With the obesity epidemic at its current rate, we can easily conclude that a lot of people have a lot of truly excellent excuses not to eat properly and exercise. In my experience, two particular excuses take the cake, so to speak: "I don't have time" and "I can't afford…
I recently spoke with a friend who was having difficulty making a major decision in his life. I suggested to him that he might be struggling because he is a talented fellow who might therefore have too many options.
After we concluded our conversation, I recalled reading a well-written book called the Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004), by Barry Schwartz. This delightful book incorporates many findings of cognitive science and the psychology of decision-making. His main point is, indeed, paradoxical:
As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitated. It might even be said to tyrannize.
When Schwartz speaks of tyranny, he reminds us that we live in a society in which you can find paralyzing members of choices even at the supermarket. Why is it that we need 16 types of instant mashed potatoes, 75 types of instant gravies, 120 different types of pastas sauce 16 versions of Italian dressing, 275 types of serial and 64 formulas of barbecue sauce? We face similar numbers of choices when we choose retirement plans, medical care, careers, where to live and who to be.
Modern society has done this to …
I’ve often referred to the Dauo Report to check out well-written blogs on the left and the right. It’s truly a good site for getting a glimpse of what people are thinking. Here’s a snapshot of what blogs on the right are thinking these days: How will the GOP remove…
This is a companion piece to “The Magazines of Wal-Mart.” In that post (and now in this post) I put on my amateur anthropologist hat and explored the range of reading materials made available to consumers by America’s largest retailer.
I traveled to a Wal-Mart superstore yesteday to check out the types of books for sale. Why? Because Wal-Mart serves as a culture filter to the many people who don’t take the extra effort to shop for books at bona fide book stores. For those people who select their books from the limited offerings of Wal-Mart, here is the full range of written materials with which they are fertilizing their minds. Here is how they prepare their minds to deal with important things such as parenthood, justice, the practices of other cultures, the meaning of life and how to vote.
The book section of the St. Louis area Wal-Mart I visited consists of five large sections of shelves. The three inside sections consist entirely of fiction; most of those titles are romance novels. Here are some of the fiction titles you can buy at Wal-Mart:
Such fiction works constitute 60% of the titles made available by Wal-Mart.
If you are one of those people who wants to buy a “Best Seller,” you would need to check out the first section of book shelves (the left-most). But don’t expect to see any of the following books, each of which is currently ranked within the top 15 books on the …
Back in early August, Jason wrote a post that declared sports the United States' national religion. At the time, I took Jason's observation as (slightly embittered) hyperbole about our cultural landscape's infatuation with passtimes that achieve absolutely nothing productive. A bit of an excessive rant, thought I, a mere illustration…