Cognitive overload

The whole act of packing one life into boxes and moving to another location is on the surface a trivial event. This triviality is however an illusion, the event is a mass of decisions that need to be taken: boxes, packing, changing address, notifying the electric, telephone and broadband company and on and on.

All this is manageable until the added decisions of decorating come along. Life seems easy and major decisions seem manageable until you all of a sudden spend half an hour trying to decide which curtain rail will fit in the bedroom. Seriously! Half an hour trying to arrive at a decision over curtain rails!!

Since seemingly simple decisions quickly become a quagmire of choices the act of moving stuff from one place to another creates a cognitive overload even before arriving at stupid decisions like where to put stuff in the new place.

Moving the boxes is the easy part. It reminds me of a Sufi proverb: Freedom is the absence of choice.

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