Favor less

This post is primarily a reflection on software and technology, but really I think it applies to everything.

I recently tried Arc from The Browser Company. It’s a clean and modern looking browser that seems to be catching a lot of developer’s attention right now. It features a side navigation bar instead of the standard top navigation bar. It offers profiles that you can easily toggle between. It seems optimized for hot-key navigation. It also just looks really good. It almost feels like Obsidian in browser form—maybe a little more bubbly. I’m sure if I took the time to get used to it, it could provide a really great browsing experience, and it seems that it has done that for a lot of people. I also know that there’s more to it than I’m covering here, but that’s kind of the problem, at least for me.

After a week, I ended up switching back to Firefox. Not because I think Arc is a bad browser, but because I found myself feeling overwhelmed by everything it had to offer. This is my experience with a lot of new software and really just with the consumer market as a whole right now. It might even be my experience with life in general?

Everyone and everything is trying to do too much.

As I write this, I realize that I have a lot of disjointed thoughts on this topic and I don’t want to turn this post into a book (or do I?), so for now, I’ll try to make this as concise as I possibly can. It probably deserves a more in-depth analysis, but I just want to put the idea in writing since it feels very central to what I’ve been feeling lately.

As discussed in the Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, an increased number of choices will, on average, result in a decreased level of satisfaction.

Technology has brought us to a point where within any market, choices are unlimited, or at least perceptibly so. This is a problem. When options are unlimited, real satisfaction becomes nearly impossible. Especially with technology. Because when you understand that your options are unlimited, you start to believe that you can do more. And more. And more. And more. You start to believe that you can literally do everything. You start to become emotionally invested in doing everything. You see everyone online and are exposed to all the people telling you that they’re doing everything.

The problem though, is that you can’t do everything. No piece of technology is ever going to make that possible. And the more we try to do everything, and invest in doing everything, the more unhappy we will be. There’s obviously a side conversation to have about capitalism and economics, but I’ll save that for another day.

The point for now is to favor less. Options, more often than not, do not improve your experiences, as much as you may want them to. This needs to be your philosophy in everything you do.