Do you ever feel like you have too much choice? I do. In fact, every time I open a blank document to write a blog post I feel as if I have too much choice. There are so many things I could write about—particularly in the current political climate—that it’s hard to know what to write about.
But I pose this question in relation to one’s entertainment choices in the modern world.
When I was growing up in the dim a distant past, there was very little choice. I could fire up my ZX Spectrum (or later my Commodore Amiga or later still my SNES) and play one of a handful of games that I owned, put on some music, the choice being either a CD I owned or the radio, watch a film on VHS (either owned or rented from the local store) or later on DVD or I could watch what is now referred to as “Linear TV”, which just means a television station as broadcast. And back in my day there were only a handful of channels to choose from—first 4, then with SKY came a dozen or so more via the satellite. Or I could read a book—either one I owned or borrowed from the local library.
Compare that with the world in 2020. I can still do all of those things, but the choice in each and every case is massive compared to what it was back then.
Take computer games. I can fire up my Xbox and play one of the installed games that I own, sure I can. But I also have Game Pass, which means there’s over a hundred games I can download and play in any given month and even then, these games are refreshed quite often. Even within some of the games themselves there seems like a large choice of things to do. Take GTA Online. Do I want to do a mission? What kind? Stealing cars? Robbing banks? Or maybe go racing in cars or at sea or even with remote control cars (somewhat ironically). There’re countless things to do within the online game.
Music? Ha! Who needs CDs or even the radio? Spotify gives you access to pretty much every song ever recorded as well as hundreds of podcasts on all sorts of topics.
And then…
And then we come to “Visual Entertainment”.
Not only are there literally hundreds of channels available, most of them also offer an “on Demand” service in addition to their linear broadcasts. And that’s before we get to the hundreds of hours of both classic and original television shows and movies available on services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Britbox, Apple TV+, Disney+, WWE Network, and probably a lot more that I’ve never heard of.
How on earth are you supposed to choose? It’s impossible.
And I haven’t even mentioned YouTube or social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok (??) instagram etc.
We just have too much choice these days and you often feel like you’re missing out on something, although you never really know what.
It’s all rather stressful.