Maybe? I get the Steve Jobs “only own one outfit so no energy is wasted deciding what to wear” thing, but it’s a fine line between that and the “wear a dark suit because everyone else does” thing.
> The key is figuring out what matters and what doesn’t (to you) and only thinking about what does.
Lots of respect for recognizing that not everyone will have the same answers. But, what if “what matters” is learning new things, or challenging oneself, or being a generalist? There are a lot of areas that (some) people find fulfilling that don’t lend themselves to single-minded focus. For those things and people, maybe this is good advice.
The majority will not stand in front of their wardrobe every day and confront the choice of outfit on a fundamental level each time. Most people decide once and stay with their decisions, and revisit them every now and then when they feel it is not appropriate anymore.
Doing it that way allows us to invest more time than we would have every day into some decision and harvest the fruit of that investigation for a while. The alternative would be to spend more time each day and more importantly: live with the uncertainty if you will find something suitable each day.
Whether the outfit is a lazy black suit or the most avantgarde fashion doesn't really change the way you decide. One can think long and hard and still come up with a boring and tasteless choice.
The point is choices cost energy. Choices we take every day take energy every day.
A have similar observation when going to some of my favourite restaurants. Even when I take my time to look through the menu, I very often choose the same dish or from only two or three standard alternatives, although I was actively deliberating to choose something else this time.
It really seems that it is not only the effort of reaching a decision that is behind the default effect, but some unconscious risk-aversion process that does not allow the mind to rest easily in the non-default case.
truth is nothing matters and everything matters.
Say you are a teenage girl, you see yourself in the mirror, you don't like your body, you think you're fat.
You see other "fat" girls on reddit that receive a lot of praise for displaying themselves half naked.
your looks are very important to you, you think about it constantly and it depresses you.
one day you post a picture on this reddit thing, your face is hidden, it's hard to recognize the place where it was take, but you wanna try'n see what happens.
it works, men (and some women) like your picture, they put a like on it, they compliment your looks, you now feel better about yourself.
so you post more and more of them, everyone more audacious than the one before.
now what's important to you is: how can I be more visible, more visibility = more self esteem!
you open on OF and now what's important is "how can I promote it?".
not long after what's important becomes: how can I make money out of it?
and now you're in trouble, because that's your job and you didn't even know you wanted it and are not sure if it's the right thing to do, but you do it anyway, once you set things in motion, inertia becomes a b*tch.
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It's an hyperbole, I know, but it's the small things that start the engine.
If people only thought about what actually matters it would be: food, water, shelter.
If I never thought "is there another option?" when I was much younger about clubs to go to in my hometown, I would never have discovered the underground music scene lurking in the shadows that has then become a big part of my life and it's now so important to me.
And I was one who did not even cared so much about music and went straight to "the default choice" about it.
> E.g if you never buy unhealthy snacks, you'll never have unhealthy snacks at home,
1 - there's no such thing as healthy snacks (if we are talking about snacks the product and not "a small amount of food eaten between meals")
2 - it means that at one point you though "is there another option?" about snacks, because the default option is not healthy at all, especially in the US, proving that "It doesn’t have to be about big decisions"
> it means that at one point you though "is there another option?" about snacks
Yes, that was my point in the article, though maybe not clear enough. This conversation has given me lots of ideas to improve it. Thank you!
Do you understand why that's unconvincing to most people?
nobody pay you to smoke marijuana, if somebody did and paid you even more to end up being a crackhead, many more people would and your comparison would make more sense.
> Do you understand why that's unconvincing to most people?
false premise, wrong conclusion.
I do this because it removes my agency in the choice.
My conscious story about this is that this comes from attempting to undermine sunk cost and survivor bias; but it could also be an artifact arising from the fact that I don't tend to habituate as much as norms, and therefore I think about "default" decisions more than most people.
Anyway what I get out of this is "life is good" instead of "good choice you made"; "I'd never noticed this difference between these things (or the outcome) before"; or "I really don't like Y as much as X". It also nudges me to contemplate the "both" or "neither" options for a fleeting moment.
People comment on it, for instance strangers in restaurants; people at the grocery store; ordinary people who seem baffled that someone can live their life by flipping a coin.
- Take the first printed word I see
- Sum the letters' ordinal positions ("ramen" == 18+1+13+5+14 == 51)
- Calculate modulus X for one of X choices (51 mod 3 == 0)
- Select option index Y, ordered visually, geographically, temporally, or alphabetically as appropriate, sometimes in reverse to be ornery (["alice", "bob", "eve"][0] == "alice")
...
If I'm with another person who also can't decide, I skip the first two steps by asking them for a random number between 1 and (a random two digit number).
Then I just tell them whatever my secret preference was all along, and we watch the good movie together happily.
Kidding about that last part. All movies suck.
Personally, I think this is the worst advice. Don't spend time thinking about unimportant things. I think it's a major contributor to the default effect.
There are so many choices to make everyday that thinking about each one becomes exhausting/overwhelming so people just pick the default all the time (even when it matters).
The key is figuring out what matters and what doesn't (to you) and only thinking about what does.
Also setting yourself up for "good" defaults is a way to work towards an outcome without having to constantly make good choices. E.g if you never buy unhealthy snacks, you'll never have unhealthy snacks at home, so picking any random snack (the default) works towards living a healthier life.