When Too Much Choice Creates the Illusion of Something Better

We live in a phenomenal city, San Francisco. It is beautiful, lively, always evolving, encourages us to live authentically. It can also be a city of ultimate optimization. If you want a specific Burmese dish, a multitude of apps deliver it to your apartment in half an hour. If you need a ride across town, a driverless car materializes in minutes. San Francisco is a city that reinvents itself, is always looking forward. We are the home to companies that have spent several decades building a system designed to help you get what you want, when you want it, with minimum friction and maximum efficiency.

Naturally, this hyper-convenient mindset has bled into how we look for love. If you are a gay man, you know the drill all too well. You open Grindr or Sniffies, and a grid of hundreds of attractive, successful men appears within a one-mile radius. It feels like a lottery where you hold all the winning tickets.

This can be fun and exciting! But it is important to also ask ourselves, is this buffet of options in every domain of our life really that good for us? Do we default to treating human connection like a digital marketplace? When we constantly believe that a better option is waiting on the other side of a swipe, does actual commitment become impossible.

How do we find meaningful commitment in this environment? One option is to let go of the optimization mindset. Stop viewing dating as a tech problem to be solved with an easy solution like apps or delivery services. Dating is messy, it is fodder for fun stories with friends. It is an act between two or more imperfect people that can, given the chance, turn into meaningful relationships that support our overall wellbeing. 

This might mean closing the apps when we find someone worth knowing and actually giving them a fair shot. It might mean choosing depth over breadth. Most importantly, it might mean accepting that "better" is a mirage. There will always be someone with a flashier job title or a better housing situation. But the most valuable thing in the world is not a flawless profile—it is a partner who helps you find joy and chooses to stay when staying gets hard.