Too Many Choices: When More Options Become a Problem

Joshes and Joshettes, lately I have been thinking about how having more choices is supposed to make our lives better, but somehow we have reached a point where having more choices can make it harder to choose anything at all. Netflix gives us thousands of things to watch. Amazon can give you hundreds of versions of the exact same product. You can open an AI chatbot, ask one question and get five different ways to solve the same problem. Even deciding what to eat can mean scrolling through dozens of restaurants and hundreds of menu items until you realize you've spent more time deciding what you want than it would have taken to actually eat it. We have access to more options than people could have imagined not that long ago, and while I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, I do think there is a point where having more options stops feeling like freedom and starts becoming noise.

I see this constantly in my own life, especially with writing. Books are probably the best example because I have spent most of my life writing and I don't stick to one genre. I write light novels, romance, mysteries, police procedurals, darker stories, poetry and whatever else happens to grab my attention. Even within my light novels, I can go from something cozy and romantic to martial arts, business, teachers, reincarnation or something considerably darker. I love that freedom because I don't want to wake up one morning and feel like I'm trapped writing the same kind of story forever simply because that's what I wrote before. The problem is that freedom creates another decision. When I sit down and decide I want to work on a book, I still have to decide which book deserves that time. Do I continue writing what has already been making money? Do I experiment with something completely different? Do I return to a series I already started? Do I chase the idea that has been sitting in my head all week? Having the ability to write almost anything doesn't magically answer the much harder question of what I should write right now.

Entertainment is probably the funniest version of this problem for me because I have access to almost everything and somehow still end up on YouTube. Between my own subscriptions and things shared with family or friends, I can watch Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, Crunchyroll, Viki and live television. There are probably other things I'm forgetting, which honestly makes the point even better. I can sit down with access to more movies and television shows than I could realistically watch in several lifetimes and still spend twenty minutes scrolling because I can't decide what I want. Sometimes I finally pick something and then realize I'm looking at my phone while the show is playing anyway. We spend all this time choosing what deserves our attention and then, once we've made the choice, immediately give half of our attention to something else.

That made me think about a conversation I had recently where someone was trying to make a choice involving different people in their life. Instead of trying to compare every possible quality of every person, I suggested making the question much smaller. Imagine you just had one of the worst days you've had in a long time. You're exhausted, frustrated and don't want someone to magically fix everything, but you need somebody who can make the rest of that day a little better. Who is the person you would call? Suddenly the choice looks different because you've removed a lot of the noise surrounding it. I think we can do the same thing with much smaller decisions. If you could only afford one streaming service, which one would you keep? If you only had enough free time to work on one project this month, which project would you choose? Sometimes pretending the other choices aren't available tells you more about what you actually value than staring at a giant list of possibilities ever will.

Careers have become another version of the same problem for me. I've worked in technology, sales, customer service and retention, and I've picked up experience in different areas over the years. Now that I'm looking at what I want to do next, I could apply in a dozen different directions and technically make an argument for why each one makes sense. That doesn't mean I should. I've become increasingly interested in AI and local AI, and I recently ordered a Mac Studio partly because I want to go deeper into that world. I've already been using AI in practical ways, including things as simple as transcribing these podcast episodes locally, so when I recently interviewed for a role that combined sales, customer onboarding and the AI space, it made sense to me. It wasn't the only type of job I could pursue. It was a direction that connected several things I already know with something I genuinely want to learn more about, and sometimes narrowing your choices means deciding which combination actually moves you toward the life you want instead of simply asking which opportunities you're technically qualified to pursue.

Money makes all of this even more complicated because there are almost unlimited opinions about what we're supposed to do with it. You can invest in individual stocks, index funds, dividend stocks, real estate, crypto and probably another twenty things somebody on YouTube will confidently tell you is the only intelligent choice. You can day trade. You can buy something and hold it for thirty years. You can build a portfolio around income or growth. I've made my own choices about how I want to approach investing, and those choices aren't necessarily going to be right for everybody else. What matters to me is that I eventually had to choose an approach instead of constantly bouncing between every strategy I came across. If I divide a limited amount of money between ten different experiments because I'm afraid of choosing one direction, I can end up giving none of those choices enough room to accomplish what I wanted in the first place.

