Readers, we’ve missed you, but we promise we’re back — and we’ve returned bearing gifts, in the form of a Q&A with the sharp, funny, honest, and slightly potty-mouthed author Erica Kennedy, whose first novel, Bling, is a New York Times Bestseller. But we bring her to you because Sydney, the main character in her new novel, Feminista*, is undoubtedly one of us. Allow me to quote:

She grew up believing she’d have it all. A Career with a capital C. A husband. Babies! She’d be the Enjoli woman, brining home the bacon, frying it up in a pan, never letting him forget he was a man! Who would’ve guessed the whole thing would turn out to be a scam, a cultural Ponzi scheme that would dupe every middle-class woman of her generation?

FUCK YOU, GLORIA STEINEM!

Ahem. I told you she was one of us. How could I not want to get Kennedy’s take on a few of our favorite subjects? It being the season of giving, she graciously obliged. Here are some excerpts.

SK: With regard to that quote [above], this feeling that it’s a scam, that we’ve all just been set up — do you believe that?

EK: In a sense, yes. But I don’t think it’s a scam. I think it’s a ‘grass is greener’ thing. When women were expected to stay home and take care of the kids, they yearned for more. They wanted to be out there, engaged with the world, making their own money, chasing their dreams. But then you get that and there are downsides to it. And then most still want to have kids and you realize how tough it is to manage both. But you can’t predict what that will be like until you’re in it.

I think that’s what the Opt-Out revolution is about. Women who got great educations because they were raised to believe they would have careers and that would be fulfilling but then they got out there and started working and realized how hard it was to juggle everything and made a choice to stay home. I know there are people who say the Opt-Out Revolution is a myth but I know many women who are living this life and many who would if they could afford to.

But that’s why “balance” is always the catchword when women are talking about their lives. Because we don’t want to kill ourselves working all the time, we don’t want to stay home forever, we want to find a way to integrate work and family (and whatever else we need to feed our spirit) in a way that feels right for each of us. And I think we’re in a time now where we are still learning how to do that. The paradigms are not in place. We all have guilt about making these choices, no matter which we choose. I think in the future, things like flextime programs will be more prevalent because that’s a way that companies won’t have to lose smart, talented women who feel like they need to make this either/or choice.

SK: So do you think the idea of ‘having it all’ is just a bunch of bullshit?

EK: To me, the bullshit is to think ‘having it all’ means one cookie cutter thing. Everyone is different and everyone has to define their ‘all’ for themselves. And do you really need it all? Can’t we be content with some? Do we always have to be chasing more?

SK: Your character Sydney is tormented by the pressure to do something amazing — the Career-with-a-Capital-C thing. Have you felt that yourself?

EK: I went to Stuyvesant, a high school for gifted students in New York. I went to Sarah Lawrence where women were encouraged to have Careers and the thought of NOT working was unheard of. I went to Oxford my junior year. So I think there were expectations that I would do something great and I internalized that and put a lot of pressure on myself. I don’t blame anyone for having high expectations of me but it goes back to what does ‘having it all’ mean? Does it mean having some fancy title, executive perks, making a lot of money, having your book on the NYT bestseller’s list? Or does it mean waking up and looking forward to your day, whatever you make of it? I sublet a place in Miami Beach when I was finishing Feminista and it was, hands down, the happiest time of my life. I would write at the beach, swin in the ocean every day, ride my bike around town. And part of that happiness came from being around people who were very chill, who didn’t define themselves by their jobs.

SK: Here’s another great quote from Feminista, variations of which we’ve heard from several of the women we’re profiling in Undecided: “Sometimes she thought, in a strange way, life was so much easier for people with no options… You didn’t sit around thinking, I could have been a documentarian or a forensic psychologist or a sitcom writer…” The angst over the road not traveled – a definite side effect of all the options. Does that affect you? How do you move past it?

EK: This has always been a huge problem for me, even now. I grew up in a middle class family where my father was a corporate exec, my mother started her own design business. Then I went to school with very wealthy kids and knew people in the hip-hop world, most of whom didn’t have formal educations but became millionaires by the time they were thirty. So nothing seemed out of reach for me. I lived in New York and knew people who were business owners and lawyers and CEOs and restauranteurs, anything you could name. And everyone knew I was this honor student, so literally every road was open to me. Which was crippling. So I floundered for many years, working at jobs I didn’t have any interest in because I didn’t know what I should be doing. There were too many possibilities.

A really big pet peeve of mine is that no one, at least in my experience, helps you identify what kind of career you might excel at. Because I think the thing that you will be successful and most fulfilled doing is that thing that you’d do even if someone wasn’t paying you. You can always find a way to make a career out of your talent or passion. But that innate thing may be the thing you completely ignore, like I did with writing. In college, no one helped me identify what my passion/talents/marketable skills were. Why isn’t that a required class?

The week before graduation, one of my professors asked me, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” And I said, “Um, married with children?” She was horrified. As was I. But I think that may have been my unconscious wish, to find someone to take care of me and make the decisions, because I was so ill-prepared, despite my ‘good education’, to do that for myself. I quit my 9-5 job at age 28 to write professionally and didn’t start writing my first book until I was 32.

And too many options doesn’t just apply to jobs but also to men and where we should live and what kind of life we should have. It’s the predicament of abundance. As women, all these doors have been thrown open for us but it’s like, Oh no, which one do I choose and where the fuck is it going to lead me?!

SK: In the book, Sydney sabotages herself, beats herself up, pushes others away–and yet, she’s extremely relatable. What do you think it is about Sydney that’s so universal?

I think what’s relatable about Sydney is that she’s trying to work it all out, what she wants and what she doesn’t want. But I actually didn’t expect a lot of women to identify with her because she’s very angry and bitter–and I consciously did that because I think we, as women, do have this anger and resentment about all the choices we have now and not knowing which to choose but we are socialized NOT to show our anger. We’re supposed to suck it up and worry about everyone else. I wanted Sydney to embody all of that repressed stuff. I hoped women would find her and they story interesting but I’m really surprised that so many women say they identify with her or that her story is their story.

*Feminista, St. Martin’s Press, 2009.

I have this friend. (Really, I swear it’s not me.) She never really had a breakup, despite the fact that she dated a lot. And dated a lot of losers. But no matter how bad the cad, she strove to end things peacefully, operating according to a simple mantra she called “keeping the door open.”

Makes sense. There’s a certain comfort that comes from knowing we have options. It mitigates risk. We’re told, after all, that keeping all one’s eggs in one basket is a bad plan. Unless one is planning on making a large omelet.

I was reminded of this after a conversation I recently had with a couple of girlfriends, discussing the post I wrote about New York Mag’s “Sex Diaries” piece, during which, one declared: “I think, for our generation, commitment is kind of like death.”

Well then.

These ideas, I’d argue to say they’re almost an indelible part of the current condition. Choice is a blessing. To commit to one is to be, at best, a fool; at worst, well, dead. Stagnated. You can be anything you want! You can do anything you want! You can Have. It. All. You don’t know how lucky you are, to live in an era marked by the number of open doors you have before you! So what kind of fool would suggest we’d be better off closing them?

Dan Ariely, for one. Check this tidy summary:

In Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dan Ariely suggests that there is a price to be paid for having many options. He claims that we have an irrational compulsion to keep ‘doors’ open. He suggests that we ought to shut a lot of them because they draw energy and commitment away from those that we should keep open.

