"There's a right answer and I have to find it"

Under the loop sits an assumption you may never have put into words. One of these options is the correct one, the others are mistakes, and enough analysis will show which is which. If that's true, you're right to keep going round. I think it's mostly false, for two reasons.

The first is about the options, and it's my own reasoning. A decision is hard to make when the options are close. If the course were plainly better than staying, you'd have enrolled two years ago. The scores say 7.4, 7.1 and 7.2. When the options are that close, picking the second-best costs you very little, because it's nearly as good as the best. So the decisions you find hardest are often the ones where the choice matters least. When a choice really matters, because one option is far better, you can usually see it quickly.

The second reason is about what you're trying to do. Barry Schwartz and his colleagues drew a line between two approaches to choosing. Some people look for an option that's good enough, take it and move on. Others feel they must find the best, and the researchers called them maximizers. Across seven groups of people, those who scored high on maximizing were less happy, less optimistic and less satisfied with life, and they reported more regret and more depression. That's a correlation. It doesn't show that the approach causes the unhappiness, and it could run the other way.

A second study is more pointed, and it's fair to both sides. Iyengar, Rachael Wells and Schwartz followed university students through a year of job hunting. The maximizers did better on paper. Their starting salaries were 20 per cent higher. They were also less satisfied with the jobs they got, and they felt worse the whole way through the search. The researchers put this down to two things. The maximizers relied more on outside sources to tell them what was good, and they kept thinking about the options they hadn't got.

I take two lessons from that. Searching hard can pay, and I won't pretend it doesn't. If a decision is large and you haven't yet looked properly, look properly. But past a certain point the search stops improving the choice and starts spoiling your enjoyment of it. Fourteen months and a weighted spreadsheet is well past that point.

There's one more thing the search for the right answer leaves out. How a choice turns out depends heavily on what you do after you've made it. A course you commit to, turn up for and work at isn't the same as one you sit through while wondering whether you should have moved firms. No spreadsheet can score that, because you haven't done it yet. A large part of what makes an option the right one gets added after you've picked it.