Is There Really Plenty of Fish in the Sea?

The internet has done something strange to the way we weigh our options. It has made everything feel abundant. Millions of people on dating apps. Thousands of potential business partners on LinkedIn. Hundreds of publishers open to submissions. The sheer volume creates an impression of infinite choice, and somewhere along the way we started making decisions as though that impression were the truth.

It rarely is.

Think about what it genuinely takes to find the right publisher for a memoir you have poured yourself into. On paper, the market looks vast. Hundreds of publishing houses worldwide, thousands of literary agents, more platforms than ever for getting a book out into the world. The sea looks full to the brim.

Now layer in your real constraints. You want a publisher who connects with your specific voice and subject. You want to hold on to your editing rights. You need a timeline that bends around your schedule. You want fair commercial terms. And you want someone who will actually fight to get the book read.

Suddenly the sea shrinks dramatically. You are probably looking at five real options, possibly fewer.

The dating app parallel is no coincidence; the logic is identical. You can technically swipe on someone in Sydney while sitting in Paris. The practical reality of building something meaningful across that distance means that person was never truly in your pool to begin with. The interface manufactured a sense of availability that was never really there.

What worries me about the abundance illusion runs deeper than unrealistic expectations. It quietly changes how we behave. When we believe the options are endless, we hold out longer, commit later, and walk away from genuinely strong fits while chasing a perfect one that may not even exist. In dating, we all recognise the pattern. In business, it gets expensive fast.

The real lesson here is precision. Define the pool that honestly meets your constraints, then work it with the attention it actually deserves. Stop treating the entire sea as fair game simply because the internet made all of it visible at once.

There are fewer fish than we like to think. The ones that genuinely fit are well worth finding properly.