Buzzkill, no? And yet. Of course it makes sense. And it’s so funny, because, in all likelihood, closing a bunch of those doors probably would go a long way to ease so many of the problems we talk about here: the pain of multitasking; the impossibility of achieving the perfect work-life balance; the angsting over the roads not traveled. (The baking of the ever-lovin cupcakes.) So why should suggesting we just stick to the path we’re on and forget about all the others be such a buzzkill?

Psychological theorizing is all well and good, of course. But does it really change anything? Does knowing that we’re making ourselves crazy make us any less crazy? But what if we took this advice to heart, if we were to just decide, once and for all: This is it! Those roads not traveled? Screw ‘em! Would that really make us feel better?

Honestly, I don’t know. But I don’t really want to find out, either. I mean, ignorance may be bliss, but it’s a bliss in which I am one hundred percent uninterested. I’ll admit, I am a product of my times, and I am happy for all those doors. No matter how crazy they make me. And, the blessing and the curse of these modern times is this: no matter how much we might buy into this idea that closing off a bunch of them would make our lives easier, no matter how much we might want to pretend that those other doors are not open to us, the fact remains: they’re there. You can’t unring this (door)bell.

And as long as they’re there, I’ll be wondering what’s going on behind each and every one of them.

It’s great to have options. But dealing with them can be a bitch.

Or so we like to say. That’s our very tag line, but, because today marks our 100th post–and is also, coincidentally, the day before the great beige food binge, I’m feeling a little sentimental and thought it would be an appropriate time to give up the but, and offer some musings on gratitude.

I’ll admit, I have a lot of big buts in my life. We all do. Especially when it comes to choices. I can’t tell you how many times, in interviews we’ve conducted for the book and conversations with friends and strangers about the book, women have expressed that very sentiment: I mean, I’m grateful to have all these choices, but… Or the slightly more optimistic: I feel blessed to have all these opportunities that women a couple generations ago didn’t, but…

One of the more scientific pieces of research that’s informed a lot of what we’re doing is Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice. (Read some of what we’ve written about it here.) I got to thinking about Schwartz again today, after coming across this piece, The Psychology of Happiness, by Elfren Sicangco Cruz. In it, Cruz writes:

In his book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz asserts that, paradoxically, happiness may lie in limiting our choices rather than increasing them. He says: “After millions of years of survival based on simple distinctions, it may simply be that we are biologically unprepared for the number of choices we face in the modern world.”

We’ve all lived the truth of that statement, but, as much as we moan and groan, kvetch and complain, no matter how overwhelmed we can be by all the analyzing, all the fantasizing over the grass we’re so sure is greener, all the musings over what we’re NOT doing, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a woman that would really choose to go back to a time when women had no choices, or severely limited choices, or choices that were made for them–probably by the prominent man in her life. So, to the prospect of limiting our choices, I say: no thank you very much.

But.

This I can get behind:

Schwartz recommends that because more choices bring more opportunities for comparison, the recipe for happiness is twofold. First, make your decision irreversible. Second, constantly appreciate the life you have… Grateful people are healthier, happier, and more optimistic than people who are not.

Again, I’m not so down with the making of the decisions irreversible thing. Despite the angst it can cause, I like the security of knowing that if I blow it and pick Door Number One when I should have gone with Door Number Two, I can always try again.

But.

The gratitude, I can get behind. So maybe, in honor of Thanksgiving, we should give it a try. Maybe, for just one day, rather than being agonized by all the things we can do, we should try to be thankful that we CAN do them at all. Maybe, rather than focusing on the overwhelm of getting it all done, we should try to be thankful that we are empowered enough even to attempt it. (And that, some days, the stars align and our to-do lists actually wind up with more things crossed off than added on.) Maybe, rather than holding up the buffet line, debating the relative merits of dark, light, or tofurkey, we should just say the hell with it, and be thankful that this is one day when we really can have it all. And stuffing and sweet potatoes and gravy and pumpkin pie…

Just hold the whip cream. It goes straight to my but.

So, the other day I rambled on about all the distractions that come with uber-connection. And, if we were to be honest, we would all admit that one of them has to do with cybershopping. Sigh. One of the clutters in the inbox comes in the form of seductive ads for shoes, dresses, “outerwear” (why can’t we just say coats?), you name it. All tantalizing us with pretty pictures of skinny models in clothes we may never wear, special online discounts, and real or imaginary deadlines.

Really, we have work we should be doing, but then there’s the seduction: Buy now! You too can be a fashionista! Free shipping! On sale for the next five minutes only!

And so you bite. (Or don’t. But wish you had.) And then that yellow dress flies into your mailbox and your credit card lives to regret it. If only you could have tried it on first. Trust me, I will get a little more substantive in a minute here. But first:

Just this week I came across a tech piece in the SF Chronicle about a bunch of new websites that use “augmented reality” (don’t ask) to allow you try on your online purchases out there in cyberspace. Basically, you can try out that cute little frock online — and maybe even mosey onto facebook to see what your friends think — before you plunk down the plastic. Genius? Maybe. Stay tuned for serious.

You have to wonder how great it would be if real life were like that, especially when we’re dealing with the big choice Q’s: What should I do with my life? Where will I fit? What would it be like to walk in those other shoes? Can I try before I commit?

Look to the big picture, and you realize that in unexpected ways, we all can — and do — try our callings on for size. Here’s just one hint. A 2002 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics drew a longitudinal picture of younger baby boomers (born between 1957 and 1964) showing that they held an average of about 10 different jobs between 18 and 36. Most studies show that younger workers are even more mobile.

For example, a Business Week article dating from this past summer, found that, for workers under 30:

Corporate commitment has dwindled, tenure has grown far shorter, and people switch jobs with much greater frequency. The average American changes jobs once every three years; those under the age of 30 change jobs once a year.

Trying jobs on for size? Not such a bad idea, when you think of it.

Here’s a hint, too, that maybe we’re trying on new roles at home as well. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the homefront reversals resulting from the economic downturn — some have begun calling it a “he-cession” — with women poised to become the majority of the workforce. What that has meant is that in many families, mom flies out the door with the briefcase while dad stays home with the kids. While the workplace parity has not resulted in economic parity — as we’ve reported here, here and here — there may be an unintended consequence:

Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who has written extensively about the history of marriage, says that the shift in spousal roles in some families could have a lasting impact. “The silver lining here may be that men now get a little more experience under their belt in terms of actually being the experts at home,” she said. “When the economy recovers, we may find a little boost towards men and women sharing these roles.”

Finally, there’s this. (Journalists tend to write in terms of threes. Old habits die hard) Examiner.com posted a column thursday in which Gen Y women gave thanks for all the ceilings that their strong female role models shattered for them, enabling them to try on the opportunities their mothers never had. As one 24-year-old woman wrote:

“This year I am most thankful for the opportunity to have a career as a woman. Going back many generations, my family is full of strong and ambitious women, from my ancestor who came over during the potato famine to my grandmother who had a successful modeling career and raised a family. My mother was the first in her family to get a college degree. I feel thankful there is no longer any question that I could go to college and have a career. My parents pushed me to get an education and supported me as I moved away from home, which many women in my mom’s generation would not have really considered. Now the canvas of the world feels much more available for women.”

