💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20201022 captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:44:25.
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Lately I've been listening to my portable CD player a lot and I've been enjoying the music much more than usual. Last night, it occurred to me what was making the experience better: lack of choice. The lack of choice I'm talking about isn't related to the variety of music available. I have enough CDs to satisfy my different musical tastes and, of course, you can still buy more or burn more. The great thing about the portable CD player is that there are no choices to make _while_I'm_listening_. Like a lot of you, I presume, I'm one of those people who plays around with the settings on everything. With computer programs I always root around in the config files and the menus. My phone is customized to the nth degree. The same is true of music apps and mp3 players. The really good ones allow a lot of customization: there are equalizer settings and sound effects with toggles and intensity settings. And I'm never sure that I've got it exactly right. So I keep adjusting, keep doing "A or B" tests, etc., when I started out intending to actually listen to music. Well, all of that is not a problem with the CD player. It has one tone adjustment switch (for extra bass). It's always on, because that usually sounds best with my particular headphones. Or at least that's what I tell myself. I don't want to admit that I'm a bass-head. I'm too old and sophisticated for that, right? Back to the main point: once I've made that decision I'm done. There's nothing else to adjust. But there's another thing that makes listening to CDs a more peaceful and immersive experience than listening to mp3s (or FLACs, AACs, and those ridiculous WMAs left over from the days of Zune). When I use an mp3 player, I'm always searching through the files for the next song to listen to. In fact, I'm so impatient that when I find it I often don't finish listening to the song I'm on. I'm never really sure that I made the right choice with the next song either. I know that may be my weird personal psychology, but given what I'm going to discuss below, I don't think it is. In any case, when I put on a CD, I just listen to the whole thing, and I actually focus on the music. It's immersive. It's serene. It's a special kind of zen. I accidentally came across a study years ago in the Harvard Business Review[1] about marketing and choice. The author discussed a company that was trying to sell jam. When they put 24 varieties on display, they got a lot of attention but made few sales. When they reduced the selection to six varieties, they started to sell a lot more jam. The author of the article thought that people became mentally paralyzed by having too much choice and just walked away from the decision. When they choices were reduced to a mentally manageable number, it became a lot easier to come to a conclusion. Equally interesting, the article noted that even when people made a choice from among a great number of possibilities, they were less likely to be satisfied by it. I don't know for sure if that analysis is correct, but it seems tenable to me. My CD player has a nice sound, but I think in part I'm happiest when using it because I have a couple of simple choices to make: what to listen to and whether to turn that bass switch on or off. On. Always on. [1] https://hbr.org/2006/06/more-isnt-always-better