In 1975, the average American supermarket carried around 9,000 products. By 2008, that number had swelled to nearly 47,000, according to the Food Marketing Institute’s annual survey. Walk into a grocery store today, and you’ll face an entire wall of cereal options—organic, gluten-free, low-sugar, protein-enhanced… And you may be able to find 15 varieties of toothpaste from a single brand in a single store.
This explosion of choice was the culmination of decades of economic transformation that fundamentally reshaped how Americans live, shop, and define well-being. For seventy years, the relentless expansion of consumer culture operated on the assumption that freedom was defined purely by the absence of constraint. The premise was simple and powerful: more options meant more freedom, which meant more opportunity for happiness.
But instead of feeling empowered, people felt paralyzed. They spent thirty minutes scrolling through Netflix before giving up and rewatching something familiar. They stood immobilized in front of dozens of yogurt options, then grabbed the same familiar brand they always bought. The very abundance designed to liberate the consumer began to feel like a burden—a cognitive tax on daily life.
If endless options lead to anxiety, inaction, and regret, do more choices actually make us less free?
When Choice Becomes Burden
The answer lies in mental costs that happen on different levels.
The first burden is sheer cognitive load. Every single option demands a sliver of your attention and becomes an act of mental energy to process, compare, and dismiss. Our brains have finite capacity, and once we cross a certain threshold of choices, we enter a state known as decision fatigue. More than just being tired, it describes a measurable decrease in the ability to make rational choices. The effort required to sort through endless cereals or streaming titles outweighs the small satisfaction of finding the perfect one. As a result, we might just choose impulsively based on a metric that no longer works, or simply shut down and choose nothing at all.
Making a choice means rejecting all alternatives, creating an opportunity cost. When you had three toothpastes to choose from, rejecting the other two was easy. But now, you have to choose one toothpaste from a shelf of 8 different brands, with 15 varieties each. What if the one you skipped was the one you truly needed to use? What if that one’s scent is better? Those “what-ifs” amplify the feeling of regret even over minor purchases.
This brings us to the issue of identity. Philosopher Charles Taylor wrote about how modern identity is shaped by the demand for authenticity: we must discover and express our true selves. But when every purchase becomes a referendum on who we are-are you a Coke person or a Pepsi person?-even trivial decisions turn into existential auditions. Does the cereal you choose supposedly reveal your ‘true’ self? Do you need to constantly define it?
This aligns with the idea of being “condemned to be free,” a concept popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre. He meant we bear the weight of defining ourselves through our actions. So we must choose, and in choosing, we define ourselves. Every time we make decisions, we aren’t just choosing a product; we are constantly defining our identity through our toothpaste, our streaming queue, and our coffee order.
Types of Freedom
In his landmark 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” political philosopher Isaiah Berlin proposed a vital distinction: negative liberty as freedom from external constraints, and positive liberty as freedom to achieve self-mastery and meaningful goals. American consumer culture focused overwhelmingly on negative liberty: removing constraints on what you could buy, watch, or experience. The assumption was that eliminating barriers automatically enhanced well-being.
But positive liberty requires something different: focus, commitment, and the ability to say no to most things to pursue what matters most. Too many options fragment attention and undermine the capacity for depth. When we spend thirty minutes scrolling through Netflix, we are not experiencing positive liberty; more likely, being paralyzed by negative liberty taken to its extreme.
This may explain why constraint can feel liberating. When Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for roughly three years and went on to sell well over 10 million copies worldwide, it was not just about organization. It was based on the acute observation of how people recognized that their accumulated possessions—the fruits of unlimited choice—had become psychologically suffocating. After her Netflix series premiered in January 2019, thrift and charity shops in the US and UK reported noticeable spikes in donations, as people rushed to declutter in response to the show.
Market’s Choice: Betting on Less
In fact, the realization that time had become more valuable than marginal choice had already led to significant market adaptation. Some businesses had been quietly demonstrating the value of constraint all along. Trader Joe’s, which grew significantly in the 2000s, built its model on a curated selection rather than a comprehensive inventory. Where typical grocery stores offered 40,000-plus products, Trader Joe’s stocks fewer than 4,000.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aldi opened its first U.S. store in 1976, offering roughly 1,400 products—a fraction of the industry standard. Customers don’t experience this as deprivation—they experience it as liberation from the burden of endless comparison.
This insight gradually spread across the industry. The decline in average SKUs and store sizes after 2008 reflected industry responsiveness to changing preferences. By 2018, the average American supermarket product count had retreated to 33,055—a marked retreat from peak abundance—and store sizes began shrinking. The success of curated subscription services and the proliferation of “grab-and-go” options reinforced the pattern. Consumers proved willing to pay for constraint rather than abundance.
The Myth of Perfect Decisions
Underlying choice anxiety is the belief that if we gather enough information and deliberate carefully enough, we can identify objectively optimal choices. This is a fallacy. Aristotle’s distinction between technē (crafting or technical skill aimed at production), epistēmē (theoretical/scientific knowledge), and phronēsis (practical wisdom about how to act well in concrete situations) warns against it: treating a practical judgment as if it were a technical problem with a single calculable solution.
Technical problems have correct answers that can be calculated. But most life choices—which job to take, whom to date, which movie to watch—resist optimization. They’re commitments made under conditions of irreducible uncertainty. No amount of additional information eliminates the uncertainty; it just increases the cognitive load.
The maximizer’s mindset treats every choice as an optimization problem. But this generates anxiety precisely because most choices don’t have objectively optimal solutions. You’re not trying to calculate the correct answer; you’re making a judgment call. Accepting this reality is psychologically liberating. Once you recognize that “good enough” is often genuinely sufficient, the pressure to exhaustively evaluate every alternative diminishes.
JOMO and the Practice of Constraint
This insight found cultural expression in JOMO—”the joy of missing out”—which emerged around 2013-2014 as a counterpoint to FOMO. While FOMO reflected anxiety about missing experiences, JOMO reframed deliberate limitation as wisdom rather than deprivation.
According to data on CivicScience, 10% of Americans already considered themselves minimalists, while 25% aspired to minimalism. This may give a clearer, statistical picture of rejecting the ideology that more options automatically improve well-being.
The movement represents what Berlin might call an embrace of positive liberty: choosing your constraints to enable meaningful pursuit of chosen goals. By deliberately limiting options in domains that don’t matter much to you, you preserve cognitive resources for domains that do.
This doesn’t mean eliminating choice entirely. It means developing judgment about which choices deserve extensive deliberation and which benefit from constraint. Perhaps you care deeply about food and should explore that interest fully. But maybe you don’t need seven streaming services or a perfectly optimized morning routine.
Editor: Redefining Freedom
The trajectory from 9,000 to 47,000 to 33,000 products tells a story about freedom that differs from post-war ideology. Perhaps it is the capacity to pursue meaningful goals without paralysis. Too many options can be as constraining as too few.
The solution may lie in developing what we might call “selective abundance”: richness in domains that matter to you, deliberate constraint elsewhere. This requires the wisdom to know the difference and the courage to accept that commitment to one path means releasing others.
It turns out, progress may not require perpetual expansion, but simply means knowing when you have enough. And freedom means identifying your needs and choosing your constraints rather than maximizing your options. So there is better well-being, which comes not from addition but from thoughtful subtraction.
