In an age where we can curate everything from our smoothie ingredients to our digital avatars, the simple act of deciding has become oddly exhausting. This modern malaise—decision fatigue—isn’t just another pseudo-psychological buzzword thrown around in productivity blogs. It’s a cognitive condition backed by neuroscience, one that suggests the more choices we make, the worse those choices get over time. Even our brains, it seems, have a daily quota for willpower. After a certain point, deciding between the tahini dressing or the chipotle aioli becomes a Herculean task.
The phenomenon was first popularized by social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who found that self-control and decision-making draw from the same mental resource pool. Spend the morning choosing fonts for a presentation and you may find yourself impulse-buying socks with avocados on them by 3 p.m. It’s the same reason judges tend to make more favorable rulings early in the day—by the late afternoon, even the robe feels heavy with mental exhaustion. The brain, much like a laptop running too many tabs, slows down when overwhelmed.
Ironically, our culture valorizes endless choice as a form of freedom. Walk into a grocery store and you’re met with twelve varieties of almond milk, each shouting its virtue: unsweetened, fortified, barista blend, locally sourced, carbon-neutral. Then we have to go to work. Are we liberated by these options—or quietly crushed by them? When every purchase becomes a referendum on your identity and values, even buying toothpaste feels like a political act.
The problem extends well beyond the supermarket. Consider the digital realm, where streaming services offer a glut of entertainment so vast that “what should we watch tonight?” is the new unsolvable riddle. Studies suggest that the average Netflix user spends 18 minutes trying to decide what to watch. In that time, a French short film could have changed your life. Instead, we scroll, we sigh, and we settle—often not for the best, but for whatever stops the mental hemorrhaging.
One might argue that decision fatigue is the shadow side of abundance. Our ancestors rarely had to choose between 40 salad dressings or 17 brands of headphones. Fewer choices meant more decisive living, not necessarily worse outcomes. As the economist Herbert Simon put it, they were "satisficers"—choosing what was good enough, not chasing perfection. Contrast that with our "maximizer" culture, where every decision must be optimized, every moment min-maxed like a video game. No wonder we’re tired.
The solution may not be fewer choices, but better rituals: techies wear the same outfit every day; monks live by fixed routines; even Taylor Swift probably has someone else manage her calendar. For the rest of us, it might mean pre-deciding the little things so we can spend our brainpower on what truly matters. Or perhaps, paradoxically, it means letting go of the obsession with choosing perfectly—because the true freedom isn’t in having every choice, but in knowing when not to make one.