Information

There is more information out there today than there ever has been. And more is being added by the nanosecond. The kind of information that is being captured by organisations across the globe also varies to tremendous degrees.

All this information out there should be helpful to us, right? Let’s take a stab at understanding whether or not that is the case.

“Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.”

Barry Schwartz

Have you recently made a major purchase for yourself or your family? Well, then you’re going to love what I have to say today. 😂

I recently bought a new car for my family. This is probably one of the biggest expenses I will make in my life. The process of buying the car, however, was one of the most tedious ones I have ever experienced in my life. It involved visiting innumerable showrooms & talking to a bunch of sales reps.

For the entire duration of the surveying process, I was constantly inundated with information. The features (or lack thereof), the shapes & sizes, the category, the prices; it was so very much for my little brain, that at times making the eventual decision didn’t seem real.

The entire exercise went on for more than three months. And interestingly enough, the car I finally bought, was finalised and booked in the matter of less than a couple of hours, and I hadn’t even considered this one in my initial analysis.

(Disclaimer: I’m in no way saying that this was a “problem” in my life. I am aware of how first world this entire conversation sounds. Please bear with me though, I’m trying to drive, pun intended, to a bigger point here).

Now, one can make a lot of inferences from this.

The first one is that I am indecisive and easily confused, which is entirely true.

But we will talk about one that I feel should be given more weightage than this shortcoming of mine.

The curse of “too much information”

I want to generalise the discussion a bit now. We started by talking about how there is a lot of information being available now. Most of it is just a click of a button or a tap of the screen away.

Furthermore, all of us are voluntarily sharing a lot about ourselves now, which in a way is also information, since there is something to be learnt from everything.

(Well, not the dancing TikToks maybe, but you get the point, right?).

With so much information out there, making decisions in life should be much easier now, right? Well, as it turns out, not really.

About 19 years ago, Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist wrote a book named “The Paradox of Choice”, where he highlighted that having more choices than there ever have been in the history of mankind, isn’t really the best thing for ourselves. Simply said, a large number of choices make decision making harder than if we had lesser choices.

I would like to add a little caveat to this statement. A large number of choices & abundant data make decision making harder than if we had lesser choices & an adequate amount of data.

This is a very prominent concept in the stock market as well. It is called analysis paralysis. For those who aren’t familiar with the stock market, there are numerous ratios that are used to determine the quality of a company.

Another interesting fact is that intuitively, we can form an opinion about the companies we are planning on investing in based on qualitative factors like what we have heard about it from other people or what we see in the news. But when it comes to numerical ratios, the story becomes a little different.

Not all ratios always sway in a single direction. There would be some ratios which will make a company a great investment avenue, while the others would cause the company to look like the most undesirable.

The point I am driving towards is,

At some point we have to decide what is the right choice for us, and then decide to live with it.

I’m not saying we should settle for less than we deserve, rather the complete opposite. We deserve everything, but where we stop our desires is not always the same as what we deserve.

Another important fact is, now that we have so much information to verify our thoughts, it is causing a lot of self doubt in everyone, including myself. What we are forgetting these days is that a lot of what is out there on the internet in the name of information is just opinions. And you know what they say about opinions, right?

Bottomline: there is no harm in what you learn from the information out there, but at the end of the day, we need to realise that every decision will be wrong from someone’s point of view. But at the same time, this should not be grounds for rationalising incorrect decisions.  

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