The shift to abundance has led to an abundance of objects, of creative content, but also of possibilities and of choices. If we apply our traditional strategies when choosing, such as trial-and-error, we will be overwhelmed. We become paralysed, incapable making a choice, or fearful of missing out on a better option. In this episode we explore new strategies to enjoy an abundance of choice, and to reframe the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) into the Joy Of Missing Out (JOMO).
The shift to abundance has led to an abundance of objects, of creative content, but also of possibilities and of choices. If we apply our traditional strategies when choosing, such as trial-and-error, we will be overwhelmed. We become paralysed, incapable making a choice, or fearful of missing out on a better option. In this episode we explore new strategies to enjoy an abundance of choice, and to reframe the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) into the Joy Of Missing Out (JOMO).
Hello, welcome to Cornucopia, the podcast where we examine the shift to abundance. My name is Karim Benammar, and in today's podcast, let's look at the joy of missing out.
The “joy of missing out”: that doesn't sound particularly joyful. I think part of us is still stuck in this idea that we want the best, we're looking for the best, we want the best at all times, and that if we are doing something which is second rate, or something that we can't participate in, we are missing out. It's a reversal, it's a reframe of the fear of missing out, FOMO, this idea that there is always a better opportunity, there is always a better choice.
That if you go to one festival, to one concert, you are missing out on the one that was happening in the same weekend, that was better, that was more fun; that you're always at the wrong party as it were, that you've bet on the wrong horse; that you've made the wrong decisions in your life, in terms of your career, in terms of your partner, in terms of the place where you live, in terms of your investments, in terms of your holiday destinations; and that with all these choices surrounding you, with this abundance of possibility and choices that our abundant life, that our state of wealth and health is creating, we are bound to always miss out on the best thing. And so paradoxically, what should be making us joyful - this amazing sense of possibility and choices - is making us fearful, is making us upset, is making us sad.
So how can we reverse this? How can we turn our fear of missing out, our sense of dissatisfaction, into the joy of missing out, into the knowledge that whatever choice we make, there's going to be equally fantastic choices, that amidst all the wonderful things and beautiful things and amazing things that we can do with our lives, we will only in our short and limited lives, be experiencing a very small amount. And, that we have full knowledge of all these wondrous opportunities, all these possibilities, all these unlived lives, all these unseen concerts, unseen movies, unread books that surround us.
Now, this of course, has to do with the general shift from a world of scarcity, a world of limited choices, limited possibilities, to a world of abundant choices and abundant possibilities. And as we've seen, when we are making this shift to abundance, we also need to make a shift in our strategies. The strategies that we used in a world of scarcity, of limited choices, the strategies which made sense and were successful in that world, are not going to be successful in the new world. If we keep using those same strategies, we will be overwhelmed. We will drown in this tsunami of possibility, this tsunami of content, this tsunami of choices.
And we shouldn't be surprised, then, that this leads to all kinds of negative feelings and negative experiences. The first emotions that we are going to get in this situation to which we're not accustomed to, with which we have no experience, is to feel a sense of being lost, is to feel a sense of fear, is to feel a sense of discomfort. And as we saw on a previous walk in which we discussed the tsunami of content that is about to hit us, the amount of content that we've generated, the amount of creative content, the amount of films, books, music, possibilities, the amount of choices available to us toda, far outstrip anything we've had to deal with in the past, and that with software-driven content, software-generated content, this choice is only about to increase.
Part of the reaction when we are faced with such a shift, when we are faced with something new, is to refuse it, to go into denial, to insist that the strategies that you use at the moment are the best ones, to insist that you would rather not have the world change for the better, because that means you have to change the strategies that you use when dealing with that world. You're accustomed to doing it a certain way, and even though there is a much better, a much more plentiful, a much easier solution, you would rather stick with the approach that you have. I think that this is what's happening when we think about how we respond to the enormous amount of choices that we have.