I think the pressure around money is also part of why almost everything has become a side hustle now. The cost of simply existing has gotten high enough that telling someone to just get a job and forget about everything else doesn't always match reality. I recently had a friend look at a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that was around $2,900 a month, and that was before adding all the other things required to actually live there. Once you start adding utilities, groceries, internet, a phone bill, transportation and everything else life throws at you, earning what sounds like a decent salary can suddenly feel very different. So people start looking for another source of income, and the internet is waiting with thousands of choices. Start dropshipping. Sell digital products on Etsy. Become an influencer. Start a YouTube channel. Build an AI agency. Freelance. Start a business. Write books. Invest. Sell a course. There is always another person explaining why the thing they chose is the thing you should choose too.

I've tried a surprising number of those things in one form or another, and the thing that has consistently worked best for me is writing books. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising because writing isn't something I discovered last month after watching a video about passive income. I've been writing for most of my life. Before I was making meaningful money from it, I was writing stories in notebooks because I liked creating them. There were years when my books barely made anything. There were times when I might sell a book every other month if I was lucky. Now I'm at a point where writing can actually pay some bills, and that didn't happen because I discovered some perfect shortcut. It happened after years of doing something I genuinely enjoyed long before the financial results gave me a reason to continue. That's why I think chasing every new opportunity simply because somebody says there is money there can be dangerous. If the money doesn't appear quickly, and money was the only reason you started, there isn't much left to keep you going.

The strange thing is that when we're kids, we tend to assume adults have all of this figured out. Adults have jobs, pay bills, make decisions and somehow seem to know what they're doing. Then you become an adult and eventually realize most people are adapting in real time. We're making choices with the information we have, discovering some of those choices were wrong, changing direction and trying again. I don't think that ever completely stops. Technology changes. Industries change. Relationships change. The economy changes. We change. You can't stay completely stagnant and expect the world to stay still around you, but adapting doesn't mean chasing every new possibility that appears in front of you either. Sometimes adapting means knowing when something new deserves your attention, and sometimes it means knowing when to ignore it.

I also don't think the answer to having too many choices is building another elaborate system designed to optimize every minute of your life. There is an entire industry around telling us how to optimize our mornings, our calendars, our workouts, our sleep, our money, our careers and probably the exact number of minutes we're supposed to stare out the window before becoming productive again. I use tools. I use AI. I make lists and keep track of things I need to finish, but I don't want managing my life to become a full-time job that prevents me from actually living it. Most days, there are things I need to get done, so I try to get them done in a reasonable amount of time. I look at what is working, I change what isn't and I keep moving. It isn't a perfect system, and I don't think it needs to be.

Maybe what matters more is knowing why you're doing something in the first place. Why do you want to get in shape? Why do you want another source of income? Why do you want a particular career? Why are you building a business? Why are you creating something when nobody is paying attention yet? A strong enough reason doesn't eliminate difficult days, and it definitely doesn't make every decision obvious, but it gives you something to come back to when all the other choices start getting loud. There will always be another opportunity, another show, another investment, another business idea, another productivity system and another person confidently telling you that you've been doing everything wrong. You don't have to explore every path just because somebody showed you the entrance.

I think that is what I'm trying to remind myself of lately. Having choices is good. Having freedom is good. Being able to change direction when something isn't working is good. But none of those things require me to choose everything. Sometimes I can turn on Netflix, decide I want to watch a legal drama and put on The Lincoln Lawyer instead of spending the next forty-five minutes searching for the perfect show. Sometimes I can look at ten projects I could work on and choose the one that matters most today. Sometimes I can see another way somebody claims I can make money and decide I don't need to try it. There probably isn't a perfect choice waiting for us if we just keep searching long enough. At some point, we have to drown out some of the noise, make a choice and give ourselves enough time to find out where it leads. We don't have to figure out every possible version of tomorrow. Sometimes taking one or two steps toward the life we actually want today is enough.

Thanks,

Josh