Every time we decide for something, we lose something else. Buying a car is a great example. A lot of people not only read ratings before they buy their car but they continue afterwards - to make sure they really made the right choice.

We still can't control the consequences our choices will bring. Not only do we want freedom of choice, but we also want a guarantee that whatever we choose will be exactly as we envisioned it.

A friend, who's a psychologist, told me about a patient once: a woman who was well educated, had a good job, a house and a loving husband. "I did everything right in my life," said the woman. "But I'm still not happy." She never did what she herself wanted, but what she believed society expected from her.

Sigmund Freud already discovered that suffering gives us pleasure - in a strange masochistic way. The tyranny of choice exploits that weakness. Consumer culture exhausts us. We suffer. We destroy ourselves. And we just can't stop.

I do have the power. I can decide for myself what I want, even if the thought stresses me out.

I don't criticize political or electoral freedom, but capitalism's perversion of the concept: the illusion that I hold the power over my own life.

One of the greatest gains of capitalism is that even the proletarian slave feels like a master. He believes he has the power to change his life. We are propelled by the ideology of the self-made man: we work more, we consume more and in the end we consume ourselves. The consequences are burnout, bulimia and other lifestyle diseases.