What the loop costs

You may think of the loop as free, or at most as a few wasted evenings. I think it costs more than that. Most of this chapter is my own reckoning, and I'll say where a study comes in.

The default's results. This is the largest cost and chapter 3 covered it. Every month in the loop is a month lived in the default, with whatever the default costs. You've had another fourteen months at the builders' merchant and a winter on a broken sofa. When the wait runs to years, the loop has picked for you without your ever agreeing to it.

Options that expire. While you go round, the world moves. The firm stops advertising. The college raises its fees or drops the course. You get older, and some doors are easier at forty than at forty-six. Anderson's review describes something further, which researchers call inaction inertia. Once people have passed up a good opportunity, they become less likely to take a similar one later, even if it's still worth having, because taking it would mean admitting what they missed. Having let two Septembers go, you'll find it harder to apply for the third.

The evenings. A lap takes two or three hours and leaves you tired. At one lap a fortnight for fourteen months, that's around eighty hours. It's roughly the teaching time of a whole term of the course you're deciding about.

Your enjoyment of what you do choose. The job-hunting students in chapter 6 who searched the hardest ended up least satisfied with their jobs. A sofa chosen after five weeks of fabric samples arrives carrying all that. You'll look at it and think about the other one.

Other people. If you share a home, someone else has been sitting on the right-hand side of the sofa as well. If the course affects the household's money and evenings, your partner has spent fourteen months unable to plan. Waiting for someone else to decide is wearing, and they usually say less about it than they feel.

Your trust in yourself. Each time you nearly decide and then don't, you learn something about yourself, which is that your decisions don't stick. After a while you start the next decision already expecting to go round. I think this is how the habit spreads from large choices to small ones. A person who struggles to choose a sofa has often lost confidence that any choice of theirs will hold.

Attention. An open decision doesn't stay in the spreadsheet. It comes up in the shower and on the drive to work, and you're carrying it while you do everything else. If you have several open at once, they take up a good part of the day.

Against this, consider what the loop has bought. It was meant to prevent a mistake, deliver sureness, spread the blame and keep you free. After fourteen months you aren't sure, nobody else is going to take the blame, and the freedom has gone unused. As for the mistake, you can't say the loop prevented one, because you don't know that any of the three options would have been a mistake.