Ever hear the one about Buridan’s ass? No, not the dude you’ve been getting to Spin class early to sit behind. Jean Buridan, the 14th-century French philosopher, and his donkey. See, Buridan had this philosophical paradox whereby an equally hungry and thirsty donkey is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. The assumption is that, because the donkey would go for whichever is closer, and since they are both the same distance away, the donkey will die of both thirst and hunger, because it can’t rationally choose one over the other. Why do I bring this up? Well, for the simple reason that it perfectly explains why we men hate shopping.
Few things in life flood us with as much existential despair as walking into a store to just “browse around and see if we can’t find something nice.” The sheer volume of possibilities induces Woody Allen levels of neurotic panic. It takes everything inside of us to keep from crumpling into a heap in the middle of the store and sobbing in terror. See, a crucial secret about us men is that we actually don’t like options all that much. Because options mean choices, and choices mean we’re going to have to eventually narrow it down to one, and God help us if we choose the wrong one. Don’t you realize we’re going to have to live with that wrong choice forever! And what if we make the wrong choice and don’t even know it? We’ll be a laughingstock! Which basically means that, for us, a shopping mall is nothing more than a giant taupe-color building full of wrong choices and Auntie Anne’s pretzels. No, no, we’ll take an afternoon on the couch in front of the TV, thank you very much.
If you have any doubts about the truth of this theory, just look at the way we shop for cars. Do we just show up at the lot, willy-nilly, hoping that the spirit will move us? “I don’t know, maybe I’ll pick a blue one. We’ll see if it matches my eyes.” Hell no! We research that car to within an inch of its life. We won’t even buy gas to drive to the dealership without knowing more about the car than Ernst the German engineer who designed the damn thing. And we don’t do this out of some OCD weirdness—well, OK, maybe we do a little—we do it because we just want to rush in there, buy the thing for the best deal possible, and then get the hell out before a thick wave of inescapable wrong-choice dread washes over us. And this isn’t only true of big-ticket items. God forbid we buy the blue shirt when we should have bought the red one. That kind of thing can haunt a man. Oh, sure, we could return it, but the only thing worse than the existential despair of making the wrong choice is having to actually admit that we made the wrong choice. Sorry, but you can have your shopping, ladies. We’re sure somebody will be giving away a free T-shirt in the next year or so. We do go to banks and sporting events after all. We’ll be just fine.
