As For Me and My Household, We Have Decision Fatigue
Today is a day of choice in our lesson from the Book of Joshua. And it’s also time to talk about choice for ourselves.
In the Book of Joshua, the people of Israel have a very a simple choice: worship the gods their ancestors worshipped in their former lands, or worship the one true Living God who had called them by name.
Our choices are a lot more complicated than that, but they come down to the same issue in the end.
We as modern Americans are bombarded by choice not just every day, but multiple times an hour.
The combination of our many resources, our fast-paced lifestyle, and our plugged-in technological interfaces subjects us to information overload.
We experience what psychological experts call “decision fatigue.”
Decision fatigue describes the phenomenon in which our capacity to make good decisions wears out if we have to make too many decisions, too often and too quickly in a row.
The more decisions we have to make, the poorer the quality of our decision making.
We begin by being very rational and careful about our decision-making, but by the end we’re choosing based on our desires rather than our values. Continue reading