Agonizing over whether your love is "the real thing" or your sexual relationship above or below par, and wondering whether you could have done better… - Barry Schwartz

There is in American society, not only the the American society but more here than anywhere else, what I have come to call the official syllogism and this is a set of assumptions that we have about well-being and about how society should be organized that runs so deep that I think we don't realize we make them. And the only time you start to notice that you make them is when you can start to accumulate evidence that they are wrong. So what is this official syllogism? First, we all think that the more freedom people have, the more welfare they have. How could you think otherwise? This is [a] no-brainer. What argument could you make to suggest that there is anything wrong with this assumption? The second thing we think is that the more choice people have, the more freedom they have. What does freedom mean if not choice?

[C]hoice in many facets of our life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real.

The average American thirty-two-year-old has... worked for nine... companies. ...[J]ob-switching has become so natural that individuals that have worked for the same employer for five years are regarded with suspicion. ...[T]heir desirability or ambition is called into question ...