The Quandaries of choice

 Choice.  Is it possible to have too much of it?  I believe there is.

I'm the type of person who likes to go at my own pace.  I know what I want, and I am confident and comfortable enough to go out and get it.  But sometimes the sheer amount of choice can be overwhelming.

Take, for example, entertainment.  When I was growing up, I watched whatever was available on TV.  We didn't have cable, so we were stuck with three local channels of varying quality, depending on how well the rabbit ears were catching signals at the time.  For music, there were a few radio stations, but each station had its own genre, and while you could switch back and forth between stations depending on what you felt in the mood for, you were pretty much at the beck and call of whatever the DJ chose to play.  If you really liked something, you could buy the album in a real brick and mortar store.  And for movies, we had plenty of choice at the local cinemas, both independent and multiplex, but at any given time there were probably no more than 25 or 30 movies playing in town.

Compare that to now.  Radio still exists, but it has spread to the internet, so you can listen to anything and everything you choose, be it a Hungarian station focusing on Magyar folk music, a station emanating from a college in Abilene Texas which broadcasts poetry readings 24/7, or you could listen to current pop hits coming out of Singapore.  For the most part, physical media (both audio and video) caters to increasingly niche audiences, as the majority of the populace chooses to either stream or download songs onto their devices or the Cloud.  Television and film is quite mixed together, with so many streaming services nowadays that it's hard to keep up!

If you had told me twenty years ago that I could have all the entertainment I wanted, at the click of a button, firstly I would have asked to check your temperature, and then I would have said "sign me up!"  Upon first musings, it seems to be an ideal situation.  And if you know what you want, then it absolutely can be.  But I will be the first to admit that there are times, especially when I'm finished bingeing a show and wondering what to queue up next, that I start getting a little anxious.  Do I go with Ozark?  Narcos?  Maybe I'll finally start watching Breaking Bad.  Or perhaps take the plunge and do the deep dive into The Walking Dead.  But everybody's talking about Squid Game, so maybe I should see what that's all about.  

If you're following along, those are choices that can be found on Netflix.  And those are just the TV series.  What about all the newly released feature-length films created especially for the content provider in question, in addition to the ever-rotating backlog of archived films?  For myself, I choose to limit myself to the one streaming service I just mentioned.  God knows what I'd do if I had to choose between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV, Crave, HBO Max, Curiosity Stream, MUBI, the Criterion Channel, and God knows how many other services there are out there!  

This is, of course, in addition to the sports streaming services I watch, and the Youtube channels that I follow, and the video games that I play.  And of course I'm a voracious reader so I try to get at least an hour of reading in a day, as well as trying to engage my skills on the other side of the page.

That doesn't even take into account spending time with my wife, my family, and my friends.  Oh, and I have to work a full time job on top of that!

Sigh.  I think I'm breaking out in hives ...

I find myself thinking back nostalgically to the days when we had a lot less choice.  If I wanted to see a movie, I had three or four weeks before it left theatres, disappearing for 6-12 months before resurfacing at the local video store.  Nowadays, I find myself putting off watching something because I know it will always be there ... along with everything else that keeps getting added to it.  I think my Netflix queue encompasses about 75 different TV series and movies, from Swedish crime dramas to French spy comedies.  And more keeps getting added to the list. 

It makes me wonder:  was it really so simple back in the day, or am I looking back with rose-coloured glasses?  I guess to a certain extent things were curated; only so much content can be put on three channels, or circulate through 16 movie theatres, or two dozen radio stations.  Nowadays we are free to choose what we want to entertain ourselves with, and how, and when.  Nobody tells us what to do!

And yet ... and yet ...

I do enjoy picking and choosing my entertainment, either by preplanning or on the spur of the moment.  I am not wholly against it by any stretch of the imagination.  There is so much wonderful content being created nowadays that a) might never have seen the light of day were it not for all the product needed to draw viewers in to subscribe to different streaming services, or b) I would never have had the opportunity of viewing (Babylon Berlin, I'm looking at you!).  

That being said, I recall with a certain wistfulness the days in which there were only 57 channels and nothing on ...