Intoxicated by possibility

A few years ago, shortly before The Love Project, I was enjoying cold beers on a roof terrace in Saigon with a lovely young couple from Germany I had befriended during the day trip to Cu Chi Tunnels. When they asked me if I had a boyfriend, I didn’t just simply answer ’no’. I went on a bit of rant, trying to justify to them (and to the entire world for that matter!) that there was something wrong with living in a big city like London, that people were just so used to consume and discard and that their huge appetite for instant gratification made finding love in such a context something of a chimera.

I wasn’t sure if I made any sense, I was just something I was onto, instinctively. But months later, during The Love Project, I came across Barry Schwartz’s book ’The Paradox of Choice’. As I was seeking to make sense out of the current dating paradigm, I found out from Barry Schwartz that we live in world of too many choices, which is said to ’tyrannize’.

“We have too many choices, too many decisions, too little time to do what is really important,” suggested Schwartz and I shouted ’Eureka!’ This was going to explain why I hadn’t been able to find a boyfriend in over six years. When faced with too many options, people stop choosing at all. They live in limbo. They think they can find better, that the ’new and improved’ is right around the corner. When in reality they should just learn to accept ’good enough’. Once I implemented that attitude in my own life, I found the choosing process easier and I knew to hold on to something good when I found it.

I wanted to write a blog post on this subject because I believe it’s so important to bring this issue to light. Often (and we don’t think we are guilty of it) we find ourselves in a constant race towards something better, whether is a life partner or simply the future. I feel it’s important to make you aware that enjoying what we have, that enjoying the ’good enough’, is a blessing and the only way to happiness.