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Now there is a book and the TED Talk by Barry Schwartz, The paradox of Choice, where he shows that we've become less happy with a lot of choice, that when we're inundated with choices we don't know how to choose. He suggests that we would be happier and better off if we just limit our choices.
And one of the striking examples he uses to make his point is research that was done by Sheena Iyengar on how we choose different kinds of jam in a supermarket setting. This research involved an experimental setup where they made people taste jams in a supermarket. In one of the setups, they gave people the choice out of six different kinds of jams, and people tried them, and then they could buy the jams. And in a different setup, they gave people the choice out of 24 kinds of jams. And the upshot is then when people had the possibility to taste 24 different kinds of jams, they got confused by this overwhelming choice. They couldn't make a decision, and therefore they ended up buying less jam.
The conclusion that Schwartz makes is that if we're overwhelmed by choice, we get confused, we're afraid of making the wrong choice, we're afraid of missing out on the best jam, and therefore we'd rather make no choice at all. This paralysis - we can't make a choice because we can't get the best solution -, or the fact that all this choice confuses us, shows us that we would rather be in a situation where we choose from six kinds of jams.
Then you can apply this to all other aspects of your life. You would rather choose from a few channels on television, you would rather choose from a limited selection of books in a small bookstore, you would rather choose from a limited record collection, you would rather choose from a few holiday destinations, and so on.
The other example that Schwartz gives is jeans. In the old days, there was one kind of blue jeans, and you just chose the one that fit you. And now of course you have 10, or 20, or a hundred different kinds of bluejeans - skinny jeans, wide jeans, torn jeans, different colors, et cetera. All this extra choice just makes us confused and unhappy.
Schwartz's point and TED talk resonate. It's been viewed millions of times. Many people I speak to say, “ah, but it has been proven that we prefer to choose from fewer options”. Psychologists proved this with this experience of jams, and it's also what I feel.
There's two points I'd like to make. The first one is really just a small point, and that is that if you look at the original research, people didn't actually mind choosing from 24 kinds of jams. They didn't mind tasting the different jams, but they bought less. When they only had a choice from six jams, they could settle on a buying decision much quicker. So from the point of view of a supermarket, you don't want to inundate your customer with choices. That may be a good strategy. The experiment itself doesn't necessarily show that we disapprove of having so many choices. The experiment probably does show that we find it harder to make a decision when we are given so much choice.
The second point I'm trying to make, which I think is much more important, is that experimental setups, experiments only show how we behave now, in our current situation. They don't actually show us how we could behave. They don't show us how we could change to behave in a different way, how we could learn to enjoy this wide abundance of choices, how we could change our strategies from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance, and then really enjoy all these choices.
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How do we make that shift, then? What kind of strategies help us in a world with an enormous amount of choices, with an enormous amount of growth and possibilities and creative content that we have to choose from? .
One of the breakthroughs came when I was teaching a summer course on abundance, maybe a decade ago, and we were discussing this very point. And a wonderful man said, well, I don't want all these choices. They really do make me unhappy. I just want to have one kind of plan from our mobile phone. I don't want to be subjected to having to make all these choices between these different things, and spending the time on making that decision. I would rather that somebody makes that choice for me. Several other people in the class felt the same way.
And so I thought, well, my theory has been challenged. If this person is really happier with fewer choices, then I'm wrong. Then, perhaps I like having a lot of choices, but there are plenty of people who don't like it. And so I kept asking him, well, do you like having choices in your holiday destinations? And he said, no, I always go to the same place. What about clothing? While taking one look at the way he was dressed, I thought, well, he probably dresses the same way pretty much every day. And yes, that was the case as well.
So, I pressed on and, at some point he actually said, I have one of these CD changers at the back of my car. I actually have 20 different versions of the same Bach sonata in that CD changer, and then it's wonderful when I sit in my car that I can choose which version I want to listen to. Then I thought, well, I've got you. Here is a situation in which you are very, very happy to have all these choices. A situation which most people probably wouldn't care about, but which you do.
