Location Taken: Spruce Woods Provincial Park, Manitoba
Time Taken: June 2008
Do you ever have decision fatigue?
It’s a fairly common thing, actually. It’s when you get presented with so many decisions in a row that your brain gets overwhelmed and just shuts down. Modern life, with all the choices that are presented to us every day, is very prone to this type of fatigue. There’s ways to get past it, by applying overarching criteria that drops your decisions down to a manageable level, but those bring drawbacks with them. And sometimes, you just either can’t or don’t want to avoid all those tempting decisions.
Like today. The most recent patch for the MMORPG I play, Guild Wars 2, hit today, and oh my goodness is it packed full of changes.
So I was having to decide which part of the new stuff to try out first, and decide how to go about it, and after that was done, what to go to next. I mean, the new traits are really interesting but the wardrobe makes dressing up my characters so easy but the sigil revamp is something I should sort through and I haven’t even touched PvP yet… And then I was struck with the urge to buy all the dyes needed to complete my collection now that they apply to all my characters rather than just one, which I ended up doing because having more colors is awesome despite it eating a significant chunk of my money…
That’s actually one of the side effects of decision fatigue. You’re more likely to give in to impulse buying. Since your brain keeps getting overwhelmed by all the choices, it can short circuit when it comes to deciding if whatever you’re considering is worth the price or even something you really want at all.
Which might actually be why so many stores toss so many options at you. The loss from stocking oddball objects might be made up by increased impulse buying of other things triggered by having to consider, ever so briefly, if you might just want that mint jelly after all…
