In the West, we are lucky.
We have an abundant lifestyle, and can indulge in life’s pleasures until we feel satisfied.
This, for a large part, is down to the huge strides Western governments have made in fostering economic development. We are wealthier than ever. We can enjoy more things than we ever have done before.
But we are not happier than ever. In fact, happiness, particularly amongst teenagers and young adolescents, has been declining for almost a decade in the United States, a trend which unnervingly coincides with the advent and growth of social media.
Also coinciding with the growth of social media is the growth of the options at our disposal. Now, we can do anything from our smartphones. This is literally true - people are now starting to have virtual relationships (there isn’t a more laugh out loud oxymoron than that) with AI girlfriends.
So, is our sought after lifestyle actually becoming our achilles heel?
What are the options that we have?
Modern technology has paved the way for exponential growth in the amount of options we have to choose from. This has affected the following areas of life:
Relationships: You can meet in person, or you can meet online. There are traditional girlfriends/boyfriends, or artificially created ones as mentioned above. One might go as far to say that porn is virtually akin to this. You can call or text, facetime, use Snapchat or WhatsApp. Without sounding like a dinosaur, it is self-evident that there are now an abundance of avenues to commence and maintain relationships in comparison to previous points in history.
Media: You can watch mainstream media. BBC, CNN, Sky News. You can be even more traditional, and buy a newspaper. Alternatively, you can follow the news in your lunch hour by reading the Financial Times, Bloomberg or the Daily Mail Online. If you’re young, you’re probably more inclined to obtain news in the shorter format, either via TikTok (how does one not cringe whilst writing?) or on more conventional social media platforms such as X. If you like your podcasts and longer form media, you have Spotify and YouTube to use. If you’re normal and ahead of the curve, you’ll just educate yourself through Substack. With all this being said, it is again clear how accessible the news is.
Sport: Tying in nicely with the media point above, you can now watch your favourite team from anywhere. You don’t actually have to be at the game. Some still prefer to soak up the atmosphere, but if you’re not fanatical (or if you’re disloyal, depending how you look at it), you can watch your team on the television. Failing that, you can watch the highlights on YouTube, but if you’re patient, you can wait for the highlights show to actually be broadcast. If you want to amalgamate sport with comedy, you can just visit X, and scroll through the endless amounts of compilations created by sports fans over the weekend. Again, an abundance of options.
Work: You can work in the office, or you can work from home. Or, if you’re unsure, you can follow a hybrid working model where you do a bit of both. If you’re nomadic, you can work a job which permits you to work remotely, permanently. You can enjoy your skiing season and do your day job in the evening - killing two birds with one stone. Notably, you can easily start a side hustle alongside your day job. It may not be profitable, but it is certainly another option.
Popular culture: You can watch any film any time when you have subscribed to Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and Apple Movies. Not to mention, you may want a Sky Cinema subscription as well. You can listen to music on Spotify or Apple Music or Soundcloud. Good luck picking a song, but you can’t say that the options aren’t there.
How many options are “too many”?
So what are the implications of all of this?
When you have too many options, invariably, decisions are more difficult to make. This is especially the case if the options are enticing and carry their own unique benefits.
How many is too many? Well, it depends on the situation.
If you’re the type which has always been reluctant to commit to one career to pursue, but you are multi-talented, being conscious of the fact that you could pursue many different career paths incentivises inaction whilst you deliberate over the best career path to choose.
This is the case in romantic relationships. If you’re a high value individual but are reluctant to commit, it makes inaction much more likely, and can even lead to a situation where that individual has no meaningful relationship.
So we can probably answer this question in this manner. “Too many options is the amount of options which restricts you from committing to one of them.” For some people this may be two options, for others it may be two hundred.
From a productivity standpoint, it does not take many options for us to be overwhelmed by them and subsequently procrastinate and delay our productive efforts. The book Essentialism by Greg McKeown is a good example of this. In the book, McKeown encourages us to pursue less if we want to become more productive. Why? Because the more things you are pursuing, the more you’ll be context switching and the more distracted you’ll become. Better commit yourself to just a few endeavours, and your productivity will benefit.
But it would be inappropriate to suggest that there is a one size fits all answer to the question “how many options is too many”. The unpopular but accurate answer is that this it’s a decision to be made by yourself. If you find your default position in many situations to be inaction, you might be overwhelmed by the options you have.
Too many options = inaction
This leads on to the next important point. We should be afraid of having too many options because it incentivises us to delay taking action. When you have a pile of books to read, you don’t know where to start reading. When you have a pile of paperwork to get through, you don’t know which piece of paper to pick up first.
The problem with having too many options is that we can become overwhelmed, and resultantly we delay taking action. This makes it less likely that we will make progress in whatever domain we are seeking to make progress in. It is better to pay attention to two things than it is to ten things.
This is in an age where being committed is such an uncommon characteristic. Commitment is defined as ‘the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause or an activity’. Too many options makes the sacrifice of committing to something/someone in the long term all the more difficult. One of the many reasons for this is that there will always be something better out there, a better option to take.
The trouble is, this is also an illusion. There are always going to be a number of insurmountable options, but they won’t all be realistic. However, we don’t have the brain capacity to rationalise this unspoken truth, hence why we continue to act like these many options are realistic.
This only results in one thing - not taking action, and not committing to the one realistic option that suits you the most.
Can too many options be a good thing?
Having said all of this, it’s important to stress that having too many options, in some cases, is obviously a good thing (at least partially).
As a mate, you would rather be desirable and have the opportunity to choose who you have a relationship with. This may mean more options, but this is certainly a better deal than not having this opportunity.
On the career front, having a plethora of options to potentially move jobs is desirable. It means you are not locked into a job that you dislike and that you are in a position to bargain with your boss for a raise and a better contract.
Too many options can be a good thing, as long as it doesn’t infringe on your ability to commit to something. The issue is, for a lot of people it does.
What should we do about having too many options?
It follows then that the antidote to greater optionality and decision fatigue is commitment. Instead of scrolling mindlessly through Netflix, before you have even made it onto the platform, commit to the type of film you want to watch that evening. Have in mind that you want to watch a psychological thriller from the 1980s. Specify this as far as you can, and commit.
An issue for a lot of people is that they don’t specify what they want in the face of too many options. Patrick Bet David highlights this point in his comments about networking. In a world with too many options, you will not get what you want if you haven’t specified what you want. “It’s just not going to happen”, said Bet-David.
Thus, in the face of too many options, specify what you want, and commit to this. What holds many people back today is the illusion that they are benefitting from having an insurmountable amount of options to choose from.
This is futile if you fail to pick one.