🫀 The paradox of choice

I’ve always blamed myself for being indecisive. There’s something about standing in the grocery store aisle, you walk in for something simple like bread and find yourself paralyzed, staring down rows upon rows of neatly stacked options. Six different brands. Four different types per brand. White, whole wheat, sprouted, gluten-free, rye, sourdough. All I wanted was BREAD, and suddenly, I am spiraling into a crisis over which grain is supposed to be better for my gut health. The worst feeling is going home after this session of indecisiveness, tasting the bread, and realizing it's not as good as the last one you bought.

Freedom of choice! It's supposed to be the ultimate gift of modern living. We’ve been told that more options mean more freedom and more freedom leads to prosperity. If I have options, then I have control. I can pick the best, the healthiest, the most “me” version of everything. Every choice is a chance to optimize my life.

But let’s be honest—when you’re staring at ten different bottles of extra virgin olive oil, each promising to be more cold-pressed, more artisanal, and more “virgin” than the last, how liberated do you really feel?

I don’t know about you, but somewhere between the gluten-free, whole grain, and low-carb options, my brain starts to short-circuit. What if I choose the wrong one? What if the $12.99 bottle of olive oil is actually just as good as the $24.99 one but with better marketing? The promise of making the “right” choice starts to feel like a high-stakes game where the prize is… well, nothing, really. Just the satisfaction of knowing I didn’t screw up my grocery run.

Somewhere along the way, our obsession with having choices transformed from an emblem of freedom into a form of subtle, soul-sucking tyranny.

With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all. – Barry Schwartz

The truth is, having too many options doesn’t necessarily make us happier. In fact, it often makes us anxious, second-guessing, and ultimately dissatisfied with whatever we end up choosing. It’s like that moment when you finally pick a movie to watch after scrolling through Netflix for half an hour—by the time you hit play, you wonder if you should’ve gone with that other film instead.

We’ve been trained to believe that in a world of infinite possibilities, the best way to navigate is to keep our options open. But there’s a sneaky little paradox here. With so many doors left ajar, we become paralyzed, stuck in the doorway, too afraid to close one for fear that something better might be waiting behind another. It’s the age of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), where every decision—from which toothpaste to buy to which career path to follow—feels like a defining moment. It’s as if every choice carries the weight of our entire future.

Sacrifices and more sacrifices. The weird feeling of making choices. Choosing something makes you sacrifice another something. Does it really?

It drives me crazy when I go out to dinner with my girlfriends. We’ll sit down, and it’s a 30-minute ordeal just to decide what they’re going to order. What if they choose the wrong dish? It’s exhausting, and that's why I love sharing, you can try a little bit of all.

There is a quote that perfectly aligns with all this: "Great is the enemy of good." We’ve become so obsessed with the idea of making the “perfect” choice that we’ve lost sight of the fact that sometimes “good” is enough. In our relentless pursuit of the best, we’ve forgotten how to be content with just good.

"With all these options available my expectation about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I compared what I got with what I expected and what I got was disappointing in comparison with what I expected." – Barry Schwartz

The relentless "what if" is what truly haunts us. It keeps us awake at night, spinning endless scenarios in our heads. This ties perfectly into what’s called the "culture of fear." And when in fear, we get paralyzed. Recently, I found myself having breakdowns, overwhelmed with anxiety about my future. I couldn't stop obsessing over all the possible scenarios, convinced that somewhere out there was a path better than the one unfolding in front of me.

Instead of letting things simply be as they are, I was consumed with dissatisfaction. The present moment felt unbearable because, in it, there were too many hypothetical options to cling to. I was living in a constant state of fear—fear of facing things that weren’t even happening, and might never happen at all.

That’s when my dad told me, “Don’t stress about the past or the future because they don’t exist. Only the present is real.” I needed to stop fighting against imaginary scenarios and instead focus on dealing with the reality of now. That’s where peace begins—by letting go of what could be and embracing what is.

Jout Jout, a Brazilian YouTuber who lived in Rio de Janeiro, smartly shared this conversation with her aunt: "What are you scared of?" she asked, "Of bears!" answered her aunt. The thing is, there are no bears in Rio de Janeiro, so there is no reason to be scared of bears if you live in Rio. So, stop being scared of bears if you live in Rio. Most of our fears are like Jout Jout's aunt's fear, irrational.

Maybe the secret to reclaiming our sanity in a world drowning in choices is to remember that, at the end of the day, our decisions are rarely as life-altering as they seem. There is no need to be scared of sacrificing. Maybe the freedom we’re all searching for isn’t in having infinite options but in embracing the confidence to choose one and then—here’s the hard part—letting go of the rest. Accept the now.

So the next time I find myself standing in that grocery aisle, overwhelmed by rows of bread, I think I’ll just grab the one that’s on sale. "After all, life’s too short to overthink," said the over-thinker.