Choice was once a privilege. Now it’s a trap. What psychologists in the 1970s called “overchoice” has become the baseline of modern life: an endless scroll of products, partners, playlists, posts. Children and young adults in particular aren’t lazy or indifferent – they’re paralysed. Faced with too much of everything, the brain short-circuits. Exhaustion replaces intention. We’re calling it passive attack. 

In the 1970 book Future Shock, American futurist Alvin Toffler and his wife Adelaide Farrell argued that the rapid shift into a “super-industrial society” happened so quickly we’ve been unable to adapt. The breakneck pace of technological change leaves people overwhelmed with “shattering stress and disorientation”. Popularising the term “information overload”, they explained how, just as the body cracks under strain, the mind behaves erratically when bombarded with too much information.

Future Shock (1970) by Alvin Toffler and Adelaide Farrell

Half a century later, the diagnosis still holds – only now it’s intensified. Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported studies showing that reasoning, concentration and problem-solving peaked in the early 2010s and have been in decline ever since.

“This inflection point is noteworthy not only for being similar to performance on tests of intelligence and reasoning”, John Burn-Murdoch suggests in the article, “but because it coincides with another broader development: our changing relationship with information, available constantly online.”