coin flip

I don’t want to grow up.
I’ve never ever said this.
But I might have meant it.

There’s a Ted Talk by this guy named Shwartz who says that there is such a thing as having too many options. Economists say more the better, but Shwartz says that with many choices come a paralysis of decision-making capability, or, on the other side, regret that we haven’t made the best decision once we’ve made it.
I get this.
I’m the guy who, when playing a strategy bored game, will keep his options open, toying with each of the several strategies I could use to win, thinking that this will serve me, and it almost does, until the game ends and the winner is some guy who took a gamble and put all his tokes in one fire. I thought that this might have been my discipline of delayed pleasure, or of discretion, but I wonder now if it’s a microcosm of something else too…
One of my favorite podcasts is from Freakonomics, by the guys who wrote the books by the same name. Anyways, they launched this comically radical science project recently. They aim to collect a large data set of people who, upon the need to make a big decision in life (we’re talking, job placements, moving, marriage, changing religions, big stuff like that) are willing to give up the stress for an otherwise difficult decision and give it to the experimenters to take the burden upon themselves with the arbitrary flip of a coin.