Sure, you could spin a lot of this in terms of the half-empty glass. But I choose half-full. Yeah, choices — no matter what, no matter when — are tough. Angsty. And there’s still work to be done. Lots of it, in fact. But when you realize you’re not locked in, that life continues to evolve, maybe each individual choice — even a lousy one — doesn’t carry quite so much weight.

Meanwhile, back to that yellow dress. I confess. Mine. I was the victim of a 12 hour sale on Bluefly when I should have been doing something productive. But actually, after letting it sit in the mailing bag for several weeks, I realized it’s kinda cute after all. With those cool brown spiderweb tights that Shannon gave me last Christmas and my killer brown boots (yeah, I found those online, too), it might be just the ticket for Thanksgiving.

There is a point here, I promise. But first, here’s the scene. My desk, at work. A wobbly stack of books, papers and files, some dating back to last spring. A to-do list, also written last spring. On the other side of my mousepad, a pile of resumes for the letters of rec I need to write. On my computer, some 200 emails that at least have to be opened.

Plus the steady buzz of folks, either in the hall, or in my office. Kinda like a roving cocktail party, but without the booze. This is not necessarily a good thing. The latter, I mean.

My home office, not much better. At least 100 unread emails. My desk is cleaner — today — but you still never know what you’ll find. A friend once described my work-at-home digs as a junk drawer. At times, the description is apt.

On Tuesday I got up early, graded papers, scanned two newspapers, got ready for school, found and paid my Macy’s bill while my Cheerios got soggy, blew out the door and off to work, taught some classes, and met with a bunch of students who have the end-of-quarter heebie-jeebies. (They’re contagious).

Last week, we hosted a party to celebrate a friend’s engagement. Next week is Thanksgiving (Yikes! I forgot to order the turkey). It’s my husband’s and son-in-law’s birthdays. Shannon and I are knee-deep in writing this book. And this blog. My hair is stringy and I’m low on clean clothes.  So here I am.

Don’t get me wrong.  I fully realize that those balls I’ve got in the air mark me as a lucky woman.  Nonetheless, I’m somewhat breathless just itemizing all this. I’m frazzled. Distracted. And probably like you, just a little bit crazed: Too much going on, going on all at once.

Maybe it was ever so. But now, add this. The San Francisco Chronicle has reported on some new studies on the way that techno-stimulation — texts, tweets, IMs, Facebook, news alerts, the list goes on — has led to a new form of attention deficit disorder. We’re always on. Uber-connected. Addicted to short bursts of constant information. And despite our best intentions, we get sucked in. All of which, experts say, impacts our ability to analyze. From the story:

“The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets,” [Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford University's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University] said, “the less patient we will be with more complex, more meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with any depth and nuance. Like any skill, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”

Dr. John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, uses the term “acquired attention deficit disorder” to describe the way technology is rewiring the modern brain.

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t need to know what Suzy from Ohio is doing every five minutes. And yet. There’s the seduction of the buzz, the flash. She has me at beep-beep.

Which brings me belatedly to my point: Is all this stuff, this stimulation, this juggling, cluttering up our already cluttered brains to the point where we are not only overwhelmed — but chronically undecided?

The science suggests the answer is yes. Shannon wrote earlier on our blog about the Paradox of Choice, about how the more choices that confront us, the less likely we are to make one — or to be happy with it when we do. There’s the iconic jam study, where shoppers confronted with 24 jars of jam — versus just six — walked away empty handed. And the pivotal Magical Number Seven study, which dates back to the 1950s, that found that the human brain has trouble processing more than seven items at a time. The study was the basis for similar research in 1999 by Stanford Marketing Professor Baba Shiv, then an assistant professor at University of Iowa. He sent two groups off to memorize a series of numbers. One group had to memorize three. The other, seven. At the end of the task, the groups were given their choice of a treat: gooey chocolate cake or fruit salad. The three digit group overwhelmingly chose fruit. The seven digit group — cake. The point? Overwhelmed with the memory task, the rational brain of the seven-digit folks begged off and let the emotional side take over.

Shannon wrote recently about Zen and art of multi-tasking where, really, what we need to do when we drink tea –is to just drink tea. I wrote about the need to just play cards. Put all of this together and I think you find that maybe, for our own mental health, not to mention our ability to make decisions, we need to turn down the chatter.

Sixties guru Timothy Leary (he of LSD fame) once exhorted the youth of the day to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” I’m thinking it’s time to flip the switch: Turn off, tune out, drop in.

But wait. Did that make the slightest bit of sense? Not sure. I’m off to find some chocolate cake.

In the first part of this suddenly two-part series, I talked about the “cautionary matrons” who advise their younger counterparts against marriage–and against staying single.

Today’s post has nothing to do with any of that. What it does have to do with is choices. Lots of them. And easy access to them. At all hours. Frequently via text.

New York Magazine’s current cover story is called “The Sex Diaries,” and was inspired by the magazine’s ongoing (since 2007) online series in which New Yorkers of all walks anonymously chronicle their sexual exploits for a week. In the highly–ahem–detailed  piece, you’ll find excerpts from “The Trader Who Will Fly for Sex” (he meets one couple at a T.G.I. Friday’s before having sex with the wife while the husband watches.); “The Transportation Coordinator Serving Three Partners” (one night’s entry includes booty-call-type texts from each of the three women, all of whom he turns down, and a final entry: “8:45pm: Jerk off”); and “The Polyamorous Paralegal” (a sample: “Fall asleep wishing I had my bed to myself. The One Who Cries keeps trying to cuddle. I want to punch him.”).

Well, what can you say? It is what it is. More interesting, though, was the lengthy analysis that anchored the salacious tidbits, written by Wesley Yang. Here’s a little background on his assignment:

The editors of this magazine asked me to read all 800 pages of the Sex Diaries, and, using them as a source text, develop some kind of taxonomy of contemporary sexual anxieties… So, that’s what I’ve done. Herewith: ten things that seem to be making our playful, amorous youth crazy.

And guess what? The top three have to do with choices.

1. The anxiety of too much choice. A fact so readily apparent that it has escaped reflection: The cell phone has changed the nature of seduction. One carries in one’s pocket, wherever one goes, the means of doing something other than what one is presently doing, or being with someone other than the person one is with…. This is a distinct shift in the way we experience the world, introducing the nagging urge to make each thing we do the single most satisfying thing we could possibly be doing at any moment. In the face of this enormous pressure, many of the Diarists stay home and masturbate.

2. The anxiety of making the wrong choice. A Diarist with any game at all has unlimited opportunity… Identify the single best sexual partner available, or at least the person most amenable to their requirements at the moment… An inordinate number of Diarists find themselves at the brink of enjoying one sexual experience, only to receive a phone call or text from another potential suitor. They become a slave to their compulsion and indecision… This compulsive toggling between options winds up inflicting the very damage it was designed to protect against.

3. The anxiety of not being chosen. Among active Diarists, the worry that they will make the wrong choice is surpassed by the fear that they may find themselves without one. To guard against this disaster, everybody is on somebody’s back burner, and everybody has a back burner of their own, which they maintain through open-ended texts, sporadic Facebook messages, G-chats, IM’s, and terse emails.

Remove the sex for a second (or don’t, we are nothing if not a world of multitaskers), and ask yourself: sound familiar?

