Life used to be so simple. You had only one choice for a telephone company; you picked up the phone and it just worked. Toothpaste was just toothpaste, and once you picked one, that was it, pretty much for life. It wasn't that long ago when we only had 7 TV channels in New York City, plus a couple of grainy extra choices on UHF. Okay, it was kind of long ago (1974?), but you get the point.

We lead a richer life now, to be sure. There are dozens of phone companies, hundreds (!) of toothpaste choices, and we steadily approach a thousand channels of television viewing, with most choices available anytime, in any room, sometimes in any language. Whether many of them are worth watching is another question, of course.

The thing is, I believe I sometimes spend more time now picking what to watch than actually watching it. My phone service is no longer a given: IP phones, mobile phones, wifi phones, plans, rollover minutes...who can choose? And sticking with my old, cavity-preventing toothpaste in these days of tartar-control, whitening, antibacterial options makes me feel kind of feeble. Not picking the best of everything is so uncool.

Fact is, life is better but decisions are a lot more complex. The human race has always turned to technology to manage complexity and scale, so what is this generation's response to having too many choices?

Web search. Google, basically. Hmmm...well, not a bad response, but it has limits.