Oversaturation of choice sucks.

[julian-is-alive]

I noticed that despite how many more options and resources I have now, compared to when i was a kid, I have a much harder time sitting down to enjoy something I like. I create new minecraft worlds all the time just to play for an hour and never return. I try my hardest to find or create the best modpack I can, and yet its the same no matter how much content there is to explore. Why is it that now I have all the choice and freedom in the world, but I can't bring myself to do anything.

[xXWebMasterXx_Gina]

Tell me about it! Personally, I feel it the most with video games.

Video games as a hobby is pretty inexpensive nowadays; you can gets tons of games from sales, bundles and don't even get me started on how easy it is to amass libraries worth of roms for emulators. I have so many games at this point that just bringing myself to pick one and play it is an insurmountable task I face daily. And even once I get to playing a game, it's extremely easy for me to get bored and just drop it, thus repeating the cycle.

Back when I was a kid, gaming was significantly more expensive and my family had a limited income. So, even if I ended up buying a game I didn't like that much, I still spent countless hours playing and enjoying them. Each game was more meaningful, and replaying them over and over again never seemed like a chore. 

Now, the concept of replaying something is so much more alien. Why replay something when I can just play something new? Then I buy like 10 more games for dirt cheap and never play them.

I guess this is somewhere between addictive behavior and the idea that when you have everything, you actually have nothing?

[julian-is-alive]

I completely agree, I guess I sort of resent the choice I have. I wish I could go back to a time where I was limited by much more, money, time, age, etc. but I also feel a bit privileged to have that yearning for more limitation, after all I should be grateful. And I am but yet the problem still remains. :/

I guess the most I can do is be more mindful of just amassing things just to have them and truly think about the value of whatever I am buying. Especially considering how much I already have.

[caracalled]

I feel this so much! This is a huge part of why I don't have any streaming services anymore. The overwhelming feeling of having so much to pick from meant I wasn't really consuming anything (or it was just slop) bwahaha

I gotta say though, just restricting yourself artificially makes a huge difference! There are a bunch of ways to do that, and not having streaming services is just one example!
Another one for me is that I use an Ipod and a Kindle for Music + Manga so I have to go through the effort of transferring everything first before I can consume it, and for a lot of movies and games I go to my library, which has every movie ever (bwahaha) but I have to walk for like ten minutes (or take the train for 20 if i wanna go to the big library), so I end up having to pick one or two movies AND I get a walk out of it!
I can also recommend the library for video games especially!! The time limit also means that I end up actually finishing my games instead of the game just ending up in my backlog, and it's a lot cheaper than paying 60€ for a single game every time and I can still always buy it if I want it.

There are a ton of ways to do this! I genuinely feel like I am so much less caught up in this type of consumption now and enjoy the things I do end up doing a lot more! Being somewhat stingy with my money is also a huge help BWAHAHA

[candycanearter07]

Your library has games? Wow..
I do have an iPod 5th gen, but I'd be surprised if it would let me put music on it from a Linux device and also without the  original Apple account. Though, I do wonder if I could mod it too...

And I absolutely agree about the streaming services point, theres just way too much.

Also, fun fact, this is actually a clinically studied phenomenon that has had papers written on it and stuff: Wikipedia

[caracalled]

You can actually mod your iPod to have a different OS! There are Rockbox and iPodLinux although I haven't seen much iPodLinux around! There are also solutions for getting iTunes on Linux afaik but I don't really know anything about that...

Thank you for the Wikipedia link, this is so interesting! You always have really interesting links & sources to topics on the forum, I really appreciate that!

And yea! My library is my pride and joy and I'm glad it's so well-maintained! It's currently getting a big remodel to transform it into even more of a community friendly third space which I am so happy about (we fought for that baby!!). Its game library is super impressive too, they buy new titles on release so I haven't had to buy a lot of the new releases and instead got to test them first :D

[candycanearter07]

Well, good news is I found my old iPod and a charger, bad news is it seems to have a battery life of 2 minutes, so I can't really do anything with it :P

The library sounds so cool, I understand why you're so proud of it!

[caracalled]

You're in luck because the iPod 5 is the most moddable/repairable ipod of all of them (as long as you mean the iPod classic)! I have one as well and I switched out a lot of the parts over time and modded it to my liking and it genuinely is so surprisingly easy!
You should check out DankPods Video on how to repair Ipod Classics and the iFixit guide for your iPod if you're interested in repairing it.
Elite Obsolete Electronics sells parts for iPods for relatively cheap.

[julian-is-alive]

I feel this so much! This is a huge part of why I don't have any streaming services anymore. The overwhelming feeling of having so much to pick from meant I wasn't really consuming anything (or it was just slop) bwahaha

Thats so cool! I wish my library had games, but also I really want to try and restrict my full access to everything everywhere all at once(watch that movie if you havent.) So Im glad to hear some other people think a lot about this too and have actually taken steps to remedy this. Sadly I live in a place thats extremely hot during most of year and isnt very walkable, aand the public transit is kind of ass(but thats just most places in america) but I totally still want to use my library more often, I actually went to the big boy library today and hung out with some friends and read some manga, it was great! Anyway RAMBLING. blah blah blah youre cool and also thanks for responding to my post! this is my first post on here and I only joined recently :DD

[caracalled]

@julian-is-alive  Oh I love EEAAO!! Such a good movie! Also I'm glad you felt encouraged by my response! :DD
I absolutely get your struggle, my partner is American after having spent some time with him in his hometown I have to say: Walkability makes a HUGE difference in life quality. Also, like you said, the trains were so ass TTwTT And that's coming from someone with an already shitty train network at home BWAHAHA

Also that library hangout sounds AWESOME I love that idea!! I'll have to ask my friends if they wanna do that with me!