While Yang makes the case that, at least in the sexual realm, much of the current landscape is colored by our wildly connected lives, what comes across loud and clear is this issue of too much choice. Analysis paralysis (Note how he concludes Finding #1). Opportunity cost (why commit to a night with One Who Cries if there’s a possibility that One Who Makes Me Laugh might text later? and what about One Who I Haven’t Met Yet But Might Like Better Than Either OWC or OWMML?). And the pressure to keep all our options open, the scattering of energy that’s required to keep that back burner lit, just in case.

Consider, as Yang puts it “One carries in one’s pocket, wherever one goes, the means of doing something other than what one is presently doing.” That makes me think. And it makes me think that the question is: in our modern, interconnected, always-on world, is all of this choice, or maybe more importantly, this illusion of limitless, constantly available choice, the modern person’s dilemma? And does it mess with our heads in every realm? Is this why, say, when we’re working one job, we spend our time daydreaming about all the other things we could be doing? Or why women beat ourselves up over not being all things to all people at all times? Or why we sometimes find ourselves wishing for a life with no options at all?

And that last idea, of longing for the good ol’ days, was, unsurprisingly, picked up and riffed on by the New York Times’ David Brooks. Check it out:

Once upon a time–in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era–courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts–dating, going steady, delaying sex–was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era…

[People] are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners… If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.

Okay. And while my stomach kind of turns at his description of  ”guiding young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment” (Date around before settling down? Horrors. Read Tracy Clark-Flory’s take on his spin for a good laugh.), I do agree with one thing: that the reality of the modern world, the messaging (both societal and, well, textual), has left us approaching everything from the mentality of a comparison shopper. Listing pros and cons. Building cases for and against. Weighing our options.

It’s exhausting. And has it all done nothing more than leave us as a world of neurotic, over-stimulated commitment-phobes?

I don’t know. But I do know one thing for certain: The Trader Who Will Fly for Sex kinda freaks me out.

By Rosanne Bane

Lately I’ve noticed that I have so many writing and writing-related projects that all seem like top priorities that I can’t focus on any one of them long enough to make significant progress. Many of my writing colleagues, students and clients share my frustration with having too many intriguing ideas and too many tantalizing projects on top of a full, and sometimes demanding, collection of personal commitments and family and friend relationships to nurture and maintain. 

Any kid whose parent let her or him run wild at the State Fair, eating cotton candy and watermelon and root beer and a milkshake and chocolate chip cookies and foot-long hotdogs and corndogs and French fries and a seemingly infinite variety of food on a stick, then riding the rides at the Midway and ending up revisiting all that food in reverse motion in the intimacy of the public restrooms can attest to the simple and hard truth that too much of a good thing is just too much.

Talking with one of my coaching clients today about the rushed, desperate, not-enough-time feeling that comes from trying to do too much, I had an epiphany: The reason we struggle to choose among too many wonderful possibilities is because God (or the Universe or the Divine or whatever form of address you prefer) is a Midwestern hostess.

In some parts of the Midwest, a hostess will keep offering food until the guest leaves some on the plate. The premise is that if the guest eats everything on the plate, she or he hasn’t had enough. It gets a bit tricky when the hostess thinks that politeness demands giving more and more food and the guest was taught that politeness means clearing the plate, that leaving food behind shows you didn’t like the meal.

The Universe is inherently abundant. As Auntie Mame said “Life is a banquet.” The upside of that is that we get to choose. The downside is that we have to choose.

Damn. I really can’t have 15 top priority projects. Some of those are going to have to on the “Maybe/Later” list and some may even end up on the “Don’t Do” list.

I told my client about this phrase we have in my family, one my mother taught herself when she was a child as her way of politely saying “no.”

“Thank you. I’ve have sufficiency, even abundancy. Anything more would be superfluous to my delicate constitution.”

Just repeat that to your Divine Hostess the next time you feel the urge to take on yet another project or commitment. Be a good parent to yourself: remind yourself that you can eat anything you want at the Fair, but you can’t eat everything you want.

As it is in fortune cookies, so it is in women’s lives and the choices they face… which is to say that, while the greatest measurable strides we’ve made have been in the realm of work–even, perhaps, as a result of those strides–we’ve found ourselves stumped when it comes to the choices we face over personal stuff, too.

And I’m talking beyond the question of whether to be a stay at home mom or a working mom: I’m talking about whether to have kids at all, and love, and sex, and marriage, and divorce. And what women who’ve been there have been willing to say about it. And what women who haven’t been there yet think about the women who have been there–and what they say about it.

There was Lori Gottlieb’s widely publicized and ballyhooed essay in The Atlantic, entitled “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” in which a life spent holding out for something–or someone–that would meet her great expectations is told from the perspective of the now 40-something, single mother Gottlieb. (The baby daddy? A test tube.) She writes that, as she ages, she finds herself much more willing to settle for something less than fabulous–and advises younger women that the really smart thing to do is to just settle for the balding dude with dragon breath.

Take the date I went on last night. The guy was substantially older. He had a long history of major depression and said, in reference to the movies he was writing, “I’m fascinated by comas” and “I have a strong interest in terrorists.” He’d never been married. He was rude to the waiter. But he very much wanted a family, and he was successful, handsome, and smart. As I looked at him from across the table, I thought, Yeah, I’ll see him again. Maybe I can settle for that. But my very next thought was, Maybe I can settle for better. It’s like musical chairs–when do you take a seat, any seat, just so you’re not left standing alone?

Then, on precisely the other end of the spectrum, there was Sandra Tsing Loh’s shockingly honest account of the end of her marriage, which included an offhand mention of the affair she had that precipitated it. She suggests that love has an expiration date, and that, in the face of having it all, the drudgery of reigniting that old, familiar flame seemed but a futile task on her already too-long list of To-Dos:

Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance.

She introduces us to her friend Rachel, married to the seemingly perfect man (who hasn’t touched Rachel in over two years). One night over martinis, Rachel announces she, too, has been thinking divorce:

Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodeling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.

…In any case, here’s my final piece of advice: avoid marriage–or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.

Whew. Between she and Gottleib, it certainly seems that we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

And then there was Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, who, at the wise old age of 42, recently lamented the loss of her looks, her loneliness, and the years she spent fleeing commitment, sabotaging stability, believing she’d always have options (and a wrinkle-free face). In the piece for Elle, a longer version of which will soon arrive at bookstores near you, Wurtzel writes:

The idea of forever with any single person, even someone great whom I loved so much like Gregg, really did seem like what death actually is: a permanent stop. Love did not open up the world like a generous door, as it should to anyone getting married; instead it was the steel clamp of the iron maiden, shutting me behind its front metal hinge to asphyxiate slowly, and then suddenly. Every day would be the same forever: The body, the conversation, it would never change–isn’t that the rhythm of prison?

Reader, she cheated on him.

(Primetime television’s answer to the mature modern woman’s romantic conundrum? Cougar Town.)

I remember reading each of these women’s stories, and bring them up because they were recently culled together into a piece by 25 year-old Irina Aleksander in the New York Observer, entitled “The Cautionary Matrons.” In it, Aleksander writes:

Our mothers and grandmothers seemed to have sound instructions. But now–now that the generation of women ahead of us has begun to sound regretful, shouting at us, “Don’t end up like me!”–what we have instead are Cautionary Matrons, issuing what feel like incessant warnings.

