I’ve been procrastinating a bit on scheduling our next CharacterLab session—it’s all new material, and I’ve been trying to get it right. This has been one of the most frustrating CharacterLab sessions to develop, and I really want to make sure I communicate the ideas well for all of you.
This talk is based on ideas from The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. Professor Schwartz challenges our very, very American assumption that more choice and more options and more freedom lead to greater happiness and satisfaction. Instead, he argues that too much choice can actually harm our emotional well-being. I read The Paradox of Choice in the first section of my UPenn MAPP program, and it blew my mind; I have notes in the margins about how this could relate to me, our team, to Coach Triya, to lots of things that were going on in my world at the time.
Over the past month, I’ve been wrestling with how to condense the key insights from a 200-page book into a 30-minute lunchtime session. Some of that struggle may have leaked into last Friday’s team talk and a few other places. I’ve been trying to figure out how to introduce a few complex ideas: that our decision-making is less rational than we think (a topic that could fill a whole semester), that our expectations often distort our satisfaction with our choices, and that we may actually be happier by reducing our options—focusing less on accumulating things and freedom, and more on cultivating relationships.
In the midst of this, I decided to reach out directly to Barry Schwartz. I explained what I was working on and sent him my outline, expecting a detailed critique—something like what I used to get on my UPenn papers. Instead, Barry replied, “Coach, you pretty much nailed it,” and suggested adding a bit about how social media amplifies some of these problems. He offered to go through it in more detail, but mostly he suggested I go ahead.
So, I guess it’s time to polish this up and present!
CharacterLab 2025-2026 Number Two
Lunchtime, Monday October 20, in D101 (Mr. Bonacorsi’s classroom)
Come to think a bit about:
- How our decision making is not as logical as we would like to think it is.
- How our expectations for happiness or disappointment can be wildly exaggerated.
- How being part of a friendship or team will constrain our choices–but make us happier.
Don’t expect to get all the answers to happiness, but be prepared to some things to think about.
