The Tyranny of Choice

I have in my hand one of those paint-swatch “wheels,” that gather together a manufacturer’s offerings in one handy – and utterly bewildering – place.

            This particular wheel comes from Benjamin Moore.  Each of these gathered swatch cards shows seven related colors, moving across an effectively infinite spectrum.  There are well over 200 cards in this wheel representing several different collections – the Historical Colors collection, the America’s Colors collection, Organic Colors, Inorganic Colors, and others. 

This inventory, then, which does not even constitute the entirety of this one maker’s wares alone, includes more than 1,500 hues, many of them almost indistinguishable from the one before or on the next card or in another collection with a different set of themed names.

There is an entire collection of just Off Whites – because, of course, “White Ice” is nothing like “Icicle,” which is so very distinct from “Ice Mist,” which only a blind-ass fool could mistake for “Glacier”.

Now, I’m sure these shades are, in fact, demonstrably different. I’m confident science possesses instruments fine enough to measure these distinctions.  And, to be fair, I actually can see them with the unaided eye.  Really.  But only when they’re right next to one another and only when we’re engaged in the fool’s errand of trying to choose just the right thing.  Were the paint store to accidentally give us “White Heron” instead of  “White Dove,” we’d never know the difference once it was on the wall, and it would have no effect whatsoever on our lives.

Yet we struggle to get it just right.  The perfect shade for each room – to go with the floors, the furniture, the rugs.  To set the right mood.  To complement the next room over.

The mathematical possibilities created by the absurd overabundance of colors available render it, for all practical purposes, impossible to achieve the perfection desired.  And the confusion is worsened by the multiplicity of makers, times the proliferation of “bespoke” pigmenteers, marketers who merely put their name on a subset of colors undoubtedly already offered by other sellers under other names – but in less appealing brochures at much less reassuringly exclusive prices.

            The futility of the whole exercise is further compounded by the nature of light and color itself. The “Wickham Grey” we picked for the entry hall and stairwell – which, in the sample we chose from looked, you know, grey – looks bluish over here and greenish over there, depending on whether it’s receiving natural or artificial light, what it’s next to, and what you had for lunch. 

            Our friend Justin captured this dilemma long ago.  Having grown up in Jamaica, Sweden, and the U.K., he was entirely overwhelmed by the staggering amount of variety he was confronted with everywhere he turned in the States. The act of ordering lunch, simple where he’d grown up with only a reasonable range of options, became a labor under the imperative of making the best possible order out of an ever-expanding universe of choices.  The implied potential of enjoying the single, perfect sandwich made the threat of ending up with a merely good one unbearable.

Ironically, the freedom to choose exactly what you want makes you a slave to the tyranny of increasingly fine distinctions.  Please, let me choose between just drawer pulls A, B, and C. I simply don’t need the combination of styles, variations on said styles, colors and materials to make me sift through nano-differences up to ZZZ₁₀.

I’m sure it’s un-American to suggest that one’s freedom of choice should be so infringed. But I can’t help thinking that liberty might be better used in some other pursuit than parsing out the ontological implications of the Dakota Round Knob versus the Dakota Button Knob.