Cheesecake and Soda

I have a hard time with menus—especially long ones. I look at all of the choices and become overwhelmed with the options and then it takes me a long time to decide what I want. The Cheesecake Factory is one of the worst. The menu itself is a spiral bound booklet and the number of cheesecake flavors is over thirty!

And now I have a hard time with the drink machine at my local Moe’s. It’s a computer. The drink machine is. It has a place to get ice, like all drink machines. But then it has a touch screen on which you choose your soda flavor from over 100 different soda flavor options. 100 different options! Then you press the “press” button and the machine dispenses your soda.

Here we are in America with over thirty different flavors of cheesecake and over 100 different flavors of soda—cheesecake and soda both being luxuries with little to no healthy, nutritional value—yet many persons around the world lack for basic food, water, and shelter.

I will confess. I like cheesecake. And I like Moe’s Mondays where I can get an enormous burrito, chips, and drink of almost any flavor for just $5.55. Sometimes I make two meals out of it and I am grateful. But sometimes I can’t help but notice the disparity between my life and the lives of the majority people in this world and sometimes I can’t help but wonder if this fast-paced, information saturated, instant gratification expecting society doesn’t have too many choices (and notice I didn’t even mention all of the choices that we have for watching an hour of television!). Does our myriad of choices actually paralyze us with overload rather than help us live happier, healthier, more satisfying lives.

What do you think?

(And what are your favorite flavors of cheesecake and soda while you’re at it? :-))