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Life
Happiness Means Choosing Not To Choose
Sometimes, too much is as bad as not enough
In Moscow On the Hudson, Robin Williams plays a Russian man who defects to the U.S. There’s a scene in which he is utterly overwhelmed by all the types of coffee available in an American grocery store.
I didn’t completely get it then.
But decades later, almost the identical scene took place just after my Dutch husband came to the U.S. and saw all the cakes available in our local grocery store. He stood there, dumbfounded.
The thing is, having seen the sorts of cakes available in the Netherlands versus here, I see things differently.
Yes, there were dozens of cakes available 24/7 in the supermarket closest to where I lived then. It was just a very ordinary discount grocery chain, yet you could walk in at 3 a.m. if you wanted and choose from dozens of cakes.
But have you ever seen a European pastry shop?
I marveled at them. They offered fewer but far better cakes. Each one was a work of art.
In contrast, the simple grocery store cakes here are almost all either chocolate, white or yellow, and the frosting is either white or chocolate. You have lots…
