The Curse Of Too Much Information
The deluge is increasing and it’s both offline and online.
If you’ve ever wandered¹ down an aisle in a modern supermarket you’d be intimately familiar, whether you realise it or not, with what’s termed “the paradox of choice”, a term coined by American psychologist Barry Schwartz, from his book of the same name back in 2004.
Paraphrasing for conciseness, the amount of choice available for so many of the items in today’s aggressively capitalistic supermarket sector has given rise to so much more anxiety than pleasure in not just the range of items available, but also the range of each specific item.
Breakfast cereal, as an example, often has a whole aisle dedicated to it with each specific instantiation² (e.g. Cornflakes) itself having its own instances (Store’s own brand, Value, Kellogg’s, Nestle, Whole Earth, Nature’s Path) and some of them even having further instances (Gluten free, Vegan, Organic, Frosted, Chocolate covered) let alone sizes (Variety pack, Standard, Family size).
It’s a good thing, of course, to have choice — but when the choice itself becomes a burden, when you mentally have to focus over such a large range trading off brand, type, subtle changes in ingredients, and size that the exercise turns shopping for food into one of min-max optimisation that would put a mathematician to the test let…
