You Overestimate This

JUDGMENTYou've mistaken "more to choose from" for "more free" — and the two are usually opposites.

A line no one stops to question

"More choice is better" sails past without a second glance. Supermarket aisles, phone plans, and streaming home screens all race to field the longer list — more options, the thinking goes, means more say over your own life, which means more freedom.

But the jam experiment tells a different story

Psychologist Sheena Iyengar set up a side-by-side test in a grocery store: one table with 6 jams, another with 24. The 24-jam table drew more people to stop, but fewer to actually buy — about a third of those at the 6-jam table made a purchase, against only about a tenth at the 24-jam table. More options didn't make people bolder; it made them afraid of picking wrong, so in the end they picked nothing.

(The "jam study" is a popular shorthand; strictly speaking, later work has questioned whether it even replicates, so treat it as an illustration, not a verdict.)

Why the arrow points the other way

Every extra option carries two quiet costs. The first is comparison: each new choice spends your energy weighing it against the rest. The second is regret: once you've chosen, you can't help wondering whether another option would have been better. With few options you don't bother comparing, and there's little to compare anyway; with many, both thoughts weigh on you at once.

So the feeling of being "more free" is usually fullest at the moment you read the menu, and emptiest the moment you've paid.

I'm not saying choice is the enemy

What I'm against isn't having choices, but treating the headcount of options as the measure of freedom. What most of you really want may not be 24 jams, but one or two answers you can grab without thinking. Supermarkets, carriers, and apps all push the other direction — they profit from "more," while you only feel safe with "less."

Where I may be wrong

This take tilts toward subtraction. If you live somewhere choices are already scarce, then "more" genuinely leads to freedom. My observations come from a world whose shelves are already overflowing, and the conclusion holds only there.