The Eternal Scroll: How Our Quest for the Perfect Choice Defines Us

It’s not just the paradox that we search endlessly for content from an infinite menu of choices on a machine designed to take us anywhere, but that critics and savants have realised they can – and do – track this behaviour. Rather than TV being just a background for eating, drinking and using the bathroom, we learn to treat it like a bazaar where we can try this or that, perhaps just for a few minutes or even just for a few seconds, and eventually we’ll find the perfect watch, as they say. It all points to the same human phenomenon.

HOME: A Sanctuary of Selections

Now that the streaming service Netflix is the new normal, home has become a place of infinite selections Where we are scrolling and have been scrolling for some time, in the comfort of the old walls that surround us. Paradox of choice, we call this. It was termed by Barry Schwartz and updated by Siddhartha Roy, both psychologists. The term has been applied to the tendency of people with too many options to find it harder to make choices. This seems paradoxical because choice should make things easier, but it turns out that, actually, having too many options can make things more difficult. That’s what we have today. Tons and tons of options, and yet we’re still scrolling. This captures something, maybe, but is it all it captures?

The "Surprise Me" Button: A Relic of Simpler Times

Recall Netflix’s ‘Surprise Me’ option? (It was actually a pretty good idea, developed in the pandemic to address the indecision that often paralyses us.) But even at the height of lockdowns, I don’t think it caught on, and eventually it faded away (‘low use’ was the official verdict). The implication from this is difficult to pin down but it seems that, rather than being the very act of choosing a title that pleases, it might be the range of potential pleasures, glimpsed by every unchosen title, that so engages the viewer.

The Beauty of Unrealized Possibilities

The ‘couldbe’ holds a certain allure, of course. Who hasn’t wasted time looking at Zillow listings after buying a house, or incessantly scrolling through Instagram feeds or Tinder profiles when you know that you’re in a relationship but a part of you just wants to see what else is out there? With all those movies you’re fast-forwarding away from – for whatever reason – they remain pristine in your mind. They are protected from the actual filmmaking that would strip them of their five-star potential, immortalised as the could-have-beens.

Content Overload: A Double-Edged Sword

The urge to think we’re confused because there’s too much to choose from – too much greatness – persists. And indeed, the need to sift through reboots and sequel series and buddy comps is overwhelming. Yet the problem is too few great choices, not too many. The determination to understand the phenomenon as a reflection of our abundance of riches enlists our complicity in endlessly scrolling, because certainly the next title will be the one.

Creating Our Narratives

Faced with a confusing avalanche of choice (not to mention the many mediocre duds) perhaps the answer is simpler than it appears. Maybe the way forward is to look at the screen one last time and then turn it off. Then we can get back to making our own. If a story isn’t out there, why not invent it ourselves?

The Dream of a Screen-Free World

Yet the limitless scrolls and feeds that make up so much of our ordinary nightly practice are precisely the opposite of these dream-treks. Why are the digital devices through which we live our waking lives so hopelessly buggy and burdensome in dreams? The dream’s impossibility of certain instruments points to an equally impossible dream of a future in which people can now, for the first time, have direct, unmediated experiences – a dream that is, in fact, ever more out of touch with the waking world as it becomes saturated with ever more mediated experiences.

Reflecting on HOME

For home is also, and perhaps primarily on the internet, the improbable location where that drama plays out, the place from which the narrative of choice, possibility and invention emerges. For all the flow we subject ourselves to each day, home is the place from which we draw a line; the place we reflect; the place where we make, ultimately, a decision.

Ultimately, scrolling through Netflix – from the shutters of the viewing experience all the way through to the thrill of the find, the promise of a new story that might just click – tells us not so much about our own helplessness as it does about our desires, our fears. It tells us about the ancient search for the right decision, the satisfying beauty of what we missed, what we might have had, what we might still create. The simple act of scrolling, of searching for just one more good watch, tells us something about the desire, very much ours, to write our own stories. We are still searching, we still want that perfect watch, but we are also searching for ourselves in the streaming mass of pixels, paradoxically never-the-same, ever-the-same at home in our own homes.