Choice is one thing. A never-ending series of eye-wateringly complex decisions is quite another, writes Donald Clarke The cyclone of options is so overpowering that you decide to end it all. You will retire to the library with a pearl-handled revolver and a bottle of gin. Tanqueray? Gordon's? Bombay Sapphire?
I can't get out of the house. That's not quite accurate. I can get as far as the pavement before a troubling new form of paralysis overcomes me. Once beyond the door I am faced with a decision whose eye-watering complexity calls for the cognitive wherewithal of that collective alien mind in Star Trek that evolved to the size of a galaxy. There are, at time of writing, 4,872 songs on my iPod. Being, unfortunately, a crude organism whose ancestors have, in geological terms, only recently descended from the trees, I am forced to randomly twiddle the machine's little wheel, trusting that fate will thrust the ideal title before me. Eventually, of course, after some minutes of tutting, I give up and allow the device to select a tune at random.
What's this racket? Mission of Burma? When did I buy that? Press random. Portishead? Oh, Lord no. This is not a dinner party and it's not 1994. Press random. Inevitably, I end up twirling the wheel again. Shadows lengthen. Up and down my street desperate men and women, petrified by choice, stand hopelessly staring at white plastic rectangles. Night draws in.
When we do escape our cul-de-sac, further crises of choice await. KitKats, whose wrappers now claim the status of collectors' items, regularly incorporate such unwanted flavours as orange and mint. Mars bars, once reliably Mars-bar-sized, are offered as tiny cubes, gooey dolmens and everything in between. And let's not start on crisps. Is there any brace of exotic comestibles too incompatible to find themselves coating flattened potatoes in a foil bag? Ox-spleen-and-mango Kettle Chips will surely be with us soon.
Coffee shops urge us to poison their perfectly acceptable beverages with one of 100 vile syrups. The same boffins who isolate and classify apparently identical species of lichen have been called in to distinguish between the numbingly similar mobile phones available at every corner.
Is all this unnecessary variety making you feel ill? Well, good news. You are even offered a choice between different traditions in medicine. A few decades ago it seemed reasonable that the sick would wish to attend only doctors whose training took account of scientific method. No more. Now you can pay to have some bounder, one step removed from a snake-oil salesman, play Enya at you while administering oyster shells suspended in distilled water. Or, when the shingles start playing up, you can fork out for the pleasure of having a hippy with dreamcatcher earrings poke you repeatedly in the foot. Somewhere out there, some poor fool is being urged to cure his bunions by dancing round the entrails of a recently slain goat.
You can't stand it, so you rush home for a quiet evening in front of the television. There's classic Pogles' Wood on the Oliver Postgate Channel. But what about this programme concerning Himmler's osteopath on Tyrant Gold? Look, live Cluedo from Bratislava.
The cyclone of options is so overpowering that you decide to end it all. You will retire to the library with a pearl-handled revolver and a bottle of gin. Tanqueray? Gordon's? Bombay Sapphire? Why settle for an antiquated firearm when the Smith & Wesson Scandium AirLight is available at such a reasonable price?
The origins of this culture of alternatives goes back to the late 1960s. Adam Curtis, in his excellent 2002 documentary series The Century of the Self, described the panic that assailed marketing executives at the rise of hippiedom.
Concerned that these supposed individualists might shun their products, Madison Avenue draped flowers around some of its younger employees, allowed them to grow their hair and sent them among the enemy. The dispatches from the front line were reassuring. The urge to radically change society appeared to seriously concern only a minority of hippies.
More important was the desire to reject cultural conformity and express oneself through dress, language, attitude and taste in music. The manufacturing industries, assisted by the availability of versatile new plastics, were perfectly placed to provide alumni of the counterculture with a wide variety of new products. If you can't express yourself by playing a guitar solo, do it by selecting one of these 400 varieties of ice cream. Purchasing make-up, records or motorcars could, the marketing men implied, be as creative an act as dancing to Grateful Dead wearing nothing but body paint.
Since then the urge to deliver ever more varied classes of ever more varied things has been an irresistible motor for consumer capitalism. But recent research - and not just that carried out on my pavement - has suggested that the terrifying array of options is beginning to bewilder punters. In last year's The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, the author Barry Schwartz described an experiment that found shoppers who were offered free samples of six jams were more likely to buy a preserve than shoppers who were offered samples of 24 jams.
Offering us too many colours or too many flavours can be counterproductive. When we had only Wanderly Wagon and Club Milks we endured Wanderly Wagon and Club Milks. Now, while driving our Britney-yellow Mercedes with chartreuse trim, we can't help but think how nicely the Kylie-pink Jaguar with Drambuie fittings might have suited us. Poor spoilt us.
Be honest. All the while you were reading this, you were wondering whether you should have turned to that piece about the Russian mafia instead. Or that nice-looking recipe. Or that article about Tudor clock towers. There is no escape.