Sartre famously remarked that "man is condemned to be free". What does that mean in the era of AI?

LLMs offer a near infinite range of possibilities. And with it, an unprecedented degree of anxiety.

Technology's potential exacerbates the tension between choice and contentment.

The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that "man is condemned to be free."

His idea was that since no higher power constricts our choices, everything is up to us. Our freedom at any given moment is infinite. In the very next second, you go out for a run around the block, look up NBA highlights, join a political party, throw your phone into the air, punch the person sitting next to you, etc. The possibilities are endless.

According to Sartre, this baffling infinitude is the source of humanity's inescapable anxiety. When you can do anything, what do you do? And while we can pick anything, we are wholly responsible for our decisions. As our freedom grows, so does our anxiety and the weight of our choices.

When we zoom out on Sartre’s worldview, he was fiercely anti-capitalist, anti-money, and felt human nature was inherently miserable. But you need not accept Sartre’s philosophy in full in order to appreciate this fundamental tension: We fiercely seek freedom of choice, but if and when we get it, it becomes a source of deep anxiety.

We can see this tension in several domains, from consumer freedom to counterfactual thinking to technological innovation. I argue that we see it most recently, in its fullest expression, in generative artificial intelligence platforms such as ChatGPT.

The Psychology of Choice in the Modern World

The ambivalence of freedom is a perennial feature in the consumer world. Consumers say they want a wide range of products to choose from—but when brands provide this, it makes choosing burdensome. The more options consumers have, the less they tend to buy, and the less they tend........

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