How do you make decisions? Do you make them quickly, just choosing instinctively, without much fuss? Or do you take ages, weighing every option, asking everyone you know, going round and round until the moment has passed? Maybe you avoid decisions altogether and find ways to hand the responsibility to someone else.

There’s a story by Terry Jones, yes, the Monty Python one, in his book of Fairy Tales, called “Katie Make Sure.” Katie is offered the chance to visit Goblin City. She can take the short way, which is quick, or the long way, which is pretty. She can’t make up her mind. She goes back and forth, weighing the options, considering the merits of each. And while she’s standing there deliberating, she loses her chance. Goblin City closes. She doesn’t go at all.

The cost of not deciding, it turns out, isn’t the wrong choice. It’s missing the thing altogether. Katie didn’t choose the short way or the long way. But she did make a choice, by default. If you can’t choose between strawberry and vanilla, you end up choosing no ice cream.

On writer’s block

I’ve been thinking about this because of something that happened to me recently with my own writing. I write articles, usually about therapy and the things I notice in my work. For a while, I was writing one a week, and I enjoyed it. The articles were personal, sometimes messy, but they felt like mine. Then AI came along, and I started using it to help. At first, it was useful, generating headline options, suggesting structures, speeding things up without changing the voice much. But gradually it started to get out of hand.

The problem wasn’t that AI was writing badly. The problem was that it kept offering me choices. I’d get to the closing paragraph of an article and ask for some help, and it would give me seven or eight different approaches. Which one did I choose? I didn’t know. So I’d leave it and come back to it. And then I’d ask again, and get more options. Eventually, I realised I hadn’t finished an article in two months. I had three or four sitting there, almost done, waiting for the final flourish. I had given my power away, not to a person but to a process, and the process had no interest in helping me land anywhere. It just kept generating possibilities.

If you search online for help with decision-making, you’ll find plenty of advice, most of it perfectly sensible: determine the stakes, know your objective, minimise your emotions. It’s the kind of guidance that works well enough for business decisions with clear criteria and measurable outcomes. It doesn’t do much for the person sitting by the signpost, paralysed, wondering which path is quickest, which is prettiest, which is most likely to lead somewhere good.

Unsticking the stuckness

In therapy, I sometimes work with people who are genuinely stuck in this way. For some of them, the roots go deep, into childhood, into families where decisions were made for them, where their developing sense of agency was never encouraged or trusted. They arrive hoping for tips, a system, something they can apply. And I understand the impulse. But a six-step framework rarely touches the thing that’s actually in the way.

What I find more useful, and what seems to help, is a distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding implies a process: reasons, justifications, criteria, a case to be made. When you decide, you owe yourself and others an explanation. Choosing is different. You simply choose. You don’t need a reason. You don’t need to defend it or explain it. Vanilla or strawberry, it doesn’t really matter, just choose. Red pill or blue pill, you can’t know what lies ahead, but you still have to pick one and step forward.

It sounds simple, and it is, but it’s also surprisingly hard. The time and energy that can go into the most straightforward choices are extraordinary, and for some people, genuinely debilitating. The shift from “I need to make the right decision” to “I’m just going to choose” can feel almost too small to matter. But sometimes it’s like taking the red pill: the earth moves, and you find yourself standing in a different dimension of space and time, wondering why you waited so long.

Space and freedom

The point isn’t to arrive at the perfect destination by the optimal route. The point is to keep walking. You can adjust as you go, make another choice, find your way back to the path. What you can’t do, if you want to get anywhere, is stay sitting by the signpost, reading it over and over, hoping it will eventually tell you something it hasn’t already said.

Katie never got to Goblin City. She never went anywhere at all. Maybe that felt safer. But is that the option you choose for your life?