You are always choosing. Waiting is a choice. Silence is a choice. Letting things unfold is a choice.

Every moment of inaction edits your character. The outcome doesn't care whether you feel like the author. You simply are.

Full story: thethought.writtenself.com/p/the-witness

There's a version of you that makes hard calls more clearly. You inhabit this version at work.

Ask yourself: If I were advising a friend through my exact situation, what would I tell them to do? The answer will arrive quickly.

A parent refuses to vaccinate their own child but, as a public health official, mandates vaccination policy.

We extend to others what we deny ourselves: the grace of difficult honesty. We're decisive in our roles, paralyzed in our lives.

Studies show doctors find withdrawing life support psychologically harder than never starting it, even though ethically the decisions are equivalent.

One feels like responsibility. The other feels like fate. But the bias weakens under one condition: duty.

Here's the thing: Parents face this choice. A vaccine prevents 10 child deaths but will cause 5 deaths due to side effects.

Most refuse. They'd rather risk 10 deaths by doing nothing than cause 5 deaths by acting. This is Omission Bias.

The conversations got shorter. The silences longer. We went from making plans together to existing in the same space. Strangers who once knew each other deeply.

I could have tried to repair it or ended it earlier. Instead, I let the space between us grow until it became permanent.

But we do not just encounter decoys. We create them.

"I'll start exercising when I have more time" is a decoy. Later sits between never and today. Never feels too extreme and today too demanding.

What would you choose if the comparison did not exist?
thethought.writtenself.com/p/third-choice

The mechanism lives in comparison. When faced with uncertainty, our brains grasp for reference points.

The decoy provides an easy comparison that makes one option feel obviously superior. We experience this as rational choice, but the rationality was designed into the context.

Then he removed the print only option and asked different students.
Now 68% chose online only, and only 32% chose print plus online.

The least popular option became the most popular when the decoy disappeared.

Dan Ariely famously tested this with The Economist subscription pricing:
- $59 for online only
- $125 for print only
- $125 for print plus online

When he presented this to 100 MIT students, 84% chose print plus online.

In 1982, researchers Joel Huber, John Payne, and Christopher Puto at Duke demonstrated this through experiments.

They showed participants two options first, then added a third clearly inferior to one choice but only partially inferior to the other.

Preferences shifted dramatically.

The medium size is not meant to be chosen.

It exists only to make the large look irresistible. This is the Decoy Effect. The inferior option that steers choice without ever being selected.

The question asks: Tall, Grande, or Venti?
We stare at the cups on display and our hand points before our mind calculates.

Comparison becomes our first metric.

Tall feels small. Venti excessive. Grande sits right between regret and excess.
But I watch the line behind me while remembering the line before. Most orders are Grande.

We stand in different bodies, lead different lives, slept different hours. Yet somehow we all want the same amount of coffee?