The quality of health care continues to improve, and people are living longer, but these developments mean that we're likely to eventually find ourselves in a situation in which we're forced to make difficult choices about our parents, other loved ones, or even ourselves that ultimately boil down to calculations of worth and value.

I think of choosing as a... both a fun and an effortful activity and I think of choice as something that in order for you to really get what you want out of it you have to put a lot into it and so I'm only willing to do that for a few different things and for the rest I really just try to either satisfy, come up with a simple rule or let somebody else make the choice.

It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.

Like, people are less likely to invest in their retirement when they have more options in their 401K plans than when they have fewer.

This is at a time when you know most of us drank tap water, so I used to go to this store and examine all the varieties and we used to marvel at all the choices out there, but I found that I rarely bought anything and I kind of thought that was kind of curious. I mean, they had things that the other grocery stores didn't have and yet I never bought anything.

The saying goes that history repeats itself; personal histories do the same. We can gather the lessons of others' lives through observation, conversation, and by seeking advice. We can use the automatic system to find out who the happy people are, and the reflective system to evaluate how they got to be that way. Pursuing happiness need not be a lonely endeavor. In fact, throwing in our lot with others may be a very good way of coping with the disappointments of choice.

We make choices and are in turn made by them.