It’s started to feel to me over the past few months that one of the most insidious things about daily life is the way the average person is pushed away from making informed choices, and is instead driven towards choosing the default options which are by-and-large worse for themselves and the people around them. If the “default settings” of our lives were more often a net-positive for ourselves then this wouldn’t be so much of an issue, but currently we sit in a place where “going with the flow” will inevitably leave us worse off.

Each decision we make, especially complicated ones that require a level of additional research or insight, incur a mental tax. No one can be perfectly informed enough and have the level of mental presence to fight their way through all of them. Even if you’re aware of these decisions and have a desire to choose better alternatives, it simply isn’t possible for you to keep up with them all. Eventually you will choose a default choice because it’s easy, because it’s being sold to you, because you weren’t aware that an alternative was available to you. This will make your life worse because the default options are worse.

What’s particularly insidious is the way that this causes the default to not only be the easy choice (or the “non-choice) but also in the ways that it causes this terrible default to feel like the norm. To push back against these norms can feel socially ostracizing. It’s “normal” to make the billionaires that make this exploitative trash richer by failing to choose. Everyone has a Facebook account.

This is all enabled by a political and business culture that encourages fleecing you with the expectation that you don’t know better. Tricking you into paying a monthly fee for access to your favourite movies or music (of which the profit will then be funnelled into supporting arms manufacturers, of course). The default used to be ownership. Over the past two decades it’s become increasingly near-impossible to make the choice to avoid being tracked and spied on by your smartphone. Slowly the choice of what you can do with your phone has been eroded, now solely controlled by the company that makes the operating system. How many people are making the choice to move to an alternative to Android such as GrapheneOS or Linux? How could the average person possibly make a choice like that without a massive amount of knowledge and planning before even acquiring their next phone?

We are all so tired. How can we possibly expect to make informed choices about these things when we only have so much mental energy for decision-making throughout the day?

The solution won’t be sold to you. The default will be.

I have enjoyed over the past half-decade making my life an exploration of alternative choices. It comes naturally to me as someone that is queer, already placed at an outside perspective when it comes to considering alternative lifestyles. I view it as a hobby: to choose something other than the default settings. But, as mentioned above, I can’t keep up with it all: I haven’t made the decision to move away from eating meat, I only have so much mental energy to show up for the political issues I care about, and I’m sure there are many other daily choices I fail to make that contribute in some infinitesimal way to a worse world.

I’ll never stop advocating for the choices that I have been able to make. I think everyone should choose to move away from corporate social media, I think everyone should choose to use free software, I think everyone should choose to think critically about the political and monetary systems that govern our lives. But at a certain point everyone runs out of energy and fails to choose: they get the default settings.