Too Much Choice Is Costing You Your Evenings

You open Netflix looking for something easy to watch.

Twenty minutes later, you have inspected Danish crime dramas, documentaries about mushrooms, and a film you abandoned in 2023. You watch nothing. Somehow, relaxing has become procurement.

Barry Schwartz gave this feeling a name: the paradox of choice.

Choice matters. A few good options give us room to shape a life that fits. The trouble begins when every small decision arrives with a catalogue, a comparison tool, 400 reviews, and a faint sense that one wrong click will ruin the afternoon.

We have made optimisation into a lifestyle.

Which gym? Which chair? Which productivity app? Which holiday rental? Which school, career path, investment, restaurant, mattress, coffee bean?

The choices are often good. The experience of choosing them can be exhausting.

Schwartz’s point was not that people should have fewer freedoms. He argued that an excess of options can produce paralysis, regret, impossible expectations, and self-blame.

That last one gets ugly.

When there are 180 restaurants, mediocre pasta does not feel like mediocre pasta. It feels like a personal failure. You had the whole city in your pocket and still chose badly.

The same thing happens with careers, relationships, homes and holidays. We see the options we did not pick more clearly than the life in front of us. Instagram helps with this, obviously. LinkedIn has also become a rather efficient machine for making perfectly decent jobs look like tragic compromises.

Schwartz draws a useful distinction between maximisers and satisficers.

Maximisers want the best option. They research, compare and keep looking. Satisficers decide what “good enough” means, find an option that meets the standard, and move on.

The maximiser may have the better spreadsheet.

The satisficer may have the better Saturday.

Some decisions deserve serious homework. Hiring somebody, buying a house, choosing a school for your child: take the time. But a shirt, a restaurant, or another project-management tool should not demand the same emotional energy as a merger.

A practical cure is to set the standard before you see the options.

For the office chair: it supports my back, fits the room, and stays within budget.

For the holiday: we can afford it, it has a beach nearby, and nobody needs to spend three days comparing towels.

For the app: it solves the problem I have now.

Then decide. Close the tabs. Stop checking whether a marginally better version exists.

A good life needs choice. It also needs the ability to live with the choices we make.