Understanding Attention

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More choice doesn't free you; it strands you, less able to pick and less happy with whatever you finally grab.

Every time you save something to enjoy later, you feel it less right now.

Your brain chases harder than it savors, so you can keep grabbing forever and enjoy almost none of it.

It's Saturday morning, and I'm on the hunt again.

Headphones on, coffee going cold, a few hours deep in the corners of the internet where the music almost nobody has found lives. Right now it's an artist with only 202 monthly listeners, a producer in a tiny bedroom somewhere in Lisbon or Leeds, and it is, I'm certain, one of the most beautiful things I've heard in months. I tap Save. Ah, a vein of gold. The album drops into a library of about 10,000 others, most of which I've played exactly once—or maybe never at all.

I listen to a preposterous amount of music, more than anyone I know, and I can't keep up with my own collecting. The saving of songs has outrun the listening so badly that my own library has become a room full of strangers.

I promise I'm not writing about this because I think my music habit is remotely interesting! I'm mentioning it because it's the most naked version I have of something I'm fairly sure you are doing, too.

We have been handed an all-you-can-eat buffet of everything ever made, and we have learned to stand at it and fill our plates with food we'll never eat, while the meal already in front of us goes cold. That is the bargain almost nobody mentions: Hand a person infinite content, and watch them slowly lose the ability to consume any of it.

The problem with a buffet

There was a famous afternoon in a California grocery store that explains this trap. Researchers set out a tasting table filled with 24 gourmet jams. On other days, at the same table, they put out only six jars. The big display pulled the bigger crowd, the way abundance always does. But the shoppers who encountered six jams were about 10 times more likely to actually buy one—and they walked away happy with the jam they chose. The ones drowning in 24 options mostly tasted, marveled, and left empty-handed.

And that's one issue with a buffet. More options pull us in and then strand us, less able to choose and........

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