Illusion of choice

I found nice video on ted talks about the problem of choice. The problem i'm always thinking about.



I was born in USSR where the people had no choice (i mean consumer choice) at all. You can be sure that if you come to your neighbour's home, you can find all the things that you have: the same tv, the same frige the same phone and so on. A lot of people tried to differ from each other by searching and buying some unusual things like jeans, food and all the import stuff on a "black market". Time after time my mother went by the bus to Estonia that was more like Europe than the USSR even in soviet times and bought some unusual clothes and food which couldn't be found in a local shops(we lived in a small town near the Saint-Petersburg). Some people brought things from Germany some from Czech Republic.

So, i see two problems here. One is in the absense of choice. In this situation people are spending a lot of time to get all the things they "realy need". The second problem is in overchoice when the people spend a lot of time making a right choice even if it's not a big deal. I think that cause of these two problems not really in "choice" but in a free time that people have and the simplest solution for killing time for the most people is consumption and these "problems" are just the extreme forms of consumption. I think there is no "magic number of choices" that Barry Schwartz talking about. The only solution of happiness is to stop the meaningless consumption and to stop thinking about things which aren't so important. It's better to focus on a people you love.