We live in an era defined not by scarcity, but by surplus. And surplus, it turns out, is its own kind of problem.
Consider what happens when a trader sits down to evaluate a single equity position. Company reports. Earnings statements. Share and option prices. Supplier data. Commodities pricing. Executive profiles. Macro outlooks for the sector and the broader economy. Each of these sources contains reams of detail. Stack them together and you don’t get clarity — you get noise. Simply adding more information doesn’t create enlightenment. It creates overload.
In equities trading, that overload has a price tag. Decisions made under cognitive saturation are slower, less accurate, and more vulnerable to bias. This is why the future of financial information won’t be measured in volume. It will be measured in signal — in the quality of tools that help financial workers sift through the data deluge more effectively. The companies that build those tools will find willing customers with enormous amounts of money on the line.
A Good Problem Is Still a Problem
Information overload is, in one sense, a luxury. It means we’ve solved older, harder problems. Subsistence is no longer the daily preoccupation for most people in developed economies. We’ve climbed Maslow’s hierarchy far enough that we now have the bandwidth to be stressed about coffee shop choice and app selection.
It’s worth being honest about that. Calling decision fatigue a “problem” in a world of continuing extreme hardship sits uncomfortably close to the unethical. And yet — when you compound every domain in which modern life demands our attention, the cumulative weight is real. It changes how we work, how we choose, and how we feel.
There’s a technical name for what happens as consumption rises: declining marginal utility. The more you have, the more you need to remain satisfied. You can see it at the extreme end — the oligarch buying cases of Romanée-Conti not for pleasure, but for display. Fine art, rare jewellery, limited edition sports cars — these are positional goods. Their value is precisely in their cost. They signal wealth. The more they cost, the better they work. And yet even the people buying them don’t necessarily feel richer for it. Rising wealth, paradoxically, doesn’t always feel like rising wellbeing.
The Overwhelm Is Real
The pressure isn’t just at the top. Across the middle of society, time has become the most brutally rationed resource of all.
Journalist Brigid Schulte describes reaching “The Overwhelm” — the point at which time management simply breaks down. It isn’t just that we’re busy. It’s that we’re playing too many roles simultaneously: parent, professional, partner, friend, sibling, carer, citizen. What used to be a rich and diversified life has tipped into what researchers call “role overload” — the point at which multiplicity stops being enriching and starts being crushing.
Worries about jobs and finances mean many people are working harder than ever just to hold their position. The cost of healthcare and education keeps rising. We become more impatient, more short-term in our thinking, more anxious. We want things now, in the way we want them, and the sheer volume of options available to us — in almost every domain — makes that worse, not better.
The Long Boom’s Unintended Consequence
The decades of growth that preceded us created more of everything: more data, more debt, more doughnuts. That abundance was, in most respects, a profound achievement. But it has also produced a world where the old playbook — make more, offer more, add more — is not only losing its effectiveness. It is actively making things worse.
Big Data is the clearest example. The promise was that more data would lead to better decisions. In some contexts, it has. But in others, the challenge was never having enough data — it was always about dealing with surplus and complexity. Pouring more data into an already overwhelmed system doesn’t solve the problem. It compounds it.
Tech companies understood this early. Sitting on the frontline of overload — building products for the web, where bewildering choice is the default state — they learned that taking away is as powerful as adding. Curation became essential, not decorative. It’s why investors have been talking about the opportunity in curation for years. And it’s why that opportunity will only grow.
Curation as Strategy
Curation isn’t a magic bullet. It won’t solve every overload problem, and it won’t apply equally across every sector. But it represents something important: a shift in where value is being created.
The locus of value is moving. It used to sit in production — in making more, building more, scaling more. Increasingly, it sits in navigation — in helping people find, choose, and use what already exists. Approaches that simplify. That contextualise. That cut things down rather than adding to the pile.
We’ve already seen the early growth of this shift over the past three decades. But the scale of the challenge ahead means we’ll need to be genuinely open about where new models come from. If the best strategies emerge from outliers — from the art world, from niche corners of the web, from disciplines we don’t usually associate with business — we should follow them anyway.
The question isn’t whether overload is real. It is. The question is whether we’re willing to build our organisations, our products, and our strategies around the idea that sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is take something away.
That instinct — to simplify, to curate, to subtract — is not a retreat. It’s the next frontier.
Source : Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess by Michael Bhaskar
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30512491-curation
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