Paralysis in the Face of Too Much Choice

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This past weekend, I was trying to scroll through the thousands of movies on Netflix to find one to watch. It was actually a dark and stormy knight, with lightning arcing across the sky and thunder so loud that it shook my windows—I was looking for something spooky and thrilling.

But as I was clicking through the K-Drama or Limited Series categories and then on to the plethora of cleverly named categories, like “Girls Night In,” “Mood Boosters,” and “Watch In One Weekend,” I simply couldn’t find a single thing that I wanted to watch.

There were just too many choices.

In 2020, the ReelGood blog counted the number of content choices available to viewers on the various streaming services. For US viewers, Prime Video came out on top with more than 12,000 titles available to choose from, with Netflix a distant second, with about 3,700 movies available. Hulu, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and Apple TV+ also had thousands of movies all together on offer. And in the subsequent three years, I’m sure that number has only grown, as we have what seem to be endless new streaming services popping up everyday. Peacock, YouTube Premium, Paramount+, Starz, the list goes on and on. You can check out this list on Wikipedia to see a dynamic list that seems to be growing exponentially.

Did I want a slasher flick with a retro 80s feel? Did I want a creeping psychological horror movie? Did I want a gore-filled movie with buckets of blood? Maybe a romantic ghost story? How about a foreign horror movie? Japanese? Korean? Every cover that I scrolled past was screaming at me: Pick Me! Pick Me! There were simply too many choices.

My “analysis paralysis” is not an uncommon thing. We may think we want more, more, more when it comes to choice. Why not 100 flavors of ice cream? That has to be better than 31, right? Instead of hundreds of TV channels, why not literally tens of thousands of TV shows and movies? In our digital world where choice has been multiplying rampantly, this problem has been written about quite a lot. Back in 2018, Psychology Today wrote about studies showing that too many choices can actually lead us to be disappointed in what we eventually choose. What if we finally pick something to watch, and then we feel disappointed because maybe we made the wrong choice. Maybe we should have picked the romcom/horror movie about teenage zombies instead of the grand-guignol Italian horror movie about ballet dancers at an evil dance school.

I’m old enough to remember having just a few broadcast TV stations to choose from when watching TV shows. Everyone gathered around their TV sets on NBC’s must-see TV Thursdays to watch Friends, Seinfeld, and ER. Movies had their regular release schedules, with big blockbusters coming out in the summer months, scary movies in the fall, and Christmas movies and Oscar contenders in the winter.

Now, you get movies released both in the theaters and on streaming services. If you want to watch Halloween movies on Easter, you can watch what Netflix has or even subscribe to a horror-only streaming service like, Shudder, for the low-low price of $5.99 a month.

Of course, there’s no going back to the simpler days when we weren’t completely overwhelmed by choice. It’s why many days, I end up watching something that I’ve already watched as the kind of comfort default choice. Because I had been doing that so often, I made a conscious effort this weekend to actually pick a movie that I haven’t seen. I kind of cheated because I chose a movie based on a book that I had already read and actually liked: Gone Girl. It was released in 2014 and was competently directed by David Fincher. Ben Affleck plays a kind of ne’er-do-well husband who’s wife (played by the amazing Rosamund Pike—she simply radiates with ethereal, yet white-hot rage) has gone missing. He’s, of course, the prime suspect, but nothing is as it seems. I enjoyed it, and was glad I made the choice that I made.

However, now that I’m done, it’s back to the thousands of movies to make yet another painstaking choice.

How about you? How do you feel about having so many shows and movies to choose from? Share your thoughts in the comments below.