A closer look
Having an abundance of options requires more cognitive effort and leads to increased anxiety and buyer's remorse. Barry Schwartz coined this the paradox of choice, demonstrating that when faced with thirty varieties of jam at the supermarket, consumers are paralyzed by indecision and often buy nothing at all. We spent thousands of years evolving to survive on whatever berries we could scavenge, and now our brains short-circuit when asked to pick between twelve streaming services that all have nothing good to watch. Maximizing your choices does not make you happier, it just guarantees you will spend forty-five minutes scrolling through Netflix only to angrily rewatch an episode of a sitcom from 2005. So the next time you feel overwhelmed by the fifty-two types of artisanal olive oil at Whole Foods, remember that human freedom is just an illusion designed to give us mild panic attacks in aisle four
