"I'll keep my options open"

Part of the appeal of not choosing is that nothing has been given up. While the question is open, you could still be a garden designer, and you could still have the extra three thousand a year. Choosing one means losing the other, and that feels like a cost you can avoid by waiting.

Jiwoong Shin and Dan Ariely built computer games to test how far people will go to avoid that loss. Players chose among options that paid out money, and an option they neglected would eventually disappear. Players spent effort and money keeping options alive, including options they seemed to have little interest in. They went on doing it when they were told what each option paid, after plenty of practice, and when the cost was made obvious. The researchers' last experiment suggested the motive wasn't a wish for flexibility. It was a dislike of losing something, even something the players didn't much want.

In the games the cost was money. For you it's the laps themselves, the hours of reading course pages and job adverts to keep both options alive.

A study by Daniel Gilbert and Jane Ebert found a second cost. They ran a photography course. At the end, each student chose one of their own prints to keep. Some were told the choice was final. Others were told they could change their minds later.

Beforehand, the students said the chance to swap wouldn't affect how much they liked their print. It did. The students who could change their minds liked their prints less than those who couldn't. And when a later group was asked which arrangement they'd like, most wanted the option to swap.

Gilbert and Ebert's explanation is that the mending I described in the last chapter only starts once a choice is final. When a decision is closed, your mind gets on with finding what's good about it. If you can still change it, you go on comparing, and you notice every flaw.

I don't take from this that you should make your decisions irreversible. If a sofa can be returned, that's a good thing. What matters is how you use that. Because you can undo it, you can choose fast, since a mistake is cheap. It doesn't mean you should go on choosing after you've chosen. When the sofa arrives, the shop may give you a couple of weeks to send it back. Decide on day two whether anything is really wrong with it. If nothing is, treat the choice as final and take the other sofa's page out of your bookmarks.

The same goes for the freedom the loop seems to protect. Keeping a door open doesn't get you through it. You've been free to become a garden designer for fourteen months, and in that time the freedom has bought you nothing.