"I haven't decided anything yet"

When someone asks about the course, you say you haven't decided yet. It's an honest answer. It also contains a quiet mistake, which is the idea that while you haven't decided, nothing has been chosen.

Look at the spreadsheet again. It has three tabs, and one of them is Stay. For fourteen months you've been comparing three options. For the whole of that time you've also been living in one of them. You've gone to the builders' merchant every weekday. A September intake has started without you, and it wasn't the first. In practice, Stay has won every single day since you made the spreadsheet, and it has never once had the highest score for longer than a month.

Waiting, then, is one of the options, and it's the one you've been picking. It feels different from the others because you never had to pick it on purpose. It happens by itself.

Economists have a name for the pull this exerts. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser called it status quo bias, in a paper from 1988. Whatever you currently have gets an advantage in your mind simply because you have it. Anderson's review, from the last chapter, sets a second habit beside it. People judge a bad result that came from doing nothing more kindly than the same bad result from doing something. If you take the course and hate it, you made a mistake. If you never take it and spend ten years wondering, it doesn't feel as though anyone made a mistake. The cost is the same size or bigger, but nobody seems to be at fault for it.

I think this is why the default never gets examined the way the other options do. Course and Move have to justify themselves row by row. Stay doesn't, because Stay isn't felt as a choice. If the options were judged fairly, the default would have to account for itself like the others. It would have to say what it costs per year, where it leads, and how you'll feel about it at fifty.

None of this means Stay is wrong. It might be the best of the three. Plenty of people look hard at their fine job and conclude that fine is worth a great deal. But in that case it should win a fair contest, once, and then the spreadsheet can be deleted. What's happening now is that Stay wins by default every day and keeps winning.

So here's the first practical step, and you can take it this evening. For each open decision on your list from chapter 1, write down what the default is, in plain words. Then write what a further year of the default will cost, in money, time or anything else you care about. For the sofa, it's another year of everyone sitting on the right. For the course, it's a third missed September, and you being a year older when you qualify, if you ever do.