Too Many Options

Usually the more options you have, the more difficult it is to make a decision. (Unless you have no options)  People used to have fewer options, and therefore usually had fewer decisions to make.  That doesn't mean life was easier, the challenges were just different.  Technology has given us so many options, there are now very few solid limits.  Where you could go used to be limited by how far you were willing to walk, and how many months you were willing to travel, but now I can reach anywhere in the world in a couple of days.  Deciding who to talk to about an urgent issue used to be limited to who you saw on a daily basis, but now I can contact almost anyone in the country instantly with a small device that I carry in my pocket.  To hear music required learning to play an instrument, or finding someone else who was.  At one point, studying the word of God required learning a new language, or letting someone else describe it to you.

Clearly life is very different than it was a few hundred years ago, and we have much more freedom and power over our lives and what we can choose to do.  I see two potential downsides to this situation though.  Having more options makes to harder to discern what the right choice is when faced with a decision, and valuing the freedom of having lots of options makes it difficult to commit to a specific choice.  The issue is that making a decision requires choosing one option at the expense of all of the others, and culturally we have assigned an inherently positive value to having more options.  People see that the more options they have the more control they can exert over their lives.  They seem to miss that it is when they use those options to make a decision that they actually exert control over their lives.  This makes people hesitant to make decisions or commit to anything, and they end up drifting aimlessly, which I consider to be a bad option.  On the other hand, only having one option could be considered the opposite of freedom.  People want to avoid being in that position, and rightfully so.  Fear of finding themselves out of options is one of the factors that leads to that hesitation.

From what I can tell, having many more options at one's disposal does not frequently lead to improved decision making.  If you look at the lives of famous celebrities who have even fewer limitations than most people, so many of them screw up their lives even more that the average person.  Having too many options can contribute to bad choices when faced with a decision.  Or more correctly: when facing a decision, having more options does not necessarily lead to better choices.

I do not claim to be immune from this phenomenon myself.  I was very deliberate in the choices I made in college and after I graduated.  Moving to NorCal was also a very deliberate decision, but now that I am here, I do find myself asking: "what do I do next?"  I have many options available, which has made that a tough decision to face.  I'd like to think that the things I am doing are bring me closer to being able to make a choice in that regard, but I am not sure how you can measure that.  God has given me lots of options, but that doesn't make it any easier for me to figure out what he would like me to do.