Hemingway sat at his desk, rolling a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter. He had a choice. A sentence. A scene. A story. But the choice wasn’t infinite. The choices had been made long before—by war, by love, by the raw edges of experience that carved themselves into his bones. He didn’t sit paralyzed, scrolling through possibilities like a desperate man flipping through TV channels at 2 a.m. He simply wrote. Because the alternative was death.
Fast-forward a century. You’re sitting at your desk, glowing screen in front of you, cursor blinking like a metronome for hesitation. You open Spotify. Thousands of playlists. You switch tabs. A dozen open projects. A hundred unread messages. Your brain flickers between possibilities like a short-circuiting neon sign. You want to write, but should it be a blog post? A novel? A screenplay? Maybe you should start a Substack. Or make a YouTube channel. AI is taking over anyway—should you learn prompt engineering?
The problem isn’t that you don’t have choices. The problem is that you have too many.
This is the paradox of choice. The more options you have, the harder it is to choose. The harder it is to choose, the less you create. And the less you create, the further you drift from the one thing that matters: finishing something.
Psychologists call this “decision fatigue.” Marketers call it “analysis paralysis.” I call it the death of art in a world drowning in possibilities.
Creativity isn’t about infinite choice. It’s about constraints. Hemingway had his typewriter, his wars, his whiskey. He wrote because there was nothing else. You, on the other hand, have a thousand doors in front of you. And instead of walking through one, you stand there, overwhelmed, scrolling social media for someone to tell you which one to pick.