Dare Obasanjo

Decision fatigue is a real biological phenomenon. The more decisions you make during the day, the more tired your brain gets and eventually the worse decisions you make.

So when you see that people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg wore the same outfit every day to eliminate deciding what to wear. It’s a justification actually backed by science.

However we don’t understand exactly how decision fatigue works.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/08/11/how-thinking-hard-makes-the-brain-tired

How thinking hard makes the brain tired

A neurometabolic account

The Economist
Jul 20, 2023 at 11:57amWeb
Show threadkv Jul 20, 2023
@carnage4life this also extends to healthcare providers. Doctors have to be tied to a computer and take notes on everything a patient is saying to make sure that they can attach a code to everything for billing purposes. When you multiply that out across several patients you are bound to make some decisions that may be harmful to a patient. Not because of any fault of the physician themselves, but because they are decision fatigued and mentally exhausted.
Show threadZeljka ZorzJul 20, 2023

@carnage4life That's why shopping for anything is exhausting.

And that's why I shop at places like Aldi/Lidl. (At least in Europe) their shops are relatively small and have just a few options for every specific thing you want. I'm in and out in 20 minutes, no choice paralysis, happy as a clam :D

Show threadIan TindaleJul 20, 2023

@carnage4life also the mode of intake can compound the way that repeated decisions are treated

As a lightweight example: I noticed in the early years of the web that spending a lot of time on eg eBay in the evenings (as a lot of us did) is tiring

Not just because you should’ve gone to bed long ago, but also because it’s a weird mixture of modalities
• scrolling vertically isn’t natural (we’re physiologically more aligned to spot differences across a horizon plane)
• there’s numbers (prices, quantities sizes, dates, but most importantly prices)
• there’s words
• there’s pictures

Each of the latter three are treated quite differently in the brain and at different speeds and in different ways (eg people with more than one language will speak fluently in an acquired language yet dive back into their original language to count or do things with numbers)

Compound this with the non-stop torrent of packets of the above, and it’s no wonder none of us are sleeping properly in the first half of the century – each little packet of info (number/words/picture) takes a heavy load of interpretation and we just shove one after another after another into our eyes

Show threadpyskaJul 20, 2023

@carnage4life Nobody will stop me from smelling the roses on my way to work, or taking joy in deciding which outfit I use for the day. Or taking a 5 minute break to look at the sky, or congratulate my fellow coworkers on whatever it is they have pride on having achieved.

Life happens now. If you are always saving yourself to live in the future, you're not living.

Show threadBellycanJul 20, 2023
@carnage4life partly why my workday lunch is always noodle soup 🍜, also it's hydrating and gives carbs to run the brain for the afternoon
Show threadKanaMaunaJul 20, 2023
@carnage4life And that is why I choose all my clothes and put together my lunch the night before work. No decisions necessary. Just grab and go.
Show threadMarkJul 20, 2023
@carnage4life Actually neuroscientists understand pretty well how decision fatigue works. It is a feature of the hippocampus.
Show threadDr James J TeethJul 20, 2023

@carnage4life

Thats part of the butler’s job. Surely male billionaires have butlers.

Show threadRixJul 20, 2023

@carnage4life Thats interesting. I didn’t realize Steve always wore the same thing. It didn’t really cross my mind before.

My only issue with wearing the same outfit is that other people might think you have no other clothes. I never thought to buy a whole set of the same thing before because I thought it was weird 😔 I thought we were supposed to have a ton of different designs and colors.