"It'll sort itself out"

You may have noticed that you've made plenty of large decisions in your life, and that nearly all of them had a deadline attached. The landlord wanted an answer by Friday. The job offer was good for a week, and the school form had a closing date. You didn't enjoy those weeks, but you chose, and mostly the choices were fine.

That's worth a closer look, because it contradicts the loop's account of itself. The loop says you can't decide yet because you don't know enough and don't feel sure. But when the landlord wanted an answer by Friday, you knew no more and felt no surer, and you still decided. So what was missing from the course decision wasn't information or sureness. It had no Friday. This chapter is my own reasoning throughout.

A deadline makes waiting stop being an option. While the offer stands, you can go on comparing. When it's about to lapse, the default is no longer "carry on as I am". It becomes "lose this", and you have to look at the default as hard as you look at the others. Chapter 3 asked you to do that on purpose. A deadline forces it.

Decisions without deadlines are the ones that stay in the loop for years. Nobody will ever require an answer on whether to retrain, or move nearer your family, or see someone about your knee. Nobody is asking about the garage or the sofa either. These are often the decisions that shape a life most, because they're about what you want, and other people don't set deadlines for that.

People with this habit often hope that events will supply the missing Friday. The firm will make redundancies and the matter will be settled. The old sofa will finally collapse. Your partner will lose patience and book the holiday. Sometimes that happens, and there's relief in it, because a choice that events made for you doesn't feel like your fault. That's the third need from chapter 2 again.

It has costs, though. Events usually decide late, after the best version of the option has gone. They often hand you the default, since that's what is left when everything else has expired. And if someone else got tired of waiting and decided, it's their choice you're now living with. The redundancy comes when you're forty-nine, and the course you could have finished by then is still two years away.

You also learn nothing from it that helps with the next decision. Each time a deadline or another person settles something, you get through it without having chosen, and at the next decision you still have no practice to draw on.

So you need a Friday of your own. A date you set yourself feels flimsy at first, because nothing seems to happen if you break it. Two things give it some weight. Tell someone the date, so that there's a person who will ask. And tie it to something real where you can. For the course, the thirtieth of June is already a real closing date. Your own date can be a month earlier, with the application form as the thing you do on it.