More is not the same as better
The shelf in front of you is probably overfull. Thirty kinds of olive oil. Fifty kinds of tea. Seven brands of the same toothpaste, each making a slightly different promise. Somewhere along the way we agreed that abundance was the same thing as freedom.
It is not. Choice has a cost. Each option you add to a range subtracts a small amount of attention from every other one. After a point, the range stops being a help and starts being a quiz.
A person should be able to begin
We chose three origins, not thirty, because we wanted a person to be able to begin. To walk up to the shelf — physical or digital — and find a way in without first becoming a student.
The discipline of saying no is what makes the yes mean something. A range of three says: we have already done the work of editing. A range of thirty says: you do the work.
This applies to most things
It applies to wardrobes, to playlists, to bookshelves, to the apps on your phone. Most of what makes a day feel cluttered is not the things themselves but the unresolved decision about whether to keep them.
Keep less. Choose more deliberately. The rest is mostly noise.