Single 40-something women warn us about being too career-oriented and forgetting to factor in children; married women warn us that marriage is a union in which sex and fidelity are optional; and divorced women warn us to keep our weight down, our breasts up and our skin looking like Saran Wrap unless we want our husbands to later leave us for 23 year-olds.

While her take is entertaining, the quotes she includes are downright spooky: though our own context might not be the same, the sentiments are quite possibly universal. Too many choices–and opportunity cost, when picking one means you necessarily can’t have the others.

From Gottlieb, to Aleksander:

The article was like I was someone’s big sister and I was saying here’s my experience and all of the misconceptions I had… I think you guys are actually lucky because you’ll get a more mixed set of messages. When I was in my 20s, women were all about having it all and ‘a guy is great but he is not the main course.’ We got a single message and it was all, me, me, me, me, me. ‘You go girl!’ And now those of us that grew up with these messages are finally admitting that those messages of empowerment may actually conflict with what we want.

And leave it to Tsing Loh to be so candid it will make you cringe, cry, and chuckle:

[Tsing Loh] speculated about the reason for this apparent surge in matronly warnings: ‘I think because we’re really surprised!’ she screamed into the receiver. ‘In our 20s, the world was totally our oyster. All those fights had been fought. We weren’t going to be ’50s housewives, we were in college, we could pick and choose from a menu of careers, and there were all these interesting guys out there not like our dads. We were smart women who had a lot of options and made intelligent choices and that’s why we’re writing these pieces. We’re shocked!’

‘It must be very confusing,’ she said sympathetically. ‘We were the proteges of old-guard feminists: ‘Don’t have a baby, or if you must, have one, wait till your 40s.’ We were sold more of a mission plan and now you guys… Well, sadly, it all seems like kind of a mess. There is no mission. Even stay-at-home moms feel unsuccessful unless they’re canning their own marmalade and selling it on the Internet. You just have a bunch of drunk, depressed, 45-year-old ladies going, ‘A-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH.’

Again, whew.

Aleksander goes on, recounting a conversation she had with a friend about the subject:

‘They are the first generation of women who were presented with choices,’ she said. ‘I think they are in the process of reflecting on a half-century of existence and are realizing that ‘having it all’ was really a lie. Sometimes I think the idea of ‘having it all’ can almost be more disempowering than ‘having it all’ because one is never allowed enough time or energy to excel in one area of their life.’

Choices. Uncharted territory. It looks to me like yet another mirror of our whole thesis: with so many options, is it ever possible not to second-guess ourselves? to wonder about the road not traveled? to worry that the grass is greener? to find yourself paralyzed in the face of all that analysis? When do you just take a seat, any seat? And, with all the seats out there, is it ever possible to be content with the seat we’ve chosen?

I don’t know, but I’m hopeful that one day, we’ll find the answer.

In bed.

Someone who is smarter than me (and who shall remain nameless) forwarded a link to an L.A. Times op-ed written by Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two journalists who were imprisoned in North Korea and released last month.

Their piece, this smart kid suggested, serves as a good wake-up call for the rest of us: Not necessarily Ling and Lee’s own story of being captured on a frozen river that divides China from North Korea and thrown into jail, but the story they were trying to cover. It’s a story that is ultimately all about choices — or lack of same.

Excerpts from their op-ed:

We had traveled to the area to document a grim story of human trafficking for Current TV. During the previous week, we had met and interviewed several North Korean defectors — women who had fled poverty and repression in their homeland, only to find themselves living in a bleak limbo in China. Some had, out of desperation, found work in the online sex industry; others had been forced into arranged marriages….

Our motivations for covering this story were many. First and foremost, we believe that journalists have a responsibility to shine light in dark places, to give voice to those who are too often silenced and ignored. One of us, Euna, is a devout Christian whose faith infused her interest in the story. The other, Laura, has reported on the exploitation of women around the world for years. We wanted to raise awareness about the harsh reality facing these North Korean defectors who, because of their illegal status in China, live in terror of being sent back to their homeland…

Most of the North Koreans we spoke with said they were fleeing poverty and food shortages. One girl in her early 20s said she had been told she could find work in the computer industry in China. After being smuggled across the Tumen River, she found herself working with computers, but not in the way she had expected. She became one of a growing number of North Korean women who are being used as Internet sex workers, undressing for online clients on streaming video. Some defectors appeared more nervous about being interviewed than others. But they all agreed that their lives in China, while stark, were better than what they had left behind in North Korea.

Are you awake now? As the forementioned smart girl wrote in her email:

The underlying story is a good wake up call to us: Better to be an internet sex worker than live in North Korea where they have no choices. That’s what faces them — and here we are whining about doctor vs lawyer vs mother?

Photo: Euna Lee, left, hugs her husband and daughter and Laura Ling hugs her husband, Iain Clayton (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

The other day, I got an interesting email from a good friend of mine. She was walking home from work, she said, having what she referred to as a “low self-esteem day,” when she came upon a big sign in a storefront, picturing three smiling (appropriately diverse, yet all perfectly coiffed) women, “around our age,” her email said (read: early-to-mid 30s), looking happy, healthy, content. “And I just thought to myself I bet they all have kids.” This particular friend doesn’t even want to have children–an assertion she reiterated in her email–but that didn’t stop the tears. “I just feel like life is passing me by,” she wrote.

(For the record, this friend is amazing and wildly enviable in her own right. She’s lived all over the world, and is successful, beautiful, talented, happily married.)

In a way, it reminded me of this comment, from Christine:

I am a 30 year old mother of two who has definately suffered from the “grass is greener” syndrome. After my daughter was born, I chose to stay at home with my children while pursuing an education. I not only became extreamely depressed, because I felt that I should be “doing it all” (work, school, housewifing, and mothering), but I percieved critism from other women for my choice. I felt like I was worthless. I did not appreciate my life and the wonderfull oppurtunity that I had to be with my children. I was more concerned with what I thought I should be doing, then with what I had chosen to do. I felt that there was something wrong with me, because I could not be the “supermom” (al a Claire Huxtable) that is portrayed on television as the epitome of womanhood. When I finally decided that I needed a job, I spent the whole time that I was at work wishing that I was at home with my kids.

They’re familiar feelings, even for those of us who, outwardly, do seem to have it all. And yet, I think, for women, the whole “life is passing me by” thing is somewhat new. (For men, the story’s so old, there’s an archetype: divorce, young girlfriend, Corvette. Even, for some, toupee. Cringe.) Aging, of course, is as old as time. But, as my friend and I talked it out later–over wine, naturally–we determined that this particular brand of angst has less to do with aging per se than it does with the idea that, as time goes by, what once looked like a wide-open wonderland bursting with possibility and open doors starts looking more and more like a collage of What You’re Missing Out On. That, with every choice we make, we shut those other doors for good, one by painful one. It’s that evil ‘opportunity cost‘ thing, come home to roost. And there’s no model for how to deal with our feelings over what we’re leaving behind Doors Number Two through Infinity (after all, if we can ‘do anything,’ the possibilities are literally infinite, right?).