What is the difference then? The difference is that this is something that he knew a lot about: classical music and Bach, and Bach sonatas. Something very specific, very niche, and also something that he cared a lot about. So we can see that when you have to make choices, the first thing to ask is, do I know a lot about this? Do I care a lot about this? If you have a lot of knowledge, if you are an expert, if this is a niche product that you enjoy a lot, then having all these choices is fantastic.
If you are an expert in jam, if you love homemade jams and jams made with different types of sugar and different kinds of processes, then six kinds of jam, the usual kind is not gonna cut it for you. If you know a lot about the product and if you care a lot about the product, you want to have an enormous amount of choices, perhaps thousands of choices, perhaps ten thousand choices, perhaps hundred thousands of choices. Think not just of jam, but of wine, for example.
When I grew up, in a supermarket, you had white wine and you had red wine, and you had rose. Those were the choices. And people, because they didn't know any better, were quite happy with those choices. It was just a question of choosing the right color. Now, in many supermarkets in Europe, you will have a whole aisle of wine. And if it's a large supermarket, you will have aisles of red wine from different countries in the whole world, you will have aisles of white wine and specialty wines, and the choice will be a hundredfold. You can choose from hundreds of kinds of wine.
Does that make us unhappier? Well, if you know a lot about wine, if you want wine from this special area of France, or if you want this specific kind of grape, or if you want biological wine, having all this choice is wonderful. Think of the happiness when you're shopping and you find precisely the kind of wine that you're looking for, and even the extra happiness when you find out that the wine that you want is actually on sale.
Think of the other example that we use a lot: music. If you know a lot about jazz, for example, and you're looking for a rare recording of a certain saxophonist playing with a jazz trio in the sixties or the seventies, and you can find it on your streaming server, that will give you the same pleasure as when you went to different record stores in your youth and different specialty stores and went all that way to try and find that specific record. If you know a lot about a product, if you have a discerning taste, then having an enormous amount of options to choose from is wonderful. I think they fundamentally make you happy, even the person in my example who kept on insisting that he didn't like choice.
And that brings us to the exact opposite of knowing a lot about something. If you don't know anything about a product and if you don't particularly care about the product, then you also have no problem with choosing, because basically anything will do.
If you know nothing about classical music, then Mozart is a good place to start. In the old days, you would go and buy a Mozart CD for your grandmother because you know that would make her happy. Mozart makes pretty much everybody happy. If you don’t know anything about wine, and you just like red wine, then you can just choose any bottle, the one that's easiest to reach, or the one that has the nicest picture on the front, or the one that has the price that you're most happy with.
So we have these two extremes: things you know a lot about, when you're really happy with an abundance of choices. And things you know nothing about, where you don't particularly care about having a lot to choose from, but it's not a problem either.
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And so we have this large middle ground, where you know something, but possibly not enough, and that's where you get confused with having many choices. Because you know a little bit about wine, you might recognize some names, you might recognize some grapes, but you're very confused at getting all these different kinds. Then you might spend a long time looking, going back and forth, and afraid that you're gonna make the wrong choice, that there is a better choice out there that you would've enjoyed more.The same thing with music. If you know a little bit about what kind of music you like, having to go on a streaming service with a hundred million choices might still be overwhelming.
And there of course, and then of course you can just ask for help. You can ask other people for recommendations. What do you think is a good wine? What do you think is a good song to listen to? Of all the kinds of jeans that I can wear, what do you think fits my figure? And the shop assistant might ask you a few questions: do you care more about the way you look or how comfortable the jeans are? Have you had experiences with these types before? Do you want to try them out? - and so on.
There are specialized jobs that help you make choices. A sommelier in a restaurant, after all, is the person who's going to help you to choose the wine to go with your dinner. And again, that may involve looking at what you're eating to do a pairing, a matching. It will involve asking about your tastes and your experiences in the past It will probably involve a question about the amount of money that you want to spend on the wine.
