Too Many Options: The Quiet Violence of Choosing

I stood in the grocery store yesterday for twenty-three minutes, holding two nearly identical bottles of cooking oil. Sunflower or soybean. The decision felt impossibly heavy, as if the weight of my family’s future health rested in this single choice. Behind me, other shoppers moved with purpose, their carts filled with confident selections, while I remained frozen between two yellow bottles that probably came from the same factory.

This morning, I scrolled through forty-seven different streaming options, each promising two hours of entertainment, and chose nothing. I closed the laptop and sat in silence instead, overwhelmed by the abundance of stories I could consume but paralyzed by the simple act of choosing one. Happy asked what I wanted to watch, and I couldn’t answer. How do you explain that having every movie ever made at your fingertips somehow makes it impossible to want anything at all?

There’s a cruel mathematics to modern choice. The more options we have, the less capable we become of choosing. I remember when our local tea shop had three varieties: red tea, milk tea, and green tea. I ordered milk tea every day for two years without a moment’s hesitation. Now the same shop has thirty-seven different combinations, and I spend five minutes staring at the menu, second-guessing every preference I thought I knew about myself.

Arash, at eleven, understands this better than I do. When I ask him what he wants for breakfast, he says, “Whatever Mama makes.” When I push him to choose between eggs or cereal, his face clouds with the same expression I wear in front of streaming services. Choice, it seems, is not freedom—it’s labor. And we’re all tired workers in the factory of endless decision-making.

The paradox cuts deeper when I think about the choices that truly matter. When my mother was dying, I had infinite medical options, countless second opinions, an overwhelming array of treatments and specialists. I researched everything, compared every possibility, analyzed every probability. But when the doctor asked me a simple question—”Do you want to be in the room when she goes?”—I couldn’t speak. All that information, all those choices, and I was reduced to silence by the one decision that actually mattered.

I think we’ve confused choice with control, options with agency. The grocery store offers me forty-seven types of breakfast cereal, creating the illusion that I’m making meaningful decisions about my life. But the important choices—how to love my family, how to find purpose, how to face my own mortality—these require no menu, no comparison shopping, no reviews from strangers online. They demand something much harder than selection: courage.

There’s something deeply violent about endless choice. It fractures our attention, fragments our desire, makes us strangers to our own preferences. I watch Happy choose her clothes each morning with the same quick certainty she’s had for fifteen years—she knows what she likes, what works, what feels like her. But I stand in front of my closet, paralyzed by seven nearly identical shirts, as if this decision reveals something fundamental about who I am.

The market promises us that more choices equal more happiness, but I think the opposite might be true. Happiness might be found in the relief of having fewer doors to walk through, fewer paths to consider, fewer possibilities to regret. When I was young, my father chose my career path, my mother chose my friends, society chose my role. I rebelled against those limitations, fought for the freedom to choose. Now I have that freedom, and it feels like drowning in an ocean of maybe.

Late at night, when the apartment is quiet and the world’s infinite options have finally been put to bed, I find strange peace in the choices that have been made for me. I didn’t choose to love Happy—love chose me. I didn’t choose to be Arash’s father—biology and circumstance and something larger than choice conspired to make it so. I didn’t choose to need Allah—the need chose me, found me in my confusion, offered me the one choice that makes all others bearable: surrender.

Maybe the secret isn’t learning to choose better. Maybe it’s learning when not to choose at all, when to let life decide for you, when to trust that some things are more important than our endless, anxious selection process. Maybe freedom isn’t having infinite options—maybe it’s knowing which choices don’t matter, and having the courage to let them go.

I think about Arash, growing up in a world where he can be anything, buy anything, watch anything, become anything. Part of me envies his possibilities. But part of me grieves for the simplicity he’ll never know, the peace that comes from having fewer doors, fewer paths, fewer ways to lose yourself in the maze of maybe.

The cooking oil I finally chose tastes exactly like the one I didn’t. The movie I didn’t watch probably wasn’t that good anyway. But the twenty-three minutes I spent choosing, the mental energy I expended comparing, the small anxiety that accompanied such a simple decision—these are the hidden costs of our infinite options, the price we pay for a freedom we never asked for and don’t know how to use.

In the end, perhaps the most radical choice is to stop choosing so much, to find peace in limitation, meaning in constraint, freedom in the wisdom to know that not everything requires our decision. Some things can simply be, without our anxious intervention, without our need to optimize and analyze and select.

Sometimes the most powerful choice is to choose not to choose at all.