Too many choices

In this talk, Barry Schwartz doesn't just say that having too many choices doesn't help, he goes even further and states that too many choices actually hurt, they make us worse off.

"This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare."

Being more pragmatic or capitalist, look at the Apple phenomenon. Apple is the most profitable company in the US and their line of products is small and simple. Check out this NYT article about Sony's new CEO:

The company still makes a confusing catalog of gadgets that overlap or even cannibalize one another. It has also continued to let its product lines mushroom: 10 different consumer-level camcorders and almost 30 different TVs, for instance, crowd and confuse consumers.
“Sony makes too many models, and for none of them can they say, ‘This contains our best, most cutting-edge technology,’” Mr. Sakito said. “Apple, on the other hand, makes one amazing phone in just two colors and says, ‘This is the best.’”

Dan Gilbert reached a similar conclusion to Barry Schwartz but coming from a different perspective. How can we be happy if we don't get what we want? Sometimes people are forced to live with certain limitations or under certain conditions that we would say are unbearable but they manage to be happy after adapting to not having any other choice.

"Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind."

Do not focus on having more things, more options, more whatever, focus on having a few good ones and ignore the noise outside.