And with the sommelier, of course, you want to know whether you can trust that person, because you are outsourcing part of your decision making to a person who knows a lot more about it. In effect, because you know a little bit about it, but not enough, you are asking the help of somebody who is an expert, who likes having that enormous range of possibilities and will help you making a match that works out for you. If the sommelier is really trying to help you to have a wonderful wine experience, that's great, of course. But if the sommelier is thinking: well, this person's on a date, he's trying to impress somebody else at the table, and so I can sell him the most expensive wine.
When you're outsourcing your choice to somebody else, you want to be able to trust them. We read reviews when we buy products, when we visit hotels or restaurants, when we choose books, and we must trust those reviews. And so you can see that it's a problem if these are fake reviews, because the trust is undermined: these were not real experiences, or a lot of these positive reviews were paid for, or were written by a piece of software.
If you've sometimes felt inundated by choices, if you have felt uncomfortable when you've had too much to choose from, perhaps it helps to ask yourself: how much do I know about this product, about this choice? Am I an expert? Then probably I don't feel uncomfortable. Do I know nothing about this and I don't care? Well, in that case, I probably don't need to worry. And if I know a little bit about this, where can I find somebody to help me make that choice, somebody that I can trust? Where do I find a trustworthy person? That may be a person, that may be a review, it may be an algorithm. The famous algorithm that said: you've enjoyed this book, so you will probably enjoy this other book.
And I think this is going to be an important role in the future and also an important profession. A sommelier is a profession. Somebody who is helping you to make decisions is a profession. Somebody who matches you up with what is good for you, whether it's in terms of a house, or in terms of a holiday, or in terms of a job, or in terms of a romantic partner. These people can help you and they can charge for this, because you are quite willing to pay to make the right decision.
And, of course, that job has always existed: the job of curating for a specific group of people. When you listen to the radio, you probably choose a station because of the genre, but within that genre, it is being curated. The role of publishers in the past, of gatekeepers was to curate the best books. But again, you see that the job of curation, even though it's important in a world with limited choice, is going to be even more important in a world where you are overwhelmed by choice.
When there is a tsunami of creative content, when there is a tsunami of possibilities coming your way, and you don't want to drown, somebody is going to help you in making those choices. Somebody is going to make that selection with you and for you.
In a world with an abundance of choices, these are the new strategies. First determine, do I know a lot about this? Do I know nothing about this? Do I know a little bit about this? And if I only know a little bit about this, at what level do I need help? Do I need a curator? Do I need an advisor? Do I need more information? Do I need an algorithm? Where can I get more information to make a choice that works for me?
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Now, that may still not take away this idea that there is always a better choice. If you only have three or four possibilities, you can try them out. If there's three kinds of jeans that fit me, I will probably try out all three, and then make a choice based on that first experience. If I'm in a bookstore, I might open the book and read a few pages and decide which book I want to read. I still have a memory of going to record stores where they would allow you to listen to some tracks on an album before you made your purchase.
We call this strategy ‘trial and error’: try everything and make the best choice. But you can see that what works when you have to choose from three or five or even ten options, is not going to work when it's a hundred options. or a thousand options, or a hundred thousand options. or a hundred million options.
The growth in the choices that we have, the growth in the available content is not a question of a doubling. It's not even the question of a tenfold increase. We are talking about a thousandfold increase. We're talking about a million-fold increase. It's not a question of a change in degree, it's a question of a change in kind. It's not taking the old strategy and tweaking it a little bit. It's coming up with a radically different strategy,
Think of the way people find romantic partners. A few generations ago you had the village fair: young women and men would dance together. As a young woman, you would dance with different partners, and you liked the style, or the smell, or the behavior of one of them. Perhaps you end up in the hay together and you get pregnant, then you get married, and your life choice has been made. A generation ago, you would meet people at a party, your friends would introduce you to somebody. You liked each other and you fell in love. Then you also made a choice in your life.
