There is a deep rooted human instinct in all of us to not want to make hard choices if they can avoid being made. One trivial example is shopping. We often buy clothes we don't actually wear but think we might some day only to acquire a warddrobe full of a few things that we wear all the time and full of many things we hardly ever wear. It is only when placed in different circumstances that require us to make hard decisions, such as what to pack when traveling abroad, that we acknowledge this reality and learn to our surprise that not only are we capable of getting by on a small subset of what we thought needed, but life is so much simpler and worry free when you have fewer things demanding your attention and cluttering your life.
One of the reasons we choose not to make hard decisions is that as humans, we are terrible predictors of our own future circumstances. With so little control of external events and even our own future moods and whims, it is understandable that we take on as much as we do. "Who knows what good tidings may come our way if instead of narrowing future possibilities we expand them?" the thinking goes. "Never mind the extra burden of taking on responsibilities that in the end will prove needless."
But viewed in terms of the total amount of time and energy that ends up going misspent, the consequences of our unwillingness to make hard choices is staggering. All the easy choices we gave in to at some point or another eventually end up cumulating in our information delivery boxes, whether it be our mailboxes, voicemail, feed readers, email inboxes or cognitive memory, as what is essentially spam, whether or not we can recognize it as such at the time. The way to tell is if it ends up forcing you to incur an opportunity cost, distracting your attention away from something you were doing before that was not only interesting but also oriented towards a worthwhile goal. Because we fail to make the hard choices early on when it counts the most, we end up paying the price of having to contend with a growing stream of unnecessary distractions, each one tearing out a little piece of us.
That's why I'm a big fan of things like the slow email movement, the slow blogging movement, taking time to actually read selected books rather than thumbing through magazines, not watching television unless there is something specific I want to watch, and generally not committing to things unless I'm sure I can follow through on them. I'm all for having fun and seeking out stimulation. But I'm also for keeping things fulfilling and purposeful.
