Choices. I'm not able to decide whether its good or its bad too have too many choices. This decision is a choice in itself. Definitely we have a million of them to make in a lifetime. However, the biggest problem is we don't give the important ones the importance that they deserve and spend time over the little ones that don't matter even a week from now. Take food for example, there are a 100 types of possible breakfast items and I definitely spend looking for a good breakfast alternative once in a while, other than my usual cereal bowl. If I analyze for past 4 months, I think it must have happened on less than 10 occasions that I had something different. But the fact remains that I did not think of it this way. If I knew this is my pattern and accepted it, it would save me a lot of stress of decision, a decision that wouldn't matter the next day itself!
Some people may say that my life is boring. But I don't feel that way. I feel that once we accept that something is good the way it is enables us to avoid the little stress that it causes everyday, saves us from choosing some of the things that don't matter. How it helps is it gives us time to stress over the bigger decisions in life, like careers or hobbies or family.
False Satisfaction
Sometimes, little choices may give us false feeling of accomplishments if we are feeling good at the end of it, however those choices don't affect our longer term goals. Rather, they keep us away from really thinking about the things that matter by making us feel satisfied. This is the reason why I think minimalist lifestyle is a superior one. We do need these small ones sometimes though, when we are low on confidence. That's the time when we should slowly look to build confidence from small accomplishments following smaller decisions.
Choosing everyday vs Choosing once
There are some things that we need to decide everyday, like which shirt to wear, what to have for breakfast, whether to shave or not to shave, whether to go shopping, what things to shop. A minimalist would have this figured out always because he is going to focus on the minimum things that are absolutely needed to go on living and he is going to accept the choices he makes for a longer period than a day. This doesn't necessarily make him boring or makes him live a repetitive lifestyle. This is not to say that he will never change what he once chose. This just means that he chooses and he accepts and sticks to it for a while until change is a necessity again. I find that a healthy way of living.
The big ones
Now if you have the simple things figured out in life you can devote most of the thinking cells of the brain into figuring out the bigger things in the life. Those decisions need to be thorough and would require a lot of time and thought and this minimalist lifestyle is going to enable us to give them their due importance. With time I think this can be practices. This is another way of thinking about the whole task/todo theory, where people for ages have talked about how pareto principle works everywhere and how successful people focus on the critical and not necessarily urgent matters over urgent/non-critical matters. This has been something people have been aware about but haven't know how to go about implementing that in real world. This kind of change cannot be brought upon just the thinking process it has to be part of the lifestyle to make it really internal in our behavior and thinking. And minimalist lifestyle solves this puzzle.
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