It is 8:37 p.m. You have finished your homework, found a comfortable spot on the couch, grabbed a snack, and decided that tonight, you are finally going to relax.
You open Netflix.
A movie appears. It looks interesting. You read the description.
Maybe not.
You scroll down. A romantic comedy catches your attention, but you are not sure you are in the mood for romance. A thriller looks promising, but the thumbnail is a little too dark. You find a movie everyone has been talking about, only to discover that it is two hours and forty minutes long. You are not prepared to make that kind of commitment on a Tuesday.
You open another streaming service.
Then another.
You check the ratings. Watch a trailer. Read a review. Return to the first movie. Suddenly, you are comparing two films you had never heard of ten minutes ago as if you were making the most important decision of your life.
It is now 9:14 p.m.
You have watched approximately 14 trailers, read 26 movie descriptions, and developed strong opinions about films you have not actually seen.
Finally, someone suggests watching a movie you have already watched three times.
You agree immediately.
And just like that, movie night is over before the movie even begins.
We have more entertainment available than any generation before us. So why does choosing something to watch sometimes feel like the hardest part of the evening?
Apparently, this is more than a personal problem.
According to a December 2024 survey commissioned by UserTesting and conducted by Talker Research, American streaming subscribers reported spending an average of 110 hours per year deciding what to watch. That’s nearly five full days spent choosing entertainment instead of actually enjoying it.
The survey included 2,000 American streaming subscribers. It also found that 41% identified oversized content libraries as a major frustration, while 51% said the sheer number of recommendations could feel overwhelming.
Five days.
I could have watched an entire television series in that time. Instead, apparently, I could spend it deciding which television series to watch.
The irony is difficult to ignore. Streaming services were supposed to make entertainment easier to access. We no longer have to wait for a particular show to air or drive to a store to rent a movie. Almost everything seems to be just a few clicks away.
But access and discovery are two very different things.
In a 2024 study published in Psychological Studies, researchers Laura Romero Meza and Giulio D’Urso interviewed 12 Netflix users in Colombia about their experiences with the platform’s recommendation system. Every participant described experiencing some degree of difficulty choosing what to watch. Ten of the 12 specifically pointed to the large number of available options as a problem. Participants reported spending at least 10 minutes browsing, with some taking as long as 30 minutes to decide.
One participant described watching multiple trailers before choosing a film. Another explained that sometimes so much time passed while browsing that they looked at the clock and realized they still had not selected anything.
Of course, 12 interviews with adults aged 30 to 36 cannot represent every Netflix user. But their experiences capture a surprisingly familiar problem: having plenty of options does not necessarily make it easier to find something we actually want.
And the platforms know that choosing can be difficult.
That is why they recommend.
Based on our viewing histories and interactions, streaming services arrange movies into personalized categories, generate suggestions, and try to predict what might keep us watching. In theory, this should make everything easier. Instead of searching through thousands of titles, we can simply choose from a selection supposedly designed for us.
But there is something strange about opening a personalized homepage and still feeling completely lost.
A 2025 study in Media, Culture & Society examined how people choose what to watch in the streaming era. The researchers introduced the idea of default viewing: rather than carefully selecting something every time, viewers often fall back on familiar apps, shows, channels, and routines. Their research drew on audience studies involving adults in the United Kingdom and Australia.
In other words, having the freedom to choose does not mean we always want to exercise it.
Sometimes, we just want someone else to pick.
This might explain why rewatching an old favorite feels so appealing. We already know the characters. We know which scenes make us laugh and which moments make us emotional. We do not have to wonder whether the ending will disappoint us or whether the movie will turn out to be completely different from what the trailer promised.
There is comfort in knowing exactly what we are getting.
A familiar movie is also a decision we have already made. We do not have to spend another 20 minutes making it.
And perhaps this is where our relationship with entertainment has quietly changed. We used to turn on a movie because we wanted to see it. Now, sometimes, we spend so much time searching for the perfect movie that watching one becomes almost secondary.
We are no longer just choosing between films. We are choosing between possibilities.
What if there is something better? What if the movie we pick is boring? What if we spend two hours watching something that could have been replaced by a much better film?
The more options we see, the more opportunities we have to wonder whether we made the right choice.
Psychologists have studied this phenomenon through the concept of choice overload. However, the research is more nuanced than the simple claim that more choices always make people unhappy. A 2015 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, examining 99 observations involving 7,202 participants, found that the effects of having more options depended on factors such as the complexity of the choices, the difficulty of the decision, and how certain people were about their preferences.
That distinction matters. Having thousands of movies is not automatically a bad thing. The problem may be that we often open a streaming service without knowing what we want in the first place.
Do we want something funny? Something emotional? Something exciting? Something that requires absolutely no thinking? Sometimes, we cannot even answer those questions ourselves.
We expect an algorithm to understand our mood before we have figured it out.
But maybe entertainment was never supposed to be a perfect decision.
A movie does not have to be the highest-rated film on the platform. It does not have to be the most popular, the most critically acclaimed, or the one everyone will discuss tomorrow. It can simply be something that catches our attention.
Maybe we should stop treating movie night like a research project.
Pick the film with the interesting poster. Watch the one a friend recommended. Give something unfamiliar a chance without reading seventeen reviews first. And if the movie turns out to be terrible? At least you actually watched something.
Because somewhere between endless recommendations, personalized rankings, and carefully curated watchlists, we may have forgotten the original reason we opened the app.
We wanted to have fun.
So tonight, I might try something different. I will open Netflix, choose a movie within five minutes, and actually press play.
Unless, of course, I find a better one while scrolling.
In that case, I’ll probably just watch the same movie I’ve already seen three times.
