The Experiment

The Jam Experiment:
Why More Choice Is Actually Less Freedom

More options was supposed to mean more freedom. The research says otherwise.

March 22, 2026

A supermarket study from 2000 that explains the transition to a market-based society.

In 2000, a researcher named Sheena Iyengar set up a jam tasting table at a grocery store. One day she put out 24 varieties. The next, just 6.

The bigger display drew more people. It looked more impressive.

But the smaller table sold ten times more jam.

That finding, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, has been cited over 6,700 times since.¹ Because it keeps being true. When people face too many options, something in them seizes up. They show signs of anxiety. They stall. They leave without deciding, not because nothing was good enough, but because the brain hit a wall.

There is a name for this. Choice paralysis. And it does not stay inside the shop.

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who spent years studying how people respond to abundance of choice, found that the people who felt compelled to compare every option before deciding showed measurably higher rates of anxiety and depression than those who simply found something good and moved on.² The constant comparing takes a real toll. It drains the focus you need for the rest of your day, your relationships, your actual life.

More options does not make you freer. It makes you more anxious, more prone to regret, and less able to be present in the things that matter. The architecture behind this was not accidental. Someone built it deliberately.

That range is not there because it serves you. It is there because it fills shelf space, creates the feeling of abundance, and keeps your attention occupied on something trivial.

Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, wrote in 1971 that a surplus of information creates a scarcity of attention.³ He wrote that fifty years ago. The average supermarket has only got bigger since.

There is a grocery chain in America called Trader Joe’s. They carry around 4,000 products. A typical supermarket carries 40,000. Trader Joe’s is 20 to 30% cheaper than its competitors, and consistently rates as the most trusted grocery brand in the country.

Not in spite of stocking less. Because of it.

When a store commits to one option per category, that option has to be genuinely good. There is no hiding behind variety. The curation becomes the promise.

Now you know why most founders wear the same t-shirt everyday. Give up the choice paradox and live a genuinely exceptional life. One where attention is directed and focus is million times justified.

¹ Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006.
² Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice. Harper Perennial.
³ Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins Press.

The System

37 Hours. That’s What Your Supermarket Steals Every Year.

You think you are shopping. You are paying with time you will never get back.

February 19, 2026

It is not the money. It is the attention. And unlike money, you cannot earn it back.

The average family spends around 43 minutes making decisions inside a supermarket each week. Not walking. Not queuing. Not paying. Deciding. Comparing. Picking something up, putting it back, picking it up again.

Multiply by 52 weeks.

That is 37 hours a year. And that is the floor. The most conservative version of this number — one person, one weekly shop, nothing else on the pile.

Now add the rest. The Tuesday evening scroll through Amazon looking for a rice cooker you do not need. The fifteen minutes comparing two nearly identical coffee brands on Ocado. The Sunday wander through Lidl’s middle aisle, not because you came for anything specific, but because retail marketing is designed to pull you in and walk you slowly past every option it has — shelf placement, loyalty card algorithms, the deliberate choreography of putting essentials at the back, peeling your attention layer by layer until an hour is gone and you are standing at the checkout with things you did not plan to buy.

Then Instagram. One thumb, one swipe, one targeted ad at a time. Products you did not know existed thirty seconds ago, now living rent-free in your head. That is not browsing. That is your attention being harvested at scale, repackaged and sold back to brands who want thirty more seconds of your consideration.

37 hours is what the grocery shop costs alone. Nobody has honestly counted the rest. What that depletion does to everything that follows — your decisions, your relationships, your capacity to be present — was documented in a courtroom.

Research by Baumeister and colleagues on ego depletion established something important: focus and willpower draw from a shared resource, and that resource depletes with every decision made.¹ The coffee aisle. The rice section. The oils. The scroll. By the time you arrive home, you have spent real cognitive energy — the same energy you need for the things that actually deserve it.

Think about what that time is actually worth.

Enough to learn something. Build something. Have the conversations you keep postponing. Be present with the people around you instead of half-present, mentally still somewhere in aisle seven.

The question worth asking is not which coffee to buy. It is how much of your life you are willing to spend asking it.

¹ Baumeister, R. F., et al. (2023). Self-control, limited willpower and decision fatigue. Internal Medicine Journal. See also Baumeister, R. F., et al. (2024). Self-control and limited willpower: Current status of ego depletion theory. Current Opinion in Psychology.

The Why

Three Crises. One System.

Economic collapse. Spiritual disconnection. Attention theft. They are converging on the same families at the same time. And they share one root.