We want to travel, but can’t take off whenever we feel like it if we’re also going to get our business off the ground–and featured on Oprah. We want a family, but that’d mean that packing up and moving to Cairo or New Orleans on a whim is pretty much off the table. We want to be there for our daughter’s every milestone, yet we also want to model what a successful career woman looks like. We want torrid affairs and hot sex, but where would that leave our husbands? We want financial security and a latte on our way to the office every morning, but sit in our ergonomically correct chairs daydreaming about trekking through Cambodia with nothing but our camera and mosquito net. We want to be an artist, but have gotten rather used to that roof over our heads. We want to be ourselves, fully and completely, but would like to fit in at cocktail parties, too. (And when on earth are we going to find the time to write our novel??)

And it can’t help that women are so often subject to the Either-Or treatment. You can be a Madonna or a whore, a Peggy or a Joan, or as The Guardian argued yesterday, a Jen or a Cameron. By virtue of being one, we necessarily are not the other–have we absorbed this paradigm to the point that its extension holds sway as well? Do we believe that it’s necessarily mother or CEO? traveler or wife? artist or president of the PTA? (And, if this either-orism is but an illusion, is it possible that all those closed doors we’re so busy pining over might in fact be unlocked?)

Granted, these are beautiful, wonderous, lucky problems–pardon me, choices–to have.

And make no mistake, we know how lucky we are. We’ve been reminded regularly, since we were sporting pigtails and must-see TV was 3-2-1- Contact: You girls today are so lucky, you can be anything you want! And don’t forget that we came of age during the Have it All era–another swell idea in theory. But I think those sentiments–constructed though they were to be capital-E-Empowering!–often play out to look a little more like capital-D-Disappointing. Like fear that the path we’ve picked isn’t good enough, or that we missed our calling along the way, or that we’ll never get to do all the things we can do, or that because we can do it all, we should. And the real stink of it is that all this fixating on what we’re not doing makes us that much less able to enjoy what it is we are doing. Knowing we can do anything, trying to have it all… it kind of makes me wonder, have we all just been set up?

Seems like a lot of folks are looking for a new direction these days. More and more unintentional entrepreneurs are trying to find their way through an ocean of choices. Too many choices, though, can be worse than too few. Faced with, apparently, an infinite variety of options for the future, paralysis sets in; our hero or heroine feels rudderless, trying to decide which direction to go.

But it’s not a rudder they’re missing. It’s motion.

A sailboat is a fine thing, even sitting at the dock. But sitting at docks is not what they’re designed for; they’re designed to use the wind to push against the waves and, between the two opposing forces, create forward motion.

And now, once the sailboat is under way, the rudder starts working.

You can sit at the dock ’til the cowfish come home, swinging the rudder from side to side, and you’ll never find direction. It’s only in movement that we can measure our progress against any kind of standards to see if we’re heading somewhere we want to go.

Feeling rudderless? Get away from the dock. Head, first, into the safety of a nearby harbor. Check out your rigging and stock the galley with supplies. Do what you reasonably can to prepare for the journey.

And then go. ‘Away from the dock’ is automatically ‘toward something new.’ Keep one eye on the compass to see where you’re heading, and one on the horizon, to see where you want to go.

And now, now that you’re moving, you’ll find direction.

Seems like a lot of folks are looking for a new direction these days. More and more unintentional entrepreneurs are trying to find their way through an ocean of choices. Too many choices, though, can be worse than too few. Faced with, apparently, an infinite variety of options for the future, paralysis sets in; our hero or heroine feels rudderless, trying to decide which direction to go.

But it’s not a rudder they’re missing. It’s motion.

A sailboat is a fine thing, even sitting at the dock. But sitting at docks is not what they’re designed for; they’re designed to use the wind to push against the waves and, between the two opposing forces, create forward motion.

And now, once the sailboat is under way, the rudder starts working.

You can sit at the dock ’til the cowfish come home, swinging the rudder from side to side, and you’ll never find direction. It’s only in movement that we can measure our progress against any kind of standards to see if we’re heading somewhere we want to go.

Feeling rudderless? Get away from the dock. Head, first, into the safety of a nearby harbor. Check out your rigging and stock the galley with supplies. Do what you reasonably can to prepare for the journey.

And then go. ‘Away from the dock’ is automatically ‘toward something new.’ Keep one eye on the compass to see where you’re heading, and one on the horizon, to see where you want to go.

And now, now that you’re moving, you’ll find direction.

I quote Ron Livingston, in his iconic role as office cog-cum-construction-worker Peter Gibbons: “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way! Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” You know you’re in trouble when “Office Space” stops making you laugh and starts pissing you off. And, in his prestigious think tank job and despite the PhD in philosophy under his belt, Matthew Crawford, the author of a new book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft” was most definitely in trouble. So, after several months of doing suprisingly little thinking at said think tank, he left, and opened up a motorcycle repair shop. His book is about the satisfaction of an honest day’s work–and how our society places too little value on such work (witness the extinction of shop class). In a recent NPR interview, he said:

Anyone with halfway decent test scores is getting hustled into a certain track, where you work in an office.

He argues that we’ve created an “educational monoculture,” with “only one respectable course” (those words made me think of the creepy meat-grinder scene in Pink Floyd’s The Wall–check the video at the end of this post), and goes on to say:

It takes a real contrarian streak to live more deliberately and make these calls for yourself…

That reminded me of this comment from Tamara, in response to my post about The Uniform Project, and whether less choice leads to more creativity: “I think it really comes down to an individual’s ingenuity and courage to be themselves.” And it does take courage–and a bit of a contrarian streak–to be yourself. Assuming we can find that courage and tap it, Crawford describes the point of work, as he sees it:

The point is to find some work where you can make yourself useful to people in a straightforward way that engages your own judgment and thinking so that your actions feel like they’re genuinely your own.

Seems like a lot to ask for from a job–and yet it also seems so profoundly simple, there’s no way it can’t be true. Leave it to a philosopher. But really. Do you feel like you were steered away from your passions, your soulcraft, in pursuit of…. a job? And, again back to the choices thing, I wonder if, as overwhelmingly inclusive as the whole “you can be whatever you want!” mantra is, it’s all too easy to just get on the conveyer belt, and hope to make some decent… hamburger? Don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to be said for hamburger. Security. Benefits (dare to dream). But what about fulfillment? What about passion? Is it possible to have any pudding, if we don’t eat our meat?

Check what some of our readers have had to say this past week. To continue the conversations — or read the whole comments — click the links.

