I find having options absolutely paralysing.
We have all music on our phones. Every movie ever made if you’re willing to pay for it.
If on every night you have to decide what to watch, play read, or even if you’re watching, playing or reading at all, you can end up doing nothing.
I have to come up with these strategies like.. Oh. Should I read just one book and play just one game until I finish it? Or should I alternate? If I do one thing at a time, I optimise for finishing it, but I have to deal with getting bored. If I do too much, I risk never finishing anything.
I find having options absolutely paralysing.
This is, I suspect, a uniquely modern affliction. A medieval peasant never had to agonise over what to do with his evening. His options were: stare at a candle, or don’t. If he was feeling particularly adventurous, he could stare at a different candle.
The question of how to spend one’s leisure time was, for most of human history, answered by the fact that there wasn’t any. We, on the other hand, carry all of recorded music in our pockets. Every film ever committed to celluloid is available if you’re willing to pay for it, and quite a lot of it if you aren’t. The complete works of every author who ever lived are a tap away. We have, in short, been handed the Library of Alexandria, the Hanging Gardens of Entertainment, and the Colosseum of Interactive Amusements, and then been told to pick one at half past eight on a Tuesday when we’re a bit tired. The result, naturally, is that we do nothing.
This is because the human brain, when presented with infinite choice, does not rise to the occasion. It does not rub its metaphorical hands together and say “Right, let’s optimise this.” It sits down on the floor of the metaphorical supermarket, surrounded by ten thousand varieties of cereal, and quietly has a crisis. And so you are forced to develop strategies, like a general preparing for a war against himself. Should I read just one book and play just one game until I finish them? This has a certain monk-like appeal. You will Complete Things. You will have Closure. You will also, by chapter fourteen of a book that turned out to be not quite as good as the reviews suggested, want to gnaw your own arm off. Very well then — should you alternate? Read a bit, play a bit, watch a bit, in a sort of carefully managed rotation, like a farmer who knows that if you grow the same crop in the same field year after year the soil goes dead? This sounds terribly reasonable. This sounds like the sort of thing a person with a spreadsheet and good intentions would come up with. The trouble is that if you commit to one thing at a time, you optimise for finishing but must survive the boredom. And if you spread yourself across too many things at once, you are essentially starting a dozen conversations at a party and finishing none of them, and three months later you have nine half-read books, four games you can’t remember the controls for, and a TV series where you’re fairly sure someone important died but you can’t recall who. The peasant, meanwhile, has finished his candle. He is going to bed. He seems, all things considered, fairly content.