But you could see that with the advent of dating apps, there's also been an enormous shift. We've gone from a half dozen or a dozen opportunities a couple of generations ago, to maybe twenty or fifty candidates a generation ago, to half a million or 5 million candidates. And even if you have a number of filters, that you specifically want this candidate or that candidate, the number of matches can still be overwhelming.
And so, the question is: how do you make the right choice? How do you make the best choice? It would seem that we're doomed because with five or ten or even fifty, you could possibly try them all out, and then at least you have that first experience. It's a short tryout, it's a short taste, but it may be enough for you to make an informed decision.
But when you're overwhelmed by choices, you can't even do that. This feeling that there is always a better choice will get stronger and stronger. In fact, it's almost inevitable. What are the chances that you would've made the absolute best choice out of a choice of a hundred thousand or of a million? You would have to be very, very lucky to have made the best possible choice.
So, how do we get out of that quandary? There's a wonderful thinker called Herbert Simon who made a distinction between optimisers and satisficers. Optimisers are people who want the optimal solution. They're only happy when they have the best of the best, when they have number one, when they're absolutely certain that there hasn't been a better choice. And you can see that the fear of missing out can be quite strong.
Satisficers, on the other hand, are happy once they've reached a certain threshold, once they've cleared a certain bar, whether it's in a choice of books or wine or music, or perhaps even life partner, they say: “good enough. I'm perfectly happy with this.” There might be a better choice out there, but I don't have the time, or the energy, or the money to go and find it, and so I'm happy with this choice, I'm happy with what I have.
And this relation between optimisers and satisficers is also different when you have a large number of choices. And I think I can best illustrate this with the example of hiring somebody. If you're looking for a certain person to fill a certain job, again, in the old days you might have put out an ad, people might have seen it, you might have had some reactions. People send in their cvs, you make a selection, and then you invite a number of people to an interview, and you choose the best one.
Say you had the choice between ten people. You might look at all the cvs, you might even interview most of them. You do a form of trial and error. You have a short interaction, and you make your decision based on that. And you could probably argue that you find the best fit: this is the best candidate that fits the position,
Let's say a thousand people apply to a certain job. You can't possibly have a meaningful interaction or a sample with a thousand. It's too much work. So, it's frustrating, because you're still looking for the best person out of these thousand. The strange thing is that if you're choosing from ten, and you're choosing one person, that is also 10%. The optimum represents 10% of your choice. If you are choosing from a thousand, then, the optimum would actually represent a hundred people.
If you're choosing from a thousand, you may still think that there is one optimum choice, which is better than the 999 other choices. But that, I think, is a thinking mistake. A hundred people would be a great fit for the job. Because so many more people apply to the job, there is bound to be so many more good candidates, or optimal candidates. People still argue: “well, yes, but even among the optimal candidates, there is one that is more optimal than all the others. No matter how large the sample you give me, there will always be the absolute best. There will always be a number one. There will always be one that is better than all the other ones”. And I want to argue that this is a deep thinking mistake: this cannot possibly be the case.
Eventually, of course, you will settle on one person, but I think that there can be several optimal candidates. In fact, there can be a very large group of optimal candidates. And you won't be able to say within that group of optimal candidates, which one is the absolute best. It's a thinking mistake. It's because we apply a way of thinking, a heuristics, a way of making decisions, from situation to another situation -and that situation of an abundance of choices is radically different.
Perhaps you would want to think it through with some of the other examples. Think about music. If somebody gives you a choice between a hundred songs in different genres, you will have certain preferences. You will say, well, I don't actually like this kind of music at all. I don't like that. This leaves me cold, and this is the music I really like. And out of the hundred you give me only three apply, and I have listened to all three of those, and this is the one I like best. Yes, out of a hundred from different categories, you might still find an optimal piece of music.
