The Decision Paradox

Why optimising every choice is making you worse at choosing.

You have stood in front of your wardrobe for twenty minutes, tried on three versions of basically the same outfit, and arrived late to something that mattered. Not because you had nothing to wear. Because you had too much to decide.

Julius Caesar reportedly dictated letters, received visitors, and issued military orders simultaneously. He made decisions that shaped the known world before most people had finished breakfast. He also, according to his contemporaries, found small daily choices genuinely exhausting. The man who crossed the Rubicon without hesitation once reportedly spent an unreasonable amount of time deciding where to sit at a dinner.

The threshold for important decisions is not the problem. The small ones are.

The research behind the wardrobe

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, called it the Paradox of Choice: the more options available, the harder it is to decide, and the less satisfied you are with whatever you choose. The maximiser, someone who always searches for the best possible option, consistently reports lower wellbeing than the satisficer, someone who chooses the first option that meets their criteria and moves on.

The maximiser stands in front of the wardrobe longer. And is less happy with what they end up wearing.

What Epictetus understood

Epictetus divided the world into two categories: what is up to us, and what is not. Opinion, impulse, desire, aversion. Everything else falls outside. The point was not to be passive. It was to stop wasting energy on what cannot be controlled, and to act clearly on what can.

Applied to decisions, this is radical. Most of what we agonise over falls outside the zone of what matters. Not because it is trivial, but because the energy spent optimising it exceeds any possible return.

What is up to us is the choice itself. Not the perfect choice. The actual one.

The cost of not deciding

Every unmade decision occupies space. Psychologists call it the Zeigarnik effect: unfinished tasks stay active in working memory, consuming attention until resolved. A dozen small unmade decisions create the same cognitive load as one large one, quietly draining the capacity available for what actually matters.

The Stoics called the daily review of decisions the examen conscientiae. Not a performance review. A clearing. What did I choose today? Was it in line with what I value? The point was not to judge the outcome, but to own the choice.

How to choose without optimising

Not every decision deserves the same weight. A useful filter: ask whether the decision is reversible. If it is, choose quickly and move on. The cost of a bad reversible decision is low. The cost of delayed reversible decisions accumulates.

For decisions that are not reversible, the Stoic approach is still not to optimise. It is to clarify. What do I value? What does this choice say about who I am trying to be? Choose from that, not from a spreadsheet of outcomes.

Nusquam est qui ubique est. Whoever is everywhere is nowhere. Seneca wrote this about attention, but it applies equally to decisions. The person trying to make every choice perfectly ends up fully present in none of them.

The question

What would you choose today if you stopped trying to choose correctly?

Not the best option. Not the optimised one. The one that is yours.