Golden Hour #006: why can't we decide?

the strange guises of trauma and grief.

Good morning,

I launched this newsletter six weeks ago and have been bowled over by the support offered by so many readers. By financially sustaining this work you are enabling a much wider group of people to benefit from it. Thank you.

The newsletter is very much in its infancy, so please bear with me as I try to find the right balance in terms of free/paid-subscriber offerings. In the longer term I would love to be sending out Thursday essays on a weekly basis, which may mean that Golden Hour assumes the biweekly slot. As ever I’d be grateful for feedback on pieces or themes you are enjoying or are curious to read more about. Let me know in the comments below.

If you were to visit my house you would see a mushrooming collection of tile samples carefully lined up against the walls of my kitchen. There are long and thin tiles, square tiles, zellige tiles, tiles with a gloss finish and tiles with a matt finish. Tiles that were hand made by moroccan artisans, tiles from Topps Tiles and tiles from an undisclosed website who are refusing to send me any more samples until I place an order with them. The collection is now so vast that it has spilled over into the downstairs toilet, creating an overflow that Gaudