Why Choosing Anything Feels Heavy by Evening

Thirty minutes have passed since I sat down on the sofa.

The remote is in my hand, and the screen keeps offering things worth watching. Scroll up, scroll down, up again. Not one of them gets a play button.

I'm hungry, but I don't know what to eat. I need to wash up, but not right now. And so the evening goes by without anything beginning.

It's strange. It wasn't a day of hard physical work.

Looking back over the day, nothing remarkable happened. But I did keep choosing things, one closely after another. What time to get up, what to wear, which route to take. Whether to answer now or later. Whether to write the sentence this way or that way. What to have for lunch. What to say back to that person.

Each one is small. That's why none of them get counted.

But the mind seems to have been counting all of them.

Something in a person wears down a little with every choice. The size of it has nothing to do with it. By evening there isn't much left, and that one small remote becomes unusually heavy.

So it wasn't the body that was tired. It was a mind that had spent all day choosing.

For a long time I called this by another name. Looking at myself unable to begin anything in the evenings, I thought I was a person who was missing something. I was fine in the morning, so why was I like this at night.

But the morning self and the night self are the same person. Only the amount left over is different.

No one says a car is poorly built because it ran out of fuel.

What's interesting is that most of what we turn over in the evening doesn't matter much. What to watch, what to eat. Whichever way it goes, life keeps roughly the same shape.

It doesn't matter, and it's still hard. Because the hard part is the choosing itself, not what gets chosen.

The more options there are, the more true this is. When the list grows long, the ache of what you'll miss grows faster than the pleasure of picking. Choose one out of twenty and it feels like letting go of nineteen.

So we choose to choose nothing. Scrolling, and scrolling again.

But getting the evening back doesn't have to mean becoming stronger.

Instead of resolving harder, it's far easier to set aside a few places where nothing has to be chosen. Shrinking the list is always easier than growing your resolve.

There's a reason for the order, too. Decisions go better when they're made early, while there's still some energy. The me of Friday morning has more room than the me of Friday night, and one thing settled then will carry the night version of me the rest of the way. Like a short note sent to a future self.

And what's left over can simply be left. The list you didn't choose from, the room you didn't tidy, the message you didn't answer. The day doesn't end only once all of it is handled.

If today ended with nothing but a list being scrolled, that isn't a day used wrong. It's what comes after having already chosen quite enough.

So I've decided Friday night is my Netflix day. Not something I'm recommending to anyone, just for me. That one thing won't make Friday nights entirely different.

Only that on that night, there will be one less thing to choose.