主题：TED视频：我们为什么感到幸福？ -- letitbe

link先：http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

简略介绍一下内容：

1. Excessive choices paralyze people, make ppl worse off.

2. When more choices of retirement funds are offered, the employee enrollment rate actually dropped. Ppl feel inundated by the myriad choices, so they put off the decision time, at the cost of thousands of matching dollars every year from employers.

3. Even after they've made the decision, they still feel bad. The process of making a choice has become so demanding, that ppl feel obsessed, even "addicted", with the decision-making, which inevitably compromises the process of enjoying the fruit of decision. i.e., instead of experiencing and savoring what you have at the moment, you can't stop thinking about other options, about what you "could have" done.

4. Another problem with having too many choices, is that your expectation goes up. You can't feel satisfied with "good enough" any more, not with so many choices available (plus the time you invested in choosing). You don't have pleasant surprises any more (it is expected to be that great), and the anxiety of making bad choice with so many good ones around constantly gnaw at you.

5. Back when you have few choices, if you make a bad choice, it's the society's fault, for you are not given the freedom to make a good choice. Now that you have hundreds of choices even for a bottle of jam, when you indeed make a bad choice, you don't have anyone else to blame but yourself.

6. Suffering from superfluous choices in a world where more than 1 billion ppl barely have enough to eat, is plain ridiculous. Solution? simple. income redistribution. give away the room for extra choices to help ppl w/ too few choices. that's what we call Pareto improvement. you are welcome.

下面开始发散式评论：

1. Can't agree more--true confessions of a control freak

2. As the other side of the coin, this is where the auto-pilot of human mind kicks in. Do yourself a favor, develop a habit for mundane choice-making, be it choosing the first one you ever see, or the one with a brand name rhyming with yours. It matters very little which one you choose and it's almost certainly not worth whatever time you put in the evaluation. You know it.

3. This is the part I want to hug the speaker and weep.

4. It has to be pointed out, that we indeed are better off with the extra choices. It's just our minds don't think so.

5. Again, it's about the state of mind.

6. I don't think this will ever happen...

7. So here are my two cents: It's all about your perspective of life. Does deliberation over the choice of jam sound fun to you? Maybe it does. Then this talk probably doesn't concern you. Choice-making can be fun, some may go further to say it's empowering. For some ppl, choice-making can even be the purpose of life in its own right. However, for most ppl (hopefully), making a choice is just the foreplay to get through in order to enjoy the "stuff" they choose. The "stuff" only gives a finite amount of pleasure, and the time used in choice-making needs to be taken into account when ppl calculate the "opportunity cost" of that pleasure. Now with more and more "stuff" to enjoy, and the choice-making constantly eating away the available time, the pleasure one can extract is declining while the opportunity cost rising. ppl are justified to feel more miserable.

It's not that choices are bad. You just need to choose which choices to dwell on. Or in other words, you need to realize that, some "stuff" is not worth taking time to choose, and some alternatives are not worth considering. There is something you want to have as many choices as possible and take as much time as necessary to make the decision, such as what kind of person you want to be, what do you want to achieve, what friends and life partner do you want to have, etc. Not only do you want to have the right to choose, you also want to have the freedom to choose again after a mistake has been made. Of coz, you can only make mistakes for limited times. That's why you want to cross off some options from your list of choices. It's good to be useful. It's good to be able to enjoy who you are. Regrets won't get you anywhere, but admiting mistakes may be the only way to give up the wrong choice. It's a virtue to do the right thing when you don't have to, and that's why casual encounters can speak volumes of the personality. Don't sabotage yourself, at least not to the extent you can't be rescued. Take care of your friends, so they will rescue you when you are down. Don't hold high expectation against ppl, esp. when you haven't done anything for them. But do know who they are, for you don't want to rely on somebody unreliable. And most of all, know thyself. Know your weakness so you can step away form traps. Know your limits so you know when you deserve a pat on the back. Know what you want, so you can stop looking, and go straight towards the goal.

p.s.: Sorry the last paragraph is totally off the point. probably because I'm obssessed with the decision-making right now:P