On quarterlife:

“…especially with all the recent layoffs, quarter-lifers like myself are stuck answering the age-old question: what should I do with my life? I have a full-time job I enjoy and am still struggling… The best thing about the mid-20s is that you can dress and act like a teenager (and get away with it) and dress and act like an upwardly mobile junior executive (and get away with it). The worst part about the mid-20s: trying to decide which of those images accurately reflects YOU.”          — Timithie

“I’m getting stressed out just reading those questions! I’ve been trying to decide on a car to purchase for five years. FIVE YEARS. I can make great decisions at the office – but when it comes to this… hybrid? 4-wheel drive? fun? practical? lease? buy? 2-door? navigation? red? leather? floormats? cupholders? aaargh. Hello, indecisions and paralysis. It’s embarrassing, frankly. Although, should I be embarassed, or embrace it? Share it, or hide it? Fake it, or own it? I digress.” — Page

“It’s so wonderful to have the plethora of options that we do…but I have no idea which way to go. Some of the stuff I have absolutely nailed down – I know what kind of clothes I like to wear; I know that I DON’T want to be a mathematician… As for the rest…I’m at a loss.” — Marjorie

About women and their choices:

“I am 65 years old and have had the option to work or not work throughout my marriage. …Up to about 35 I used to worry about why I liked to change and explore new things and what was wrong with me that I could not find one goal or profession and stick to it for life like Georgia O’ Keefe did with her passion for painting. But, at around 40, I decided to accept that this is just who I am… I have continued to and hope to never stop changing, learning and growing as the years go on and love it that way.” — Dottie

“I am mostly happy with my job — it’s challenging and well-paid and flexible — but at the same time I constantly feel like I’m just dancing around in circles on the fringes of “the dream job.” I also struggle with how big and important a role I want career to play in my life anyway. I came out of law school thinking I wanted career to be my entire life, and the older I get, the less important career seems and the more important the rest of life seems…” — Anne

“What a relief to find that I’m not the only one who has experienced this phenomenon! I keep reading everything, thinking, “Yes, yes, yes!” My sister used to tease me that I was on the semester system in life because I was always moving and changing jobs. But really I was just worried that I was missing my “true calling” or not doing enough to fulfill my parents’ expectations after all that schooling. .. Now I’m almost 40 and starting yet a new career… Looking back I can see how the choices and self-inflicted expectations led to a major paralysis in my mid-20’s…” — Marisa

“One of my favorite things about being a woman, and about women in general, is how they tend to be better at adapting to change than men. I feel this is a real benefit when you look at the number of choices before us these days…You have to bend and mold and be flexible to be successful in life and I see that women really tend to show this strength. No wonder we have so many choices before us…women rule. I say “Bring it ON”!! — Ani

“Yes, I swim in a sea of confusion over my options! Being a woman who feels she is unlimited, I’ve spent too much time debating my opportunities instead of picking one path and sticking with it. I can’t complain; life has been good. I do, however, feel concern that I might be overlooking the one thing that is my “calling.” From orchestra conductor to herpetologist to cartographer to photographer to writer, I’ve wanted to do it all. I also know that I can, we all can…”          — Lauren

On “Commencement”:

“…I’m curious to see how women (or men) from previous generations would relate to the characters. One interesting tidbit, I thought, was from one of the character’s mothers, who said — while cooking dinner and doing 90% of the housework — that women with careers and families makes life easier for one gender… men.” — Colleen

On the pressure of the passion versus paycheck dilemma:

“I feel like I have dealt with this issue my entire life, just on a slightly different level. What if you don’t have a passion? It always seems to come up: What would you do if time, money and experience didn’t matter, how would you spend your time? Honestly, I have no idea. … When I did my corporate job for 10 years, I did it well (I have the annual reviews to back that up), but it wasn’t what I lived for. I worked to live, not lived to work. My real life was always on the verge of something else. The verge of what? who knows. I was talking with a friend this weekend who basically thought it was pointless to work in a job that wasn’t emotionally, spiritually, and creatively fullfilling. I thought good for her, but what about everyone else? I kept thinking, this is a first-world problem and really doesn’t apply to much of the world.” — Joanna

On the happiness gap:

“… with so many choices and so many opportunities, it seems like women can now choose careers that they want to pursue rather than doing something they have to do. Unfortunately, our society seems to encourage us to seek out jobs that pay the most money rather than jobs that we enjoy. Finding a high-paying job you love isn’t easy. Of course we all need money to live, but is it worth doing something that causes so much stress just to have the money? Perhaps the women that are the most anxious, stressed and medicated are those that are pursuing high-paying, high-stress jobs that they hate – jobs that in the past may have been held primarily by men.”  — Jennifer

Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz is the guru of too many choices. His book “The Paradox of Choice” puts forth the argument that, the more choices there are, the more unhappy we’ll be with whichever one we choose. Check the video above (long, but worth watching–especially for his hilarious cartoons) to hear him talking about option excess in the salad dressing aisle, the cell phone store, and his inspiration for the book, something to which we can all relate: shopping for jeans. More specifically, how he found the experience of standing before a wall of options so overwhelming as to leave him longing for the days when jeans came in only one style, only one wash–and not an especially flattering one, at that. He talks about how having so many choices makes picking any one a million times harder than it should be (hello, analysis paralysis), and about how in the face of so many options, there’s no way NOT to come out of the store worrying that the perfect pair was actually one of the ones he’d left discarded on the dressing room floor, or one of the ones he never even got around to trying on. He calls that phenomenon “opportunity cost.” We call it those nagging daydreams about the road not traveled.

The thing is, he’s talking about buying jeans. And yeah, buying jeans is stressful (who wants to wind up with a black bar over her face as a Glamour “Don’t”? More to the point: these days, most of us can only afford one new pair of jeans, if we’re lucky–so if we pick wrong, we’re stuck with the “Don’t”)… but that’s buying jeans. Now extrapolate that stress, that overwhelm, that angst to the ultimate question: What Should I Do With My Life?

Is it any wonder that we’re all in such a state?

Wharton School’s Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers published a study in May that’s been dubbed “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” The title kinda says it all, but the gist is that, while, 35 years ago or so, women reported being happier than men, today women–regardless of marital or employment status or whether or not they have kids–report being unhappier than men. And, as one might imagine, dozens of articles came out in the wake of that study, riffing on the whys.

From the Sunday London Times:

There’s plenty more opportunities for women than there used to be–but then again, that means you are always questioning whether the moves you have made are correct, or whether you should have done something else.

From BusinessWeek:

Over the last 50 years, women have secured greater opportunity, greater achievement, greater influence, and more money. But over the same time period, they have become less happy, more anxious, more stressed, and, in ever-increasing numbers, they are medicating themselves for it,’ says management thinker and author Marcus Buckingham… ‘Better education and job opportunities and freedoms have decreased life happiness for women.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a bit of a problem with that assessment. (Not least because it’s coming from a guy.) The Washington Examiner’s Marta Mossburg had this to say:

Too many choices or opportunities can paralyze rather than inspire. Men are used to this. For women, opportunity is still a relatively new phenomenon, and often a confusing one.

and

Women’s declining happiness in the face of greatly expanded freedoms should come as no surprise. But neither should a reversal of the trend once they have the time to get used to it.

That I can get behind. What about you? What do you think? Does this idea get your hackles up, or do you think there might be a kernel of not-so-convenient truth in there? Would you be happier if your only career options were teacher, secretary, nurse; what if our society was down with arranged marriages, for that matter? And, okay, we’ll be happier once we get used to it. Swell. But in the meantime, we’re living our lives now, wishing we were just a tad happier than we are… So how do we get there?

Clearly, a touchstone of the zeitgeist: Read what the New York Times had to say about “Commencement“, one of the hottest new summer reading books, currently on backorder in bookstores near you:

[The author, J. Courtney Sullivan] is brave to characterize the modern female condition as equally bewildering and empowering: ‘They were the first generation of women,” one character notes, “whose struggle with choice had nothing to do with getting it and everything to do with having too much of it — there were so many options that it felt impossible and exhausting to pick the right ones.’

This too many choices thing? It’s not just us. No less than e-behemoth Microsoft has recognized that our era would be more accurately described as the too-much-information age. And the more information, the harder the decision.

