The Paradox of Choice

During Christma season, giving gifts is a pretty common tradition and now that I have a job, its can get a lot harder when done with the wrong mindset

Now that I actually have money to buy stuff for my parents and siblings, its gotten a lot harder to actually buy something for them. Before, I didn’t even have to get anything because it wasn’t really expected from me. An origami or some other craft could do, maybe some candy and goodies like that, even less when I was younger, if at all.

However, now that I got a job and have decent money and not much to necessarily spend it on—thanks to living with my parents—I’ve felt the need to just give something more expensive to them, just because I can.

Obviously, that’s not the point at all of these times, my parents taught me that very well. However, I am grateful with my family and I just wanted to show that gratitude in a way I’ve never been able to do so before. And of course, I was faced with a huge amount of options. I don’t know if it was a YouTube Short or a full video, but I remember hearing about the “Paradox of Choice”.

Basically, if you have 3 or 4 things to choose from, you will probably take some time and pick the best product from the options you have, but once you get a thousand products that do the same thing, no matter what choice, you can’t be sure if there was something else that was better for you, which ends up leading to stress and more problems.

Whatever, I was weak, and I decided to just give them some money and let them pick the stuff they want, and we had an alright shopping day, we are all adults anyway.

Right when I was going to publish this as is, I remembered one time my parents just gave me a spinning top for christmas, it wasn’t expensive or even good quality. Maybe it wasn’t actually a christmas gift and something they got for me on a whim some other day. But I remember being so happy because of it, and trying to learn how to get it spinning all the time. I was happy with something that simple, and recalling that memory at this moment—it got me thinking. I didn’t even learn how to actually spin a top until months later but, I was happy.

By the way, due to the days I have left I think I’ll stick to shorter posts for now and put the “Favorite XYZ of the year” posts on hold until 2024 comes up, but I’ll still try to do one more next weekend. What will it be? Anime? Movies? Videogames? You’ll find out soon enough.

This is day 89 of #100DaysToOffload

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