February 8, 2026

They look like separate problems. They are not.

Between 2022 and 2024, UK food prices rose 19.2%. That is not an abstraction, it is families choosing between heating and eating. It is the weekly shop becoming a source of genuine stress. It is the slow erosion of something that should be simple: feeding the people you love without it costing you more than you have.¹

That is Crisis One. It is the most visible.

Crisis Two is harder to name but most people feel it. Somewhere in the last generation, communities lost what older traditions called divine abundance in their sustenance, the sense that food carries meaning beyond its price per kilogram. When you do not know where your food comes from, who grew it, at what cost to them and to the land, something is missing that no organic certification label can restore. The connection between what you eat and where it came from has been erased by branding, packaging, and a loyalty card points balance.

Crisis Three is the one being actively manufactured. The average person now makes around 226 food-related decisions every single day.² Each one costs something. Not money. Focus. The same focus you need for your family, your work, the things that deserve your full attention. The supermarket’s 40,000 SKUs are not abundance. They are a mechanism. Every aisle is engineered to extend the time you spend deciding, because your indecision is commercially useful to someone. The annual cost of that, in real hours, is higher than most people realise.

Three separate problems. Three different words for them. But look at what sits underneath all three and it is the same thing: a total dependency on a system that was not designed for your flourishing. A system that profits from your financial stress, your disconnection, and your distraction simultaneously.

The economic crisis extracts your money. The spiritual crisis extracts your meaning. The attention crisis extracts your time. All three running at once. All three feeding the same machine.

This is not pessimism. It is a description of something that can be interrupted.

The interruption starts small — with the most ordinary act there is. Deciding where your food comes from, how it was chosen, and what it costs in every sense of the word. Not as a political gesture. Not as a lifestyle brand. As a practical act of recovery.

One decision, made deliberately, is the beginning of not making ten thousand of them on someone else’s terms.

¹ Office for National Statistics (ONS). Food and non-alcoholic beverage prices, UK Consumer Price Inflation, 2024.
² Wansink, B., & Sobal, J. (2007). Mindless eating. Environment and Behavior, 39(1), 106–123.

The History

The Man Who Invented Your Choices.

The supermarket did not happen by accident. Someone designed it. Here is who.

February 2, 2026

His name was Edward Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. And in 1928 he wrote the instruction manual for modern consumerism.

Edward Bernays was a psychologist. He understood something his contemporaries did not. You do not control people by limiting their options. You control them by multiplying options until the act of choosing becomes its own exhaustion.

In 1928 he published a book called Propaganda. In it he argued that mass psychology could be used not just to sell products, but to manufacture desire itself, to make people want things they had no previous interest in, through careful manipulation of their social anxieties, their need for status, their fear of being left behind.

Corporations read it carefully.

By the 1950s, average supermarket SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) counts had already begun their long climb. By the 1970s they had passed 15,000. Today a standard UK Tesco carries over 40,000 products. The coffee aisle alone: 127 options.

This was not driven by genuine consumer demand. It was driven by shelf space economics, supplier relationships, and the insight. Bernays’ insight. that a person standing in front of 127 coffee options is not a person exercising freedom. They are a person whose attention has been captured, whose decision-making capacity is being occupied, and who is therefore less likely to be thinking about anything else. Consume, submit and obey.

In 1956, a psychologist named George Miller published one of the most cited papers in the history of cognitive science. He found that human working memory holds roughly seven items at once, plus or minus two.¹ Beyond that threshold, the brain struggles. It cannot meaningfully evaluate what it cannot hold.

Every choice beyond seven is not really a choice. It is noise. And noise, it turns out, is extraordinarily profitable.

When you cannot evaluate 127 coffees meaningfully, you default to the familiar. The brand you recognise. The one at eye level. The one with the most packaging. None of these are quality signals. All of them are the product of someone else’s marketing budget.

Bernays called the people who understood this the invisible governors, a small number of individuals who shape the environment in which everyone else makes decisions, without those people ever knowing the environment was shaped at all.

The supermarket aisle is that environment. So is your Instagram feed. So is Amazon’s recommended section. The mechanism is the same. The scale has simply changed.

Knowing this does not automatically change anything. But it does change what you are looking at when you walk into a shop. And what that environment costs you by end of day was measured somewhere you would not expect.

¹ Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.

The Science

The Judge Who Ran Out of Mercy.

Every decision you make depletes your capacity for the next one. The science on this is not subtle.

January 22, 2026

A study of 1,112 parole hearings found that the law mattered less than the time of day.

