Maria Konnikova, writing for the New Yorker:
North America, however, greeted him with constant abundance and leisure. As he pondered the contrast, Lipowski thought of Buridan’s ass: an apocryphal donkey that finds itself standing between two equally appealing stacks of hay. Unable to decide which to consume, it starves to death. The donkey got its name from Jean Buridan, the nominalist fourteenth-century philosopher and Catholic priest who wrote extensively about free will. Buridan posited that free will could sometimes lead to inaction: an inability to choose due to excess uncertainty and, potentially, excess choice. Buridan’s ass, in turn, became the mascot for that general principle (though no equines of any kind actually appear in Buridan’s writing). For Lipowski, this scenario helped to explain the type of anxiety that he was witnessing around him. He called it an approach-approach conflict: faced with enticing options, you find yourself unable to commit to any of them quickly. And even when you do choose, you remain anxious about the opportunities that you may have lost: maybe that other stack of hay tasted sweeter.
Story of my life.