There are now too many choices.
Whether it’s deciding what book I should read next, choosing the next show to binge watch on Netflix (or Disney Plus more likely in our household), or finding a new video game to play, I am frequently overwhelmed with the sheer number of options available.
My nightly ritual with my wife, once the kids have gone to bed, is to ask her:
“What do you want to do tonight?”
She always – without fail – responds with:
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
We dance this dance every night for 5-10 minutes, before eventually we agree to watch something, or I end up playing video games or reading for an hour or two and then crawling into bed.
I know I’m not alone. There are plenty of resources talking about “decision paralysis” or “analysis paralysis”, and strategies to deal with it.
“Give yourself fewer choices”, these books and articles and tweets will tell you. Admittedly, a lot of the websites that rank in Google for this are marketing based, so they really want to drive those sales!
But they do also say that the overabundance of choice leads to fatigue, often to the point that there’s no energy to actually follow through with the task itself.
And that’s what I’m feeling all the damned time now. Fatigue.
Fatigue at having to decide what TV show we should watch. Fatigue at having to decide what book I should read. Fatigue at having to choose which video game I should play next.
And so what do I tend to do in these situations? Fall back to things I’m comfortable with. That means rewatching Scrubs with my wife. It means reading Raymond Feist’s Magician for the 8th or 9th time. It means playing through the Batman Arkham games, instead of branching out to experience something new.
Which is fine. There’s plenty of joy to be gained from experience things I’ve already experienced (although sadly Scrubs just isn’t holding up in the 2020s).
But it doesn’t really help the fatigue.
