Expectation

I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans and I walked out of the store, truth, with the best fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But I felt worse. The reason I felt worse is that with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low expectations. I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in a hundred flavors, damn it, one of them should have been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results even when they're good results.