epilogue

Passwords are good. But when you subscribe to a lot of services, you start swimming in the so-called “password soup”. I have friends who prefer keeping one password for everything, they probably don’t care about what might happen when that one password gets out. That’s why we have password managers. Recently, I tried SplashID for the Mac and the iPhone. I liked what I saw and purchased it straightaway. I soon realized that there are plenty of them password managers out there, nearly 40 or so. It seems that 1Password is the tool that the world is using. Dang!

Ditto for iPhone applications. For any given function, there are just too many of them. All this reopened a line of thinking that I had quite a few years ago. It basically dealt with choice and freedom. In a post-industrial consumption-based society, more choice definitely means more freedom. Freedom is good, but is having lots and lots of choice good? To simplify things a bit, I feel it comes down to the difference between custom-tailoring and mass produced ready to wear clothes. Basically a manufacturer of name-brand clothes says something like so:

Just because we don’t have time to measure you, we’ll make clothes in all shapes and sizes. Plus we’ll manufacture it so cheaply, that we’re sure there is someone out there who is ready to buy it at a good markup and suck it up. We will then use our profits to influence him and make him come back for more, and then some…

On the other hand, my tailor passes a comment on gaining some weight, tells me what will look good on me, gives me a choice of cuts and fabrics and measures me up before stitching and fitting something. The end result, is not only what I am comfortable in, but it also makes me look good and feel happy. Besides being a quantity vs. quality argument, it also becomes wanting what you already have rather than wanting what you don’t have. You treasure what you have a great deal more. The only problem is that the whole process takes a lot of time.

But our original question still remains: Is more choice good? Well, I just found out how to put this case in plain simple English: Watch Barry Schwartz give an absolutely great talk on the paradox of choice. If one gets over accepting that more choice equals more freedom, the rest of his logic is extremely conclusive.

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