Choice Overload vs. Indivduality Theft

We live in a world where individuality is overloading us with more choices than we could ever possibly need. The simple mathematical permutation of how many different combinations of pizza toppings alone is enough to make anybody's head spin. Our society conditions us to think that individuality is bad. The cover of every women's magazine tells people that unless you look exactly like the person on the cover you will not be "cool." As a result, teenage girls end up with eating disorders, self-esteem issues, and a lack of appreciation for the uniquely wonderful person that they can be. The same is true of men's magazines. The message is "If you're not 6-pack abbed, 6' 2" tall, have darkly tanned skinned, and enough musculature to compete in the Mr. Universe contest, then you just don't make the cut."

All this serves to do is to confuse the mind of an adolescent into equating being different with being wrong. Yet, we still cling to the individuality with all of the choices we're faced with in the mundane every day activities that we do. You go to a bagel shop, and you order a bagel. You look through the case at about a dozen or more different varieties to choose from: whole wheat, blueberry, chocolate chip, asiago cheese, sesame seed, onion, and for those that cannot decide the "everything" bagel which is a collection of all of them, and how good can that taste really? And, once you do choose a bagel flavor, you're left with what to put on it: strawberry shmear, blueberry shmear, garlic shmear, salmon shmear, or just plain butter. Isn't it kind of cruel to make someone think this hard when they haven't even eaten breakfast yet?

And Starbucks is no help. You know that you want coffee. You go in to look at their overwhelming menu, and you have to figure out even more choices: macchiatto, frappaccino, mocha, cafe au lait. Then you have to contend with: French roast, Sumatran blend, Ethiopian, etc. Then you have to figure out whether you want
a "venti," "grande," or whatever that other one is and god forbid they just use "small," "medium," and "large" because then they couldn't be pretentious and trendy. So you finally get you coffee after having waded through an ocean of choices, and you go to put some sugar into it, and here we go again. Raw sugar, plain sugar, liquid sugar, Splenda, Sweet 'N' Low, ad infinitum. By this point, who has the strength left to even drink that damned thing? I recently asked a barista "Isn't it somewhat ridiculous how many choices we have in society nowadays?" He answered, "Considering that I have to ask every customer the same 12 questions every time they order a drink, I think that I agree with you."

So on the one hand, we have way too many choices, and on the other we're trained to not think in the first place. Personally, just trying to figure out which is better is causing me mental stress. I think that the solution is one of scope. If we lived in a world where we conditioned adolescents to think that when it comes to things talked about in all of those health magazines (body type, clothing brand, muscle tone) that you could choose whatever you want to have and be, and for the more mundane choices (bagel flavor, coffee flavor, and sugar preference) you only had about half of the options that you do right now, then I think that we'd strike a much better balance between preserving our self-esteem during those turbulent teenage years and maintaining our sanity in the adult years by keeping the "Fast" in "Fast-Food" as ringing true.