Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst

Action's Antidotes

We have more options than ever in modern life, but is that really a good thing? Digital technologies that claim to make our lives easier, like restaurant ratings and dating apps, are all around us, but they usually end up making us feel even more stressed. In this episode,I speak with Emily Pabst, the founder of Remake the Rules and a decision-making coach. Emily discusses how our lives are being shaped by "choice tech" and how to regain control. We look at the mental traps that undermine our thinking, how having too many options can lead to anxiety, and how to prevent decision fatigue. Emily explains how small business owners, corporate executives, and regular people can simplify their decisions, live more clearly, and reconsider their relationship with technology. --- Listen to the podcast here: Rethinking Choices and Tech Overload with Emily Pabst Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. In today’s world, we just have a lot of decisions to make and a lot of choices to make them from. I often make the reference to doing a Google search for something like a therapist, something that a lot of people will look for at some point in their lives, and if you ever look for a therapist, you’ll see a Google search and you may see the people who do, say, the type of therapy you’re looking for, work with the type of people, whether it’s individual, couples, family, stuff like that, whether it’s specific to addiction counseling versus just kind of trying to get a leg up on life, but it’s really hard to know what you really want because you’re going to meet the therapist and you’re going to find out more about the person and whether or not you vibe, and I think that paradigm applies to a lot of other places in life, especially in our technical world where you just have so many choices and so much information and you’re like how do I sort through it all and how do I avoid getting decision fatigue? My guest today is Emily Pabst, and she is the founder of Remake the Rules, a decision-making coaching service. --- Emily, welcome to the program. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining from the other side of town here in Denver. And first, to I guess orient, tell us a little bit about Remake the Rules, because I think the idea may be a little bit new to some people out there listening about someone to coach you to make decisions other than whatever, probably the four or five family members they all have giving them advice. My background is in information science and data analysis, actually, and, throughout these last few decades, what I’ve really noticed both in my professional and then also in my personal life is that the overwhelming addition to what I call choice tech tools to our lives, so those are going to be tools that are digital information tools that impact how we think, how we feel, and, most importantly, how we make decisions. That the addition of those tools, while they promise a lot, a lot of additional knowledge, a lot of additional tools, they often do not deliver and they often do the exact opposite. They create a lot of uncertainty, a lot of frustration, a lot of overwhelm. And so I essentially help people live and thrive well within this sort of overwhelming information environment that we’ve created for ourselves. So, give us an example of a choice tech tool that did overpromise, underdeliver, and essentially make things more frustrating. Sure. I think the number one for many, many people, it’s going to be online dating. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen so many videos and essays about how 90 some percent of people involved in it are frustrated with the online dating world, that there’s like this idea that there’s maybe 5 or 10 percent of people that are really thriving in it, and then the other 95, 90 percent are just fed up. Yeah. I mean,