Pathways, October 2025

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.

In 2004, Barry Schwartz published his now classic study, The Paradox of Choice — Why More Is Less. The basic argument: the proliferation of choice in every facet of life distinguishes us from previous generations and makes us worse off. The 251 salad dressings in stock at your local grocery store; the ability to work at any time and in any place, facing you with the constant choice of whether to unplug; and the most intimate choices about whether to marry or to have kids—these all make up the fabric of our distinctly modern life. 

For Schwartz, these new realities challenge a basic premise of our social and political order: more freedom = more happiness. Through his examination of psychology and economics, Schwartz showed that too much choice meant less happiness, more FOMO, relentless self questioning, and overall decision fatigue. Not to mention the atomizing effects of the proliferation of choice—the hyper-individualism underwriting and advanced by it. 

In the 20 years since Schwartz wrote his book, there have been numerous applications, adaptations, and reworkings of this view of choice. Renata Salecl’s critique of the self-help genre in her 2011 The Tyranny of Choice is one such example: as she writes, “The idea of choosing who we want to be and the imperative to ‘become yourself’ have begun to work against us, making us more anxious and more acquisitive rather than giving us more freedom.” Along similar lines critiques of choice have been waged with regard to social media, modern romance (including a book coauthored by comedian Aziz Ansari and Erik Kleinberg), dating apps, and more. 

Earlier this year, Schwartz’s genealogy of modernity was given a deeper historical grounding by Penn historian Sophia Rosenfeld in The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life. As the title suggests, Rosenfeld is very much invested in viewing modernity as equivalent with the expansion of choice—with some qualifications. But ultimately what is at stake for her in the question of choice is our conceptualization of freedom: 

[C]onsidering the history of choice should make us more self-conscious the next time we are fretting over whether to pick the oat milk rather than the half-and-half, not to mention one train ticket or candidate for office or college course over another. We might instead ask ourselves: when, collectively, should we be invested in individual choice as a good way to solve a shared problem, and when not? And when should I, as an individual, try to maximise the opportunity to make choices about my own life versus not doing so? Most of all, though – as we struggle with both choice overload and the failures of personal choice to help us solve some of our biggest problems, including the rise of forms of authoritarianism directed squarely against choice – thinking about our attachment to choosing off menus should make us wonder what other possibilities for defining freedom might be lurking out there.

Choice, then, is not a good in itself, but has to be directed or negotiated in the pursuit of justice and the good. This suggests that there are cases in which actual freedom—understood more capaciously and perhaps more accurately—is born out of surrender, constraint, and responsibility. 

Here’s the paradox of choice for the modern person: that, now that we have so much choice, we must choose to have less choice. This is perhaps most true in the case of digital technologies, which pose a special problem to human flourishing because of the extensive, elaborate, and even destructive amount of choice they make available.

Many are working on this problem and finding solutions, from Matt Švarcs Richardson’s “37 Tool and Tactics to Protect Your Attention,” to Jersualem Demsas’s invitation to purchase a dumb phone and leave your smartphone at the office, to Jean M. Twenge’s chronicling of the great lengths she had to go through to control her children’s access to the internet because Apple makes it difficult to do so. But as these authors note, choice as a method to limit choice is likely a losing strategy in which the house (i.e., Apple and other tech companies) always eventually wins. Until viable policy solutions emerge—or until we have the imaginative resources to understand the meaning of freedom anew—it’s likely that we are left with our choices.