Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. June 20, 2009.

In fact, it’s part of a bigger theme I’ve been mulling over: freedom from choice. I’d always been taught to fetishize freedom of choice. It’s the American way. It’s why I went to Brown university, where they don’t have any requirements, and you can go through all four years writing papers on the importance of Christian Slater’s oeuvre.

But more and more I’m starting to see the beauty in a more rigid framework. The structure, the stable architecture of religion.

My brother-in-law Eric – now getting his doctorate in psychology – likes to lecture me about an experiment at a grocery store by researchers from Columbia and Stanford. They set up two tables offering free tastes; one table had six flavors of jam, and the other had twenty-four flavors of jam. Oddly, more people bought jams from the table with six flavors. Nearly ten times more people, in fact. The conclusion was that the big table was just too overwhelming, too many options … There’s something relieving and paradoxically liberating about surrendering yourself to a minimal-choice lifestyle, especially as our choices multiply like cable channels.

Excerpted from The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs. Published by Simon & Schuster, 2007.