Paradoxes are amazing because they force us to hold two opposing ideas in our mind at the same time.

Now on the surface there appears to be a contradiction, but if you look beneath the surface

you often find the deepest and most powerful truths in life.

Today we're going to discuss a few of the most life-changing paradoxes that I've ever come across.

Like why having more options makes you feel less free. How the fear of failure only makes you feel less free.

How the fear of failure only makes it more likely that you fail,

or how being more connected with the world can make you feel lonelier

than ever before.

We're going to talk about these and much, much more, so stick around.

The podcast that's saving the world, one fewer fuck at a time. It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host Mark Manson.

The first one, the more choices you have, the less satisfied you are with each one so this is the widely known as the paradox of choice this comes from the psychological literature I believe it was Barry Schwartz. This was his work.

Great book called Paradox of Choice and the research studies that this is based on

are actually really simple, but I think the impact of this idea is quite profound.

So the original studies, they found that basically

if you give people, I don't know, say two options of Candy Bar,

they would pick their favorite and they would be relatively satisfied with that choice.

Whereas if you give people the option of 20 candy bars, then whatever option that they picked,

they actually would be less satisfied with that choice despite the fact that they had more

options to choose from and so this paradox of choice shows up in a lot of different areas of life and

my personal pet theory I guess that I talk about in my books is that a lot of the

mental health issues or anxiety or malaise of the modern world is the fact that we're exposed to so much information and so much opportunity

that we're beginning to have a paradox of choice about everything in our lives. That you get on social media and you become aware of a hundred different activities you could be doing this weekend.

...