You chose this

Default settings and a calculation you never asked for

You're reading this right now. That's a choice. You could be doing literally anything else with these seconds: checking email, making coffee, staring at the ceiling.

But here you are, eyes tracking across these words. When did you decide this? Was it even a decision, or did you simply find yourself here through some chain of unconscious micro-choices that feel, in retrospect, like inevitability?

Yesterday I tried to count my decisions before writing this. Not the big ones: those are easy to track.

Whether to snooze the alarm (yes, three times and I was late for an early meeting). Which mug for coffee (my favorite from The Ramble hotel in Denver). Whether to respond to those Slack message immediately or let them marinate (immediately).

By noon I'd lost count somewhere around 200 and that was being generous about what constituted "conscious." The exercise fell apart because I couldn't distinguish between choosing and simply doing.

We've constructed a comfortable narrative that life flows like a river, carrying us along its course. We talk about "life happening" as if we're passengers. We say things like "before I knew it" and "time flew by" and "suddenly I was forty."

But rivers don't actually flow. Molecules make discrete movements, each following the path of least resistance. The flow is an illusion created by volume and repetition.

Think about your yesterday.

Can you reconstruct it as a series of actual decisions, or does it blur into a haze of "one thing led to another"?

Most likely, you remember maybe three or four choices vividly.

• What to have for lunch

• Whether to attend that meeting

• Perhaps a conversation where you chose your words carefully.

The other sixteen waking hours? Gone, dissolved into the automatic execution of patterns you and I have been running on for years.

If life is a flow then we're not responsible for every moment. We can't be blamed for unconscious patterns.

We're just doing our best to navigate the current.

The math is unforgiving.

Let's be conservative and say you make 20,000 decisions per day—less than the 35,000 some researchers claim, but enough to be meaningful. Multiply that by 29,000 days in an average lifetime.

That's 580 million decision points.

If even 1% of those are conscious, intentional choices, you'd have made 5.8 million deliberate decisions by our time comes to an end. Does that feel right? Do you think you’ll consciously choose your path 5.8 million times?

More likely, you’ll make a few thousand critical decisions that set patterns, then run other decisions against those patterns tens or hundred of thousands of times.

You chose a career path once, maybe twice.

You chose a morning routine through trial and error over a few weeks, months or years.

You chose a way of being in relationships through some combination of modeling and reaction.

Then you stopped choosing and started executing.

The truth is that our lives are shaped less by the decisions we agonize over and more by the ones we don't recognize we're making.

Every time we reach for our phone instead of sitting with discomfort, we’re choosing.

Every time you default to the same lunch spot, the same route home, the same response to conflict, you're choosing.

These aren't non-decisions.

In my past I spent a lot of time at a company that was failing. Everyone knew it was failing. The metrics were clear, the market had spoken, the writing was cast on the wall in neon lights. Yet every day, hundreds of smart people made thousands of micro-choices to pretend otherwise. Not big, dramatic denials. Just small ones.

Choosing to schedule next quarter's planning meetings.

Choosing to discuss anything except the obvious.

Death by a thousand defaults.

Nobody chose failure. But everybody chose not to choose something different.

All our decisions, urges, desires, aversions lie within. No evil can touch them. — VIII. 28

Default settings.

Here's an uncomfortable question: How many of your daily patterns are actually yours?

The way you structure your workday: is that your design or just what everyone around you does?

Your morning routine, your communication style, your response to stress—did you choose these, or did you inherit them?

We like to think we're the authors of our own lives but most of us are running behavioral software we didn't write.

Our parents, our culture, our first boss, that one influential teacher. They all contributed code to the program we execute daily.

And we run it without examining it, because examining it would mean recognizing that we could choose differently.

When your patterns become so automatic that they feel like identity rather than choice, you've lost the ability to see them as changeable. "That's just how I am" becomes the ultimate abdication of agency.

Balance?

The contemporary obsession with "work-life balance" is perhaps the perfect example of how we avoid the discomfort of actual choosing. Balance implies you can have it all if you just optimize correctly. It's a comforting in theory because it lets us avoid the reality: every yes is a no to something else.

When you choose to stay late finishing that presentation, you're choosing not to have dinner with your family. When you choose to leave at 5 PM sharp, you're choosing not to be the person who goes the extra mile. These aren't right or wrong choices but they are choices. The myth of balance lets us pretend we're not making them.

If every moment is a choice, if we become hyper-conscious of the 20,000 daily decision points, don't we risk paralysis? How can anyone function while constantly aware of the infinity of alternatives at each moment?

You can't optimize all 20,000 daily decisions. That way would lead to madness. But you can identify the hundred that actually matter. The ones that compound. The ones that set patterns. The ones that, if changed, would cascade through all the others.

The goal isn't to consciously navigate every choice. It's to recognize that you are choosing because that recognition alone changes the calculation. When you know you're choosing to check your phone for the fifteenth time, even if you still do it, something shifts. The unconscious pattern starts to become visible.

Here's what most do not want to admit: if life is discrete choices rather than continuous flow, then we're far more responsible for our circumstances than we prefer to believe. The struggling career, the unfulfilling relationship, the persistent anxiety: these aren't things that happened to us. They're the accumulated result of millions of micro-choices.

So what to do?

Notice that you're choosing. Notice when you're defaulting. Notice when you're running someone else's program. Notice when you're choosing not to choose. Don't judge it and don't immediately try to optimize it.

Just notice.

Tomorrow morning, when your alarm goes off, you'll make your first choice of the day. Then another. Then another. At least twenty thousand times before you sleep again. You can pretend they're not choices, that life is just flowing along, that you're carried by forces beyond your control.

The arithmetic is always running. The only variable is whether you know you're the one doing the calculations.

What will you choose? Or more precisely: will you notice yourself choosing?