Marcus Otter
Imagine stepping into a restaurant...
You glance around, taking in the room, the ambiance, the volume of conversation, the movement of staff and guests. Very quickly it seems as if the situation boils down to a very small set of salient decisions: Do I wait to be seated or choose a table myself? Where do I sit? What do I order from the menu? On this surface level, “choice” appears to be nothing more than a selection, a seat, a dish, and perhaps a drink or dessert. Most of the time in our day-to-day life, we treat this as the whole story. There seems to be a fixed list of options, we pick one, and the decision is done. But if we were to pause and zoom out, even just for a second, the scene could expand very quickly. In the same moment, you could turn around and walk straight back out onto the street. You could sit on the floor in the middle of the restaurant. You could start talking loudly to strangers, pretend to be part of the staff, climb onto a chair and make a toast, or stand motionless in the doorway until someone asks if you’re alright...
At any given moment, you are surrounded by a vast space of potential choices. And physically speaking, there are hundreds of things you could do. Yet, you don’t stand paralyzed at the threshold of the restaurant, systematically weighing up “leave, lie down, sing, order soup, set fire to the napkins…”. As most of those possibilities never make it into experience as real options, they never even seem to enter the field of consideration. When we talk about “making a choice”, we are almost always talking about a choice inside an already pre-filtered set. Long before we feel ourselves deciding, an enormous amount of quiet work has already been done, and most theoretically possible actions have been ruled out. But why is that?
One part of this is because certain possibilities never even get invented in your mind. Others are edited out by basic skills and practicalities. For instance, you cannot seriously consider quietly making a circuit of the dining room, lifting wallets and handbags from the backs of chairs, if you don’t know what that would entail, have never thought of yourself as someone who would engage in that kind of theft, and have no script for what you would do when someone noticed. A large portion is suppressed here by values, expectations, and social norms you’ve absorbed over time. I mean, you could put your feet on the table, but if you care about not alarming people, that option dies before it’s fully formed.
In a subtler way, familiar patterns shrink the field even further. If you come to this restaurant often, your “choice” may amount to little more than a ritual: you sit where you usually sit and order what you usually order. The menu may list twenty dishes, but subjectively you only experience one present option—the decision has been outsourced to habit.
Our goals add another important layer to this. What counts as an option depends heavily on what you are currently trying to do. If you’ve been awake for two nights and your goal has narrowed to simply getting through the moment and reducing strain, then slumping in your chair and letting out an unguarded burp after your meal may start to feel like a viable option, even if it violates your usual standards of politeness and social decorum. But if, say, your primary concern is to impress a client, that aim will pull your attention toward different details of etiquette and social signalling, and you’ll likely adopt a different tone and level of formality than if your primary goal were simply to get in calories as quickly as possible. Our goals, in this way, organize perception by highlighting certain aspects of the environment and pushing others into the background. This, in turn, generates intermediate aims that further structure what we are able to see as viable options along the way.
The pool of options available to us is shaped by many factors. Including the environment itself, the behavior of the people around us, our memories, temperament, current mood, cultural upbringing, and much more. So what we ordinarily call a choice is already the endpoint of a long series of eliminations, simplifications, and pre-selections that happen before we even feel that we are deciding. Seen this way, the practical issue is not always which option we select from a given set, but how we relate to the option-space that determines which options show up in the first place.
If we stay with the restaurant example for a moment longer, we can see that many instances of the situation present what we can call a selection problem. We find ourselves in situations where a finite set of options is presented as the decision space. The menu lists its dishes, the waiter asks “still or sparkling?”, the card machine asks “credit or debit?”. In many areas of life the pattern is the same: a multiple-choice form, a doctor presents two treatment plans, a shortlist of jobs, a couple of suggested treatment plans, two “obvious” life paths. We tend to take this at face value, as if these were the only options available and our only role were to choose between them.
Once a set like that is in front of us, we tend to move into a familiar mode. We compare. We run through the options one by one, or jump back and forth between a few of them, weighing pros and cons, anticipated gains and losses, risks and comforts. Sometimes we arrive at something like a clear winner, more often, we reach a point where one alternative simply feels “good enough” relative to the rest and relative to the cost of thinking further. From the inside, this can feel like careful deliberation, and sometimes it is. But the whole process is also tightly constrained by how the situation is initially framed and perceived, as we saw earlier.
If the options are already given, and we never question where they came from or what has been left out, then all our intelligence is being spent on choosing within a box whose shape we did not design. This sets up a subtle but consequential illusion: we easily confuse “the best option among those we currently see” with “the best option that exists.”