But if somebody gives you a hundred million songs on a streaming service, then many songs are gonna hit your category. There will be thousands, tens of thousands of songs that you will like. And out of those, I don't think you will be able to make an absolute preference. All the top 10% of the songs will be wonderful. They'll be the best song you've ever heard, they'll be great songs.
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And so, what is really revolutionary about this shift to abundance, what is really wonderful about shifting the order of magnitude, of going from tens of choices or a hundred choices to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of choices - you are going through the orders of magnitude and it's also increasing the orders of magnitude of the things that are enjoyable for you.
It's also increasing the orders of magnitude of the optimum: there will be hundred excellent candidates, there will be hundred excellent wines. When you increase the quantity, you also increase the quantity of the best ones, because the percentage of the best ones probably doesn't change very much.
In a world of abundance, we can be satisfiers and optimizers at the same time. If we're satisfied with the top 10% of any given choice, we are already in optimum territory. Within the top 10% of a large number of choices, there really isn't an optimal version. We've seen that that was a thinking mistake. You can change your strategies. In the past with a limited number of choices, you would be focused on getting the best one. Whereas here, you know there are going to be a lot of best choices, the top 10%. So in this case, perhaps it's easier to start with what you don't like, with what you hate, what you despise, what you find unpalatable.
You can discard anything you dislike because there's gonna be an enormous amount of choices left anyway. You don't have to worry about those. Even the average choices you can just easily get rid of as well, because you know there's going to be so many great choices. So in fact, you only have to make sure that you're in the position of being in that 10%.
If you’ve found the wine that you enjoy, that goes well with this particular thing that you're eating, you have made the best choice. If like me, you like walking in the mountains on your holidays. It doesn't particularly matter where you go. There is an abundance of mountains in the world that I can walk in and there isn't one absolute best mountain. So again, I'm looking for the things that I don't want and then I can be comfortable with having made the right choice of the things I do enjoy.
And so finally, we get to the reframe from the Fear Of Missing Out to the Joy Of Missing Out. In a world of abundant choices, you never have to be afraid of missing out. There's never going to be a better option if you're in the top 10% say, because they're all equivalent.
They are all the best option. There are just an enormous amount of best options. The party you are at is the best party. The wine you're drinking is the best wine. The music you're listening to is the best music.
And the joy of missing out here is the realization that even though you have the best, there is a lot of best out there. There are untold number of really fantastic parties going on that you would've really enjoyed going to. There are untold bottles of wine that you would've enjoyed just as much with this food that you're eating. There are still thousands, or tens of thousands of songs that you would've enjoyed listening to at this moment.
The feeling of living in a world of abundant choices is a feeling of joy. But the joy at thriving amidst all these possibilities is a new kind of joy. A joy we have to learn to feel, that we have to allow ourselves to feel, that we have to practice.
And in the walk where we discussed the tsunami of content, we saw this as a shift between quantity and quality. If there is more than you will ever need, if you are faced with this wave of creative content of possibilities, it makes no sense to try and have more quantity, what you want is more quality.
What we mean by quality for you is actually fit. It's actually taste. Its actually preference. What is it that brings you joy? In this world where there's so many possibilities, exploring this joy, exploring what your preference is, exploring out of this myriad of possibilities, of creative content, of life choices: these are the choices that resonate with you. These are the choices that challenge you, these are the choices that bring you that deep joy, that excitement, that passion.
That is the joy of choosing in a world of abundance. And it's no longer a zero-sum game. In a world where there is one best choice, one person wins and everybody else loses. In a place where the top 10% are the best fit for one person, and the best fit, the best preference, the best taste is going to vary widely amongst individuals, there will be best choices for everybody.
This may not be to your liking, this may not be your taste, but somebody else thinks this is fantastic, and they will enjoy it. The shift to abundance means that we can live in a world which is not zero-sum game, where winners don't imply a large amount of losers, where everybody wins because everybody is exploring their joy.
Thank you for listening. I hope you explore the Joy Of Missing Out. We'll meet again on the next episode of Cornucopia.