have said it’s not enough to warrant taking them off the market. Plus I’m sure I got exposed to more endocrine-disrupting female hormones just being sat by the bachelorette-party-gone-wrong last night. Besides, the steel bottles will give you something when the chromium breaks down, and the aluminum bottles will give you Alzheimers or something else when the lining goes away, and the lining will poison you slowly, and the soft plastic bottles will make the water taste like petroleum and harbor bacteria, and the pre-packaged bottled water is less regulated than tap water and you can’t reuse the bottles anyway, and…well, you know my solution, and it rhymes with Laker’s Dark.

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