A finger slides across the screen. Up, down. The glow of the glass reflects in a pupil that is already a bit dry from the air conditioning. There are three hundred movies available in the “psychological thriller” category. Three hundred. The man stares at the catalog like someone staring at a concrete wall. Twenty minutes pass. Forty pass. In the end, he turns off the television and stares at the ceiling in silence. He has chosen nothing. That silence is the sound of modern freedom collapsing under its own weight. We believed that having every category would make us gods, but it has only turned us into archivists of our own desire.
Sade would have laughed at this dilemma with a brutal dryness. For him, choice was an act of sovereignty, a slash through reality. Today, we slash ourselves by trying to process an infinite menu. Paralysis is not a lack of will. It is the vertigo of knowing that choosing something implies murdering a thousand other possibilities. And in the 21st century, nobody wants to be an assassin of options.
The Infinite Shelf and the Fear of Missing Something Better
Neuroscience calls it “opportunity cost,” but it tastes like ash. Something contracts in the collective marrow when the algorithm offers us a “98% match.” It is an invisible pressure. If the machine says it is perfect, why do I feel like I am making a mistake? It isn’t a metaphysical doubt. It is the fear that, on the next page, there is a version of happiness with a bigger discount or a higher resolution.
The system does not want you to choose. It wants you to search.
Nothing more.
While you search, you consume time, data, and hope. The mechanics of indecision are of an icy precision: they keep us in the waiting room of our own lives. Perhaps it isn’t a lack of judgment. Perhaps we have been convinced that the “correct” choice exists, when in reality only choices made exist. But admitting that hurts.
And the problem is this: nobody wants to close the door
It is almost touching to see someone in the supermarket comparing two brands of detergent for five minutes. The hum of the fluorescents hits the back of their neck. They read the ingredients as if they were a last will and testament. What they seek is not cleanliness, but the security of not being an idiot for paying ten cents more. Sade understood that pleasure requires cruelty, even toward oneself; one must be cruel to the remaining options to enjoy the elegance of the chosen one.
Who has the courage to discard today? Maturity in this desert of abundance consists of accepting that visual freedom burns if you don’t have a filter. They sell us the omnipotence of the infinite hanger, but they forget to mention that the viewer’s neck has a turning limit. In the end, an excess of categories does not expand the world; it flattens it.
Inventory of a Will at its Lowest
We explore a map where paralysis is the norm and action is a suspicious anomaly. The fetish of variety has handed us a catalog of possible lives so extensive that real life sits gathering dust in a corner. We are subjects who seek confirmation of our intelligence in comparison, forgetting that the clock does not stop to wait for our reviews.
Maybe it isn’t paralysis.
Or maybe it is.
But if it isn’t, it feels like a dead weight in the stomach every time we have to decide between two paths that lead to the same place.
And tomorrow we will open the app again. We will look at the thumbnails with the hope that something chooses us, instead of us having to exercise the terror of preference. As if we didn’t know that time is the only thing without a return category.