We live in an age of too much new technology .. too many choices … take iPods for example .. the world has never seen such an effective tool for carrying around more music and videos than you will ever listen to in one life time … There are too many choices … and yours is better than your mates one because , yep you guessed it , yours has more capacity … so while he can only carry 10 000 songs at a time, you can carry 20 000 …

Some of you may have never carried the Sony Walkman or even the Discman … but for those of us who did they were cool pieces of kit … freedom, battery life and a great music selection (or about 10 tapes or discs) and you were mobile .. from commuting to traveling to diving trips to ski runs … music was everywhere and it was cool … now one iPod carries as much music as an entire ski village had during those days, including all night clubs, all skiers on the slopes, all the cars and all the bars … that be a lot of tunes !

So it’s about choices .. are we happier or more content with all that choice on tap at any time should we find the need or desire ? …My contention is actually not… I have recently relegated my 80GB iPod to my safe to act as a backup disk for my iMac data …

I travel now with my 8GB Nano (1st Generation, which interestingly enough is the design that Apple has returned to for the Nano) … it is not filled to the brim with music, but has a travel backup of all my work files (about 2-3GB worth), also my contacts and calendar, should my phone go missing … and then the balance in music … I would say a good 5 GB worth … this is plenty for any trip of a month or less …

My theory is that if you are sitting around all day listening to music you don’t have enough action in your life !

The other benefit of loading an iPod up for a particular trip is that it forces you to go through your collection and find music that you really want to listen to … it avoids invariably invoking of the shuffle button in the larger iPods as you run out of patience with continuous song finding…

Or have I missed the point of carrying around all this choice? … as an avid techno early adopter I find myself pulling back from the technological arms race as we are getting less and less incremental bang for our upgrade bucks … the old Nano still works a treat, has a few travel scars but has never let me down … the new one is cheap enough for me to buy one with no big deal, but will it give me a better experience … I doubt it … enlighten us with your views … till next time …

I noticed something about my songs – the vast majority of my early songs are either slow or medium. That’s probably because the slower it is, the easier it is for me to play the guitar part and that fact subconsciously affects my writing. At least that’s my theory.

So I set out to write some faster songs, for balance if nothing else. I wanted to find out if I could write a good fast song or if I’m destined to be a ballad writer, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

One more reason I wanted to write some fast songs is that nothing brings down an audience more than a set of slow songs without an occasional uptempo number to change the pace. And, as you singer/songwriters know, when you perform in a drinking establishment, they sell more drinks when the music is loud and rowdy or at least bouncy.

I find it’s a good exercise to push myself to write songs that don’t come naturally. Which leads me to one of my favorite exercises: self-imposed limitations.

Back in the day, when somebody like Mozart wrote music, it was always for a specific event or purpose. When Mozart’s patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, would ask for a piece for the celebration of a family member’s birthday or the anniversary of the king’s coronation or some such thing, Mozart had to comply. He did not have the luxury of choosing his topics, he had to write what his ‘employer’ told him to write.

According to Good-Music-Guide.com, Mozart’s next patron, the infamous Hieronymous Colloredo, laid down the hard line to the Mozarts [Amadeus and his father Leopold]. They were employees and their job was to remain in Salzburg performing music for the court (Mozart’s compositional skills were not valued).

Neither did he always have the luxury of choosing his instrumentation. If a string quartet was available, that’s what he wrote for.

Nowadays, as songwriters we can have too many choices. If you use MIDI or loops, you have just about every instrument under the sun to choose from. We have tons of studio effects at our disposal. And because of recordings, radio, TV and the ‘net, we are all aware of many different styles of music that were unknown to Mozart, most of which didn’t exist in his time.

Too many choices can be a hindrance to the creative artist. To get around that, simply limit your palette. Just as a painter may choose a limited color palette for a particular painting, you can choose to set some limits on yourself for a particular song writing session.

I call it self-inflicted limits. Here are some examples. Limit yourself to writing a song:

- for a small combo, say bass, piano and drums,
- for 2 voices in the style of the Everly Brothers,
- for 4 voices in the style of CSNY,
- for 4 a capella voices, SATB
- in waltz time,
- for an unusual mix of instruments, say tuba and guitar,
- with a particular rhyme scheme,
- in barbershop quartet style,
- that would appeal to kindergarten age children,
- about a particular subject, say your favorite sports team,
- from the point of view of someone of the opposite sex,
- about a fictional character from literature,
- in a minor key,
- about a story in today’s news

You get the picture. Constraining yourself at the beginning of the process can help you focus. Once you get started and the juices are flowing, you can always jettison the limits and expand on what you’ve got.

Let us know if you find this exercise helpful, and if you have any that work for you — we’d love to hear about them!

While talking to some of our buyers, it occurred to us that they currently have too many Choices .  Now this is not news to anybody who serfs the web, but if you plan to buy anything you have to set limits and need to have perimeters. We are currently into our third month of choosing living room furniture that no one will use.  I not going to make this a long post, but simply point out that in any buying decision, the buyer has to decide what they need, what their standards are, and what they are willing to spend. 

In the go-go days of the housing boom, you basically bid on your minimal requirements and hoped for the best.  Today with four times the inventory of the boom, many potential buyers are asking, isn’t; there something better at a lower price coming on?  We’ll, ya ,maybe.  But  what is it that you need and are you qualified to get it if it comes on the market.  Right now the biggest issue is getting a loan and the second will the property appraise. 

Think.  No home is perfect.  Everything can be changed for a price.  What neighborhoods do you like, what do  really need for for the next 5 to 7 years, then talk to your loan broker or lender and find out what you you can afford to pay on a monthly basis.

They say that stress sometimes comes from having too many choices.

You only need to spend five minutes with a dinner menu at Cheesecake Factory to realize how true that really is.

I was reminded of this dilemma when I went to purchase a loaf of bread at the grocery store. This seemingly easy task turned into an outing that would be more difficult then taking a pack of sugar infused 4-year olds to Disneyland.

When I was young, I think we had two choices — wheat or white. Now there are 2,459 types of bread to choose from. You have wheat, white, whole grain, multi-grain, half grain, etc., etc.

Not sure I fully understand the “grain” thing. Is seven-grain better than six-grain? What about 12-grain?

I feel like calling my sixth grade woodshop teacher for help — 220 grain sandpaper was fairly smooth; 80 grain sandpaper was very rough; six or seven grain? That sounds like wheat boulders, not bread slices. I can’t swallow that.

The name doesn’t help me much either. Wonder Bread. I don’t think about bread much let alone “wonder” about it.

Please, for the sake of all that is good in the world, start cutting out some of my bread options. McDonald’s knows this. I only have to order by number. If other food producers followed suit, I think I would be happier with fewer choices.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go find milk. 

A Dave Mathews song goes, “It’s a typical situation in these typical times… Too many choices.” Whether you’re buying a laptop or a car, it can be overwhelming to make apples-to-apples comparisons between all the options out there. It can be exhausting unless you love cars or gizmos (I have friends who find a trip to Best Buy or the local car dealership truly stimulating!).

Barry Schwartz has done research on the subject of too many choices. Have you seen his speech at the TED conference? http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93

I’m not suggesting that we should go back and not have choices. That’s not even realistic given our current consumption habits. But maybe we don’t need so many choices — choices that pollute our air, water, and muck up the planet for us and future generations. Maybe there’s some middle ground here?