This is especially true when it comes to medical care because actually doctors often don’t know what my priorities are. It does make it more difficult if i have to think about what i’m signing up to, but in my mind that’s a good thing too.

There’s far too much passiveness when it comes to health. This is your body! You only get the one and when it’s gone so are you.

Thank you for that SoRB.

My pleasure minniebeaniste.

I’d love to go.

The first time I bought a really big telly I did probably forty hours of research on the internet to make sure I was getting the best value for money. And I did. And then 20 minutes later a different telly came out which was better and cheaper. So it goes.

The next big telly I bought, I poked about on some forums for a couple of hours to make sure it was OK. And it was. I have no idea whether a better one came out shortly after, because I’d stopped looking.

The last one I just spent about 20 minutes making sure the model I had in mind wasn’t a total dog. It wasn’t. There’s certainly better ones out there, and possibly even cheaper, but the one I have is so unbelievably good I have no use for the incremental benefits of a “better” one.

Choice matters when it’s possible to make a bad one. If you’d bought a paraglider 20 years ago, the choice would have boiled down to (a) one that works more or less OK, probably and (b) one that probably works, but if you hit a downdraft, snag a line or turn without due care and attention, you’ll be in a wheelchair if you’re lucky. At that time, exhaustive research and time spent pondering was worthwhile. Nowadays, design and manufacture has advanced to the point where it’s not really possible to buy an inherently dangerous glider, so choice comes down to whether you like the colour, whether your instructor sells this brand or that, or other meaningless details.

And the thing is – the market is like that now for practically everything any western consumer needs or even wants. The only thing I can think of where recently it’s been possible to buy something actually BAD is mobile phones, and even there my experience is something like five years out of date, which is a geological amount of time in the phone market.

So the key to overcoming the agony of choice is simply to understand that in almost any situation, choice is irrelevant. If there are no bad choices – if it really doesn’t matter whether you buy a Ford, a Vauxhall or a Honda (and it doesn’t), then you can simply relax, pick whichever one occurs to you, or flip a coin, serene in the knowledge that you’re going to get something that’s about as good as it can be.

Moving on from Aldi, I agree that consumers, particularly in the UK and the US, have too much choice. That’s why shopping in both countries becomes a hobby for the population, instead of, say, going for nice healthy bike rides in the fresh air as in Germany, for example.