Alright. Let's talk about the paradox I keep stepping on, usually while standing in a supermarket aisle for eleven minutes deciding between seventeen varieties of oat milk.
Here's the situation: I live in the most option-rich era in human history. I can work from anywhere. I can date anyone within a 40km radius with a smartphone. I can access thousands of shows, millions of songs, effectively infinite information. I can be, to an extraordinary degree, whatever I decide to be.
And I am frequently completely paralysed.
Not because I'm ungrateful. Not because I'm indecisive by nature, exactly. But because my brain — which is a remarkable organ doing its best — was not designed for this volume.
Your brain on options (it's not pretty)
When psychologist Barry Schwartz sat down to write The Paradox of Choice in 2004, the oat milk situation was less pronounced but the principle was the same: more choice produces not more freedom, but more anxiety and less satisfaction.
The mechanism is this:
More options raise your expectations. With 47 choices available, the right one should be perfect. Anything less than perfect is a failure of selection.
More options increase your sense of responsibility for the outcome. If you picked wrong from 47 options, that's on you. You had alternatives. You didn't do enough due diligence.
More options require more energy to evaluate. Your brain has a limited decision-making budget per day. Spend it on seventeen oat milks and there's measurably less left for the things that actually matter.
The result: you're more anxious before, more likely to not decide, and less satisfied after — even if you picked well.
This is not a personal failing. This is mathematics colliding with neuroscience.
The frenemies I didn't know I had
Here's where I got to an uncomfortable realization: my constraints — the things I've been calling limitations — might have been doing me a favour all along.
When I didn't have unlimited time to make a decision, I made one. When I couldn't choose from an infinite pool of options, I chose from what was available and usually found it was fine. When life handed me a smaller, messier set of possibilities than I wanted, I got creative inside the box instead of spending my energy cataloguing everything outside it.
The unlimited choice version of me spends a significant portion of her time researching, comparing, second-guessing, and wondering whether she should have chosen differently. She is also, paradoxically, less decisive and less satisfied than the constrained version.
The universe tapping me on the shoulder: you're not built to do everything. The things you actually focus on — that's where the results are.
Constraints are not walls. They're editing. And editing, as any writer will tell you, is where the good work happens.
The satisficer vs. the maximiser
Schwartz describes two approaches to decisions: the satisficer sets a standard and stops when they find something that meets it. The maximiser needs to confirm that the best available option has been found before committing.
I am, historically, a maximiser. This means I make technically better decisions by certain metrics and am significantly less happy with them, because I'm always aware of what else was out there.
The recalibration I'm working on: decide what "good enough" looks like before I look at the options. Then stop when I find it. Not because I'm settling, but because perfect is not available and the search for it is consuming time and energy that could go toward making the actual choice work.
A good decision, made now and committed to fully, almost always outperforms the perfect decision made never.
The practical bit
Set the standard first. What does "good enough" look like for this decision? Define it before you see the options. Then choose the first thing that meets the standard and close the tab.
Limit the options before you evaluate. Don't look at all 47. Pick the three most relevant and choose from those. The best option within a smaller set is almost always good enough.
Commit. The research on reversibility is counterintuitive but consistent: people are less satisfied with decisions they treat as reversible. Keeping the door open prevents you from fully inhabiting the choice you made, which prevents the choice from working as well as it could.
You picked the oat milk. It will be fine. Close the fridge.
I say this to myself as much as to you. Possibly more.
