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Opinion!!! The Dark Side of More
If you enter a superstore like Walmart to shop for rice, you are met with a dazzling array of choices: white rice, brown rice, black rice, red rice, sushi rice and many more. The options don’t end there.
If you settle for white rice, for example, you must decide whether you want long grains, medium grains or short grains. This overwhelming variety also applies to sugar. It can come in granules or in powder or in cubes; it can be white or brown.
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You see, complexity is the twin of variety. Unless, you have an acquired a taste, if it’s your first-time, choosing a simple product like rice or sugar may be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
The clock ticks away and you are still reading the labels, judging one variant against the other before you make a purchase. While eating your long grains white rice at home, you are imagining what would be the nuances in the taste of your meal and the short grains brown rice on the shelf.
Without an abundance of alternatives, all that would have mattered was that you could afford to buy rice.
It’s the same idea that makes you stroke your tongue with your pinky finger and wonder what to wear for an event while standing in your walk-in closet with an assortment of clothes,whereas the girl with a single pair of pants and top is already catching the bus to attend the same event.
The piercing eyes of others will judge, and you will apologize for coming late.
The impact of variety transcends the realms of cuisine and fashion in the examples above. It infiltrates our digital lives in real time. Variety steals the time.
Though the initial plan is to quickly catch up on the lives of friends on Facebook, we endlessly scroll as one post slides and makes way for the next and the next and the next, as 2 minutes grows into 20 and then 200. There are too many things to see on Zuckerville. It’s inexhaustible.
We repeat the same for TikTok and IG, then go to bed every day with uncompleted personal tasks. We veer off the road to goal and lose track of purpose – a surefire recipe for an unfulfilled life.
A woman finds a male colleague more attentive than her husband; a man finds a female neighbour more submissive than his wife.
They are dissatisfied with their spouses because they think they could have made better marital choices: a more attentive husband; a more submissive wife. Variety is the ground for comparison, a fuel for dissatisfaction.
People who keep their inner circle very small are those who rethink the saying, “The more, the merrier”. It’s easy to get caught up in the web of social obligations and its harder to maintain a large network.
As Nigerians bemoaned the mass failure in 2024 JAMB, an educator on LinkedIn posted about his tradition of putting his students in academic Intensive Care Unit, months prior to major examinations.
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The idea of an academic ICU is to camp students in a place and starve them of their distractions, to take from them other options apart from studying. According to him, the students always come out with flying colours in their examinations.
Variety is not Inherently bad, it’s our response to it that sometimes puts us in trouble. Life presents us with too many choices.
Fidelity is making a choice and sticking with it.Simplifying our choices might help us lead more focused, fulfilling lives.
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