What is too many choices?

Example: You open a streaming service to watch something while eating dinner. The platform offers 17,000 titles. You spend 25 minutes scrolling through categories, reading synopses, checking ratings, and adding things to a list you will never revisit. Eventually you either restart a show you have already seen or put the phone down and eat in silence. You had more options than any human in history and ended the evening having chosen nothing — or worse, feeling vaguely dissatisfied with whatever you finally selected. The architecture of unlimited choice produced paralysis, not freedom.

This concept is part of Choice Architecture in the How to Think curriculum.