At this point, we can look at the same situation from another angle. Rather than treating it purely as a selection problem—“given a set of options, how do I pick?”—we can start to treat it as a search problem: a problem of generating better or alternative options. Often times it is easy to assume that the real work is to choose correctly between A, B and C. In many cases, a more honest description would be that this is just the visible tip of the menu. There might be a D, E or F that no one has articulated yet. To treat a decision as a search problem in this way is to deliberately pause and step back from the presented set and ask some examining questions:
For me, this is where our creative and imaginative capacities enter the picture. Whilst we’re searching, we are attempting to re-frame the situation altogether, drawing on our ability to invent new combinations, question binaries, and notice overlooked dimensions.
If we were to return to the restaurant for a moment with this in mind, is there now more room here than first appeared? Perhaps you can ask to combine parts of two dishes. You can decide to share plates instead of ordering individually. You can pay with cash, or have a table moved so you can sit in the sun. You can realize that none of this works for you and leave to eat somewhere else. In other words, the situation may be far more pliable than it seemed at first glance.
Not all choices, of course, deserve the same depth of search or the same intensity of evaluation. Given the magnitude of some decisions, it makes sense that there is a natural proportionality to the effort we should invest in them.
If we are deciding between two near-identical options on a menu—one pasta dish or another, adding a side or not—the impact this has on us is short-lived. In a few hours, it will hardly matter. In that kind of situation, a quick, almost direct choice is usually enough. By contrast, some decisions stretch far beyond the present moment: what kind of work to pursue, what to study, whether to move to another city or country. Here it makes sense to slow down. We might sketch different futures, talk to people we trust, gather information, notice how our perspective changes over weeks or months as we involve as many of our faculties as we can: thinking, feeling, imagining and even those quieter senses, like intuition.
Of course, another side of the story is that some choices are small in isolation but large in aggregate. Deciding to scroll on your phone in bed for “just ten more minutes” on a single evening will not change much, as slight delay in sleep once is negligible. But a pattern of that same choice, repeated over months or years, can start to shape sleep, mood, attention and health in very real ways. In that sense, the scope of impact is not only about how far a single decision reaches, but also about the frequency with which that kind of decision is made.
In general, the crucial part here is discerning which kind of situation we are in:
There is no exact formula for where that line sits. We feel it out, roughly, from context. What matters is that we at least notice that such a line exists. When we misjudge this proportionality however, it usually fails in one of two ways: we rush into something, or we circle around it without ever quite stepping in. To understand why that potentially happens, it helps to look more closely at two familiar human tendencies.
In light of this question of scope, there are two pitfalls we as humans easily lean into around choice, both of which can skew our ability to arrive at a wise decision. Firstly, we may act out of an urge where we prefer doing something over holding still, this is what we know as our action bias. Historically, the impulse to act—run or prepare to fight—was a survival mechanism. If we froze and did nothing, we might not survive an encounter with a predator, even if most of the time, the rustling in the bushes was caused by something harmless like a hedgehog. This ingrained instinct to act, even when it’s not necessary, was crucial in promoting survival. However, in the modern world, we’re rarely facing wolves anymore. Instead, we often deal with complex, chronic problems that require more thoughtful, less reactive decision-making.
If action bias is the tendency to move prematurely, analysis paralysis is the tendency to defer movement indefinitely. Faced with an abundance of options and an awareness of their potential consequences, we can become stuck in endless comparison. Choice overload is not merely a practical inconvenience here it may well become an existential discomfort. We are acutely aware that every choice excludes other possible lives, other selves we might have been. If we remain at the level of thought alone, it is always possible to find another consideration, another angle, another risk that has not yet been accounted for. The decision horizon inevitably recedes as we approach it.
A useful distinction that can help us here, though, is between contexts where actions are safe to fail in, and contexts where they are not. In some areas of life, we can afford to experiment. We can try something small, observe what happens, learn, adjust, and try again. Failure is simply another bit of information. In these cases, rapid cycles of trial and error are not only acceptable but can be desirable, precisely because they produce fast, concrete feedback. In other contexts—like taking on a large mortgage, choosing a surgery with permanent effects, or signing a long-term business contract—the situation is different. These are decisions that cannot easily be reversed. Here, the first serious attempt may need to be extremely robust from the outset, because our current situation cannot tolerate a major failure without severe consequences following.
Even though it's tempting to act quickly so that the discomfort of indecision is short-lived, or avoid the choice altogether by never quite committing—keeping all options open in imagination while none is allowed to become real—both tendencies are pitfalls. The reality of choice is, that we must act under uncertainty, with incomplete information, without full guarantees of the consequences.
However, the encouraging part in all this is that we can practice a kind of sensitivity in our choice-making: to the quality of the set of options we are currently entertaining, to the biases that can quietly deceive us, and to the real magnitude of the choice in front of us. We can make a habit, every now and then, of asking for “one more way” to approach a problem—of noticing when a situation has been framed as a forced choice and questioning whether there is something we can do to step outside it.