In 2011, three researchers published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They had spent months tracking 1,112 parole hearings in Israeli courts, recording the outcome of each case alongside one variable most legal scholars would consider irrelevant: what time of day the hearing took place.

The results were uncomfortable.

At the start of each session, judges approved parole roughly 65% of the time. As the session progressed, that figure fell, steadily, predictably, with no correlation to the severity of the crime or the length of the sentence. By the end of each session, the approval rate had dropped to nearly zero.

Then the judges took a food break. Approval rates reset immediately to 65%.¹

The researchers called these extraneous factors in judicial decisions. What they had found was that the law, with all its protocols and precedents and professional training, was being quietly overridden by something as basic as how many decisions a person had already made that morning.

The mechanism is called decision fatigue. Every decision, regardless of its significance, draws from the same cognitive resource. A judge choosing between granting and denying parole. A person standing in a supermarket aisle choosing between 127 coffees. The resource does not distinguish between them. It simply depletes. The system that manufactures this depletion daily was not an accident.

When it runs low, the mind defaults to the easiest available answer. For a judge, the easiest answer is denial, maintain the status quo, defer the complexity. For a shopper, the easiest answer is to grab the familiar brand, the one at eye level, the one with the most shelf space. Neither decision is really a decision. It is the absence of one.

Now consider your week. The average person makes around 226 food-related decisions every single day. By the time you have navigated a full supermarket shop, compared prices on your phone, scrolled through an Amazon recommendation engine and made it home, you are sitting down to the people and the work that deserve the most from you with the least left to give.

The captive whose case was heard at the end of the session did not receive less justice because of what they had done.

They received less justice because of what the judge had already been asked to do that day.

The single most powerful predictor of whether they went free was not what they had been charged of. It was when their case was heard.

¹ Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(17), 6889–6892.

The Model

One Product. One Decision. Done.

The coffee that grows in Chikmagalur this season is not one option among many. It is what this land, at this time, under this sun, produces best. That is not a limitation. That is the whole point.

January 20, 2026

Nature has always worked this way. We just stopped listening.

Before supermarkets. Before supply chains that could move a strawberry from Morocco to Manchester in 48 hours. Before the infrastructure that made it possible to eat anything, from anywhere, at any time, people ate what was near them, what was in season, what the land around them produced.

It was just how nature works.

The earth does not offer 127 versions of a coffee bean simultaneously. It offers what grows in a specific soil, at a specific altitude, through a specific season. The Arabica that comes out of the highlands of Chikmagalur, India is the product of precise conditions: the temperature range, the monsoon pattern, the elevation, the shade of the surrounding forest. You cannot replicate it elsewhere. You cannot manufacture it in the off-season. It simply is what it is, where it is, when it is.

What replaced this was not abundance. It was hyper-abundance. The difference matters. Abundance is what the earth gives freely, enough, in its season, of genuine quality. Hyper-abundance is what industry manufactures to fill shelf space: processed, packaged, season-less, origin-less, wrapped in plastic and engineered to taste like something that once grew somewhere. It produces more choice than any human being can meaningfully process, and less nourishment, physical, mental, spiritual, than what it replaced.

Our grandparents never had to make these decisions. Because they never had to choose between 127 versions of the same thing. The research on what that abundance of choice actually does to a person has been building since the year 2000.

Research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society found that disrupting seasonal biological rhythms, pulling humans out of alignment with natural cycles of food, light and temperature has measurable negative effects on health, mood and cognitive function.¹ The body expects seasonality. It was built around it. When that rhythm is removed and replaced with permanent artificial hyper-abundance, something in the system goes wrong.

It is just plain biology.

The great traditions understood this before the science did. Almost every spiritual framework that has thought seriously about food arrives at the same place: sufficiency over excess, gratitude over accumulation, the present season over the endless pursuit of what is out of reach. Not as deprivation. Alignment. The recognition that what is given in its right time, in its right place, carries something that what is manufactured for all times and all places simply does not.

One coffee. Grown where it grows best. Harvested when it is ready. Chosen because it is genuinely excellent, not because it fills a slot in a catalogue, not because it was engineered to be acceptable to the widest possible market, but because the land produced it and it is good.

This is the most naturally occurring conclusion of a business model that, carefully, pays attention to how the world actually works. Turns out the oldest way is still the right one. Clearly, we mix our commerce with our values. It’s what comes naturally.

¹ Stevenson, T. J., et al. (2015). Disrupted seasonal biology impacts health, food security and ecosystems. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 282(1817).

The Jam Experiment:Why More Choice Is Actually Less Freedom