AND AND ofc welcome to the forum!! I hope you enjoy your time here and I hope you find ways to remedy the choice thing (and work with the lack of walkability in your neighborhood :(( )

[garystu]

When I was a kid I had no fuckin choices. It sucked. Being stuck with bad videogames or boring telly meant you really had to try hard to absorb the fun from whatever crap you had. The grass is always greener, I suppose. But u couldn't pay me to go back to it, unless the payment came with unlimited entertainment budget. I'd rather have a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in my ear than watch another episode of syndicated television ever.

The novelty of opening up a new Minecraft world is fine, and if that's where you find the fun, why not. The game has thousands of mods and billions of seeds, there's a lot of fun to be had by seeing what you can see. You can play it however you like, what's the problem.

Its fine to leave media unfinished, and not wrong to drop things. Whatever. Its about having fun, not "brining yourself to do anything".

I brought Minecraft when it was still in its Infdev version, and played it on and off since. And I've never beat the Ender Dragon. Ever! The game didn't have an ending when I brought it! I though adding a proper ending to Minecraft was bad, and I wasn't alone in that. I don't really care anymore, and I'm not like an old Minecraft purist either, but I've still just never felt compelled to beat the Ender Dragon. I don't think combat is fun in Minecraft.

I gotta say though, just restricting yourself artificially makes a huge difference! There are a bunch of ways to do that...

I agree with this, and would like to add some more suggestions:

- There's a lot of Top Ten lists in the world. Find one from a media critic you trust, or one that just looks interesting, and give completing the list a shot. Just go down the list.

- Try shortform media. Minecraft is a 10000000000000000000 hour game, so its fair enough if you can't commit to that. You don't even need to leave Minecraft. Try downloading other people's Minecraft Maps online, to have the experience of being in somebody's big build for a while. But also, do leave Minecraft.

[orchid]

I gotta say though, just restricting yourself artificially makes a huge difference!

absolutely, doing this has improved my mental health so much :> really appreciating everything you can, no matter how small 

the biggest thing for me personally is how i do music. i have a massive collection on a server in the other room connected to Jellyfin, so i have to go thru the process of downloading, sorting, cataloguing, etc before i can actually get to listen to it. it's wonderful and actually means your music is your music! it also probably helps i fucking love metadata and making all of it perfect and uniform xP

[BlazingCobaltX]

I don't remember where I read this, but one idea that really helped me with regards to paralysis of choice is the candyshop analogy: Sometimes it is just fun to look at a collection of things, like all the candy at a shop, and then buy nothing. It is enough sometimes to be visually satisfied by all the options. Ever since learning of this idea, I have felt less guilt about amassing digital collections and doing nothing with them.

That said, I've definitely thought about what it means that I spend less time on games and other media than I did way back, when you simply had to make do with what you had. In a way, it feels like I have less fun sometimes because I am not getting the full 100% out of something. Recently I willingly rewatched a movie, and it made me think about the things you only notice upon rewatching or rereading something. That additional layer of meaning and engagement is now lost, most of the time, because there is so much to do that going back to old things stopped being a regular option. I think this indirectly also affects how we value the media that is out there, with regards to overconsumption and shorter life cycles of modern fandom spaces.

With choice paralysis in mind, I have restricted myself to buying/downloading very little and forcing myself to finish what I have. But at the same time I don't think the magic of replaying/rewatching stuff as a child can be revived, simply because I stopped being a child. I mourn it a little, but it is what it is.

[nintendowii99]

I completely agree. I'm from a rural island in Alaska and we didn't have really any choices. One grocery store, a small used bookstore, a couple of tourist shops, and not much else. I moved away when I was in my mid-twenties because of the lack of job opportunity. I moved to a major city and loved it. There was so much choice. If I wanted a new video game, I could go buy one and be playing it in less than an hour. Pretty much anything was available whenever I wanted it. After living here for a while though, I so look forward to moving back home. There was a unique simplicity to life that was just...easier. Even something as simple as going to the grocery store was fun and exciting, we could wander around for an hour or so and not be bored. Usually our only option for buying things was online, and it would take 3 or so weeks to arrive. It was so much more exciting to get a package when you've been waiting for it for three weeks!

[livingdeadgrrl]

i noticed this when i use my homebrewed 3ds. i downloaded too many games at once and what happens is that i end up scrolling around the home screen and just playing around with the title card animations until i sit down and go back to playing the same 5 games (ace attorney, tetris, tomodachi life, rune factory 4, style savvy) i usually play out of around the 140-ish games i have  . obviously this is something of my own doing cus i was just too lazy to disassemble and re-assemble my 3ds whenever i wanted to download some games so i just do them in whole batches lol but another really egregious example of this is netflix like i have probably spent more time scrolling on the damn site than actually watching anything. and when i DO have a movie in mind i wanna watch, netflix doesnt even have it 

,,,

the illusion of choice