Shein uploads thousands of new items every day. Zara launches collections faster than any season can hold. The supermarket offers an entire aisle of “unique” waters: sparkling, still, electrolyte-packed, alkaline, vitamin-enhanced, “premium spring.” Abundance stopped being a luxury and became a maze.

Barry Schwartz called it the paradox of choice: the more alternatives we have, the less capable we are of deciding. Erich Fromm anticipated it: absolute freedom does not emancipate us, it terrifies us. And in the middle of all that noise, the star business of our time emerges: curation. What we consume is no longer just clothes, food, or art—it is the relief of someone telling us, “this yes, the rest does not matter.”

In art and design, fairs like Art Basel or Salone del Mobile make it obvious. The excess is so overwhelming that people no longer hunt for “the new” but for the curator who can filter the avalanche. The same happens in dating apps, where the infinite parade of faces generates apathy more than desire: we swipe, but we do not choose.

The problem is not just paralysis. The problem is that we surrender identity. Once, choosing was a way of performing who you were: the rare band you discovered, the book you hunted down in a small shop, the garment you picked among thousands. Today, more and more of those choices are outsourced. The algorithm, the influencer, the cultural editor decide for us. Our “voice” dissolves into someone else’s playlist or catalog.

Walter Benjamin said mechanical reproduction erased the aura of art. Now, overproduction erases our personal aura: it turns us into interchangeable profiles consuming what has already been preselected.

And here is the ultimate irony: we went from fighting censorship to happily paying for it. We crave someone to take away options, to shrink the menu, to tell us what is worth it. Abundance exhausted us so much that what we truly want is not to choose… but to be chosen.

The future, perhaps, is not about having more options, but daring to decide less. Then again, we can always keep swiping, sipping “premium fine-bubbled alkaline water,” and convincing ourselves that it somehow says something about who we are.