Choicetech, Choice Inflation, and the Disappearing Defaults of Modern Life
Introduction: Setting the Stage
Think about how often you get stuck on simple decisions: What to watch tonight, what to eat for lunch, whether to swipe left or right. Netflix queues, cereal aisles, and dating apps all promise to make life better, yet they bury us under endless options. These aren’t just small annoyances. They point to a bigger reality: we’re living in a world where the very tools meant to expand our choices also flood us with information, leaving us stretched thin.
And the stakes are high. This flood of options doesn’t just slow us down; it drives burnout, pushes us toward whatever the algorithm favors, and leaves us drowning in information overload while constantly reinventing routines that used to run on autopilot. Our ability to decide well is under pressure every single day. But this moment also carries possibility: it gives us a chance to question old patterns that never served us and experiment with new ways of living that might work better.
In this essay, I’ll explore four forces shaping that pressure: choicetech, choice inflation, information overload, and decision fatigue. You may not have heard of the first two before—that’s because I coined them through Remake The Rules to name dynamics that are everywhere but rarely recognized. We’ll look at how each one works, how they feed into each other, and why they matter for the way we live and work. Naming them isn’t just an academic exercise—it’s a way of giving ourselves power. When we can see these forces clearly, we can begin to work with them instead of against them.
What Is Choicetech?
Choicetech refers to the systems, tools, and algorithms that influence, automate, or overwhelm our decisions. These aren’t neutral; they actively shape what shows up in front of us and how we make sense of it.
Examples:
Dating apps present hundreds of profiles and decide who you even see.
Spotify and TikTok suggest what to watch or listen to next.
Search engines and shopping platforms decide which products or sources float to the top.
Workplace dashboards bury leaders in endless metrics.
Hiring platforms rank résumés before a human ever looks at them.
Email filters and meeting schedulers dictate whose voices surface first in organizational life.
Choicetech expands what’s possible, but it also reshapes the environment in which decisions get made, including the information we see, trust, and act on.
Consider the leader facing half a dozen dashboards, each flashing urgent signals. Her team waits for direction, but the more she scans, the harder it is to know which numbers matter. For her employees, the fallout shows up as shifting goals and unclear priorities. The issue isn’t incompetence—it’s a system drowning everyone in metrics, with no clear way through.
What Is Choice Inflation?
Choice inflation is the surge in the number of decisions we face every day, without a matching increase in support to make them.
Examples:
Grocery aisles lined with dozens of kinds of cereal.
Juggling email, Slack, texts, and project apps.
Endless career paths, side hustles, and wellness trends.
Leaders pulled between competing dashboards and KPIs.
Hiring managers flooded with algorithmically ranked résumés.
Small business owners juggling stacks of tools—payment processors, marketing dashboards, inventory trackers—that rarely fit together.
Parents sorting through schools, extracurriculars, and digital learning platforms.
More options can feel like freedom, but often they bring pressure, confusion, and second-guessing. And this isn’t only a story of crowded shelves or crowded feeds. The overwhelm can come from something different: the repeated work of reinventing. With fewer shared defaults or reliable services, you might find yourself traveling long distances to test out healthcare options, piecing together side jobs, or constantly recalibrating how to get what you need. The burden isn’t just the number of choices—it’s the repeated effort of reinventing, which can be just as draining as a flood of options. At the same time, reinvention can be creative: people in both rural and urban contexts are finding inventive ways to adapt, mix resources, and make life work in ways that reflect their real needs.
What Is Information Overload?
Information overload is the flood of data, inputs, and signals that outpaces our ability to process them. It’s what happens when the sheer volume of information—emails, feeds, reviews, metrics, notifications—outstrips the time or attention we have to make sense of it.
Examples:
An inbox with hundreds of unread messages.
Scrolling endlessly through reviews before buying a simple product.
Leaders wading through competing and incomplete reports.
Parents confronted with pages of contradictory advice.
Information overload doesn’t just frustrate us—it sets the stage for decision fatigue by burning through attention before we even start choosing. Yet access to more information also carries potential. It can empower people to question authority, discover alternatives, and connect with possibilities beyond what’s immediately available in their local environment.
What Is Decision Fatigue?
Decision fatigue is the mental exhaustion that comes from making too many choices. The more decisions pile up, the worse the quality of those decisions becomes.
Examples:
Feeling too drained to cook and defaulting to takeout.
Settling for a so-so match on a dating app because you can’t swipe anymore.
Late-night impulse shopping online.
Leaders signing off on a proposal just to clear their plate.
Employees accepting another meeting invite instead of making a call themselves.
Parents choosing last-minute activities for their kids simply because comparing every option is impossible.
Decision fatigue is the hidden tax of choicetech, choice inflation, and information overload.
The Disappearing Defaults
Choicetech doesn’t just expand what’s available; it rewrites the backdrop of daily life. For most of human history, defaults carried us through: cultural norms, routines, and shared expectations that meant we didn’t have to decide everything from scratch.
Now many of those defaults are gone. Once, Sunday gatherings doubled as built-in social networks. Now, Sunday evenings often look like scrolling apps alone. Once, families tuned into the same nightly news. Now, each person curates a private feed. Once, you bought what the local store carried. Now, you scroll thousands of reviews on products from anywhere.
This shift isn’t all bad. Many old defaults weren’t supportive—they funneled people into roles or expectations that weren’t really theirs. Defaults did provide stability, but they also limited possibility. Without them, we now have to reinvent strategies in areas of life that used to run on autopilot. Reinvention can be exhausting, but it also holds promise: it lets us question routines that never really fit, and experiment with new patterns that better reflect who we are and what we need. The challenge is to balance the cost of constant effort with the opportunity to create something more aligned and life‑giving.
How They Interact: A Cycle of Exhaustion
These four forces don’t stand alone; they intensify each other:
Choicetech creates new ways of presenting options.
Choice inflation multiplies the volume of those options.
Information overload floods us with more data than we can process.
Decision fatigue drains us until we lean even harder on choicetech to decide for us.
The disappearance of defaults speeds this cycle up. Without a fallback option, we turn to the very systems that create the overwhelm in the first place, feeding the loop.
Shifting Our Relationship to Information
All of this points to a deeper transformation: our relationship to information itself. Choicetech constantly reshapes the flow of data, fueling choice inflation and creating conditions of information overload. Decision fatigue makes us more likely to skim or accept whatever algorithms push to the top. Where information once came in slower, socially shared streams—like neighborhood papers or trusted community voices—now each of us lives in a personalized, fragmented feed. This can be empowering, but also deeply disorienting. Our decisions are no longer made against a common backdrop, but inside constantly shifting, individualized ecosystems. The opportunity lies in learning to shape these flows with more intention, building new habits and defaults that let us use the abundance of information without being consumed by it.
Why This Matters
Individually, this cycle produces stress, burnout, and the sense of never quite doing enough. Collectively, it concentrates power in the hands of system designers, who shape culture and behavior in ways we rarely see.
Still, it’s not all bad news. Choicetech can also surface healthier habits, amplify marginalized voices, and reduce unnecessary busywork. The point isn’t to reject these tools, but to recognize their influence and engage with them on our terms. In fact, this moment also gives us a chance to redesign defaults more intentionally than past generations ever could—choosing practices and structures that reflect not just convenience, but care, alignment, and sustainability.
Reframing Our Relationship with Choices
We may not escape choicetech, choice inflation, or decision fatigue, but we can remake the rules for how we respond:
Limit your option set. Decide in advance to consider just a few possibilities instead of drowning in endless scrolls.
Be discerning with choicetech. Use tools when they lighten your load—like a scheduling app to coordinate meetings—but remember their limits so they don’t quietly take over your decisions.
Embrace “good enough.” Perfect is a trap. “Good enough” saves energy for what really matters.
Reflection Questions
Where in your life do you feel the weight of too many options most heavily—and where have you discovered new possibilities because of them?
What’s one area where choicetech makes decisions easier for you? Where does it make them harder, and how could you use it more on your terms?
Can you recall a recent time when you felt drained from choosing? What, if anything, came out of that moment that taught you something useful?
Which old defaults (TV schedules, community dating, neighborhood shopping, shared rituals) do you miss, and why? Which ones are you glad to leave behind?
Are there new defaults you’ve created for yourself to simplify life? How well are they working, and how might you refine them?
How does decision fatigue show up in your day-to-day—at work, at home, in relationships? What signals tell you it’s time to pause or reset?
When you lean on choicetech (recommendations, algorithms), do you feel more supported or more controlled? How might you shift that balance?
What would “good enough” look like in one area of your life this week? How might embracing it open up space for something more meaningful?
How might you consciously limit your choices to protect your energy while also leaving room for creativity and experimentation?
What’s one small step you could take today to reclaim ease in your decision-making and move toward patterns that feel more aligned?
Conclusion
Choicetech, choice inflation, information overload, and decision fatigue aren’t abstract—they’re the air we breathe in modern life. Together, they explain why daily decisions feel heavier than they used to, and why reinvention has become constant. But the future doesn’t have to be only about coping. By noticing these forces, demanding better design, and choosing how we engage with them, we can build intentional new defaults that support us. At the heart of this work is our evolving relationship to information. Decisions have always depended on information, but today’s torrent of personalized feeds and algorithmic nudges makes the terrain harder to navigate. Our challenge isn’t to chase perfection, but to reclaim agency: shaping how information enters our lives and choosing deliberately—even when the landscape is uncertain. Small but steady practices, like shared rituals, clear boundaries, and thoughtful defaults, can restore stability without pretending the complexity will disappear. Reinvention will always carry effort, but it also opens space for creativity, alignment, and growth. The task is to turn that effort into power—reinvention isn’t just survival, it’s how we build the future.
