The subtitle of Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice, says it all: Why More is Less. A rigorously researched and thorough survey of the dangers of too much choice, Schwartz believes that having more possibility leads to less enthusiasm, oftentimes rendering us paralyzed. The decision making process, he says, is more often than not something people do not want to partake in. For example, he discusses healthcare, where we would rather have a doctor offer us a cure than leaving the investigative work up to us (or worse, the increasingly tragic habit of letting advertisers decide for us).

This is a more extreme example—of course we hope healthcare professionals know what they’re talking about. What he’s getting at is the tendency to write off our own responsibilities in the belief that someone else will take care of us. Much of this work is concerned with our attitudes toward other people, as well as personal situations, where too many choices can lead to making no choice at all. In a study of jam tasters, participants were first offered six different jams; then, thirty jams. Tasters at the table of thirty never tried more than six anyway; the table of six lead to a higher percentage of sales to boot.

True, this is common knowledge to marketers, who know that advertising one product in an ad is going to lead to more sales than trying to pimp five. What most interested me in this book is a study conducted with workers and their relationship to co-workers. Schwartz had already found that we generally brood over loss with more intensity than we get giddy with happiness, and that what makes us happy leaves shorter imprints than what makes us sad. When a worker was given positive feedback, but his co-worker was given more positive feedback, his level of happiness decreased. On the flip side, when he was given negative feedback, but his co-worker received more negative feedback than he did, he was not as sad as he first was (that is, he was more satisfied with a poor job performance that is not as poor as his cubicle mate).

Competitive edge is a biological drive. Our push to survive is what helped us populate the planet. I know that I, for one, take sports much too seriously (playing them; I haven’t watched a game of anything for years). I probably took a co-ed softball league in Brooklyn this summer too much to heart, especially after losing in the championship game. Still: happiness with a co-worker failing? Feeling defeated when we’re doing well, though not as well as another?

One of the greatest lessons to be learned in yoga is the community the practice creates. This does not stop people from bickering over issues within the community, or judging other communities. (As one of teacher, Raghunath Cappo, said before his class, gossip is a very low frequency language. It leaves both speaker and listener feeling dirty.) Then there’s the internal dialogue one has while on the mat. You’re in split pose with your front thigh a solid twelve inches from the ground, while the ballerina next to you looks like she’s as comfortable as can be. I know that habit as a practitioner, and see it as a teacher. It beats up your ego for a while, which is a good thing, because yoga is a humbling discipline, and we all have our “postures” that we’re comfortable in, as well as those that remind us not to take ourselves too seriously.

There will be no neat summation to this piece, because this is not the kind of topic that can easily be wrapped up. Instead, we end with an observation practice: How many times do we judge ourselves on the basis of others? What does that really get us? Do we boost our egos at the expense of people we don’t know, or of people we call friends? Does their failure make us feel better about ourselves? Does their success make us jealous? Tough questions, which is why yoga is a tough path to walk down.