š® Letters from a Seeker
āLetters from a Seekerā is a weekly series of short contemplations that explore the mystery, meaning, and art of living. The word āSeekerā in the title is inspired by the Delphic maxim: āBe a seeker of wisdom.ā *** This series is exclusive to members.
Dear Fellow Traveler,
We are arguably the most optioned generation in human history and possibly the most stuck. We face countless choices in what to watch, where to work, how to live, and who to be.
Yet, we seem to share a strange modern dilemma: it's not a lack of options but the inability to commit to one.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz documented this pattern carefully in his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice. His findings were counterintuitive and uncomfortably recognizable: beyond a certain threshold, more options donāt liberate usāthey paralyze us. They raise our expectations until no single choice can meet them, and leave us less satisfied with whatever we do choose than if weād had fewer options to begin with.
Schwartz described the phenomenon as the tyranny of abundance. His research shows that having more varieties on the shelf actually led to less buying and enjoyment, serving as a surprisingly accurate reflection of modern life.
Although Schwartz diagnosed the symptom, SĆøren Kierkegaard (1813ā1855)āthe Danish philosopher who worried about the human condition with more honesty than almost anyone before or sinceāhad already identified the disease. Writing two centuries before the age of infinite options, he saw that the problem wasnāt abundance itself.
It is what abundance does to the soul when it has no anchor.
He called anxiety the dizziness of freedom.
The image is precise. Dizziness isnāt pain. It isnāt grief. Itās the sensation of having no fixed pointāof the ground moving slightly beneath you, of reaching for something stable and finding only more space.
That is what genuine freedom feels like from the inside, Kierkegaard thought, when youāre standing at the edge of your own possibility with no necessity to tell you which way to step.
He wasnāt against freedom. He was against the illusion that more of it automatically produces a better life.
Iāve felt it most not in the big decisions but in the small, embarrassing ones. Standing in a grocery store aisle, paralyzed by thirty-one varieties of olive oil. Scrolling through shows for twenty minutes before settling on the first one Iād considered. Keeping plans loose, commitments light, doors openātelling myself this is wisdom when, if Iām honest, it is mostly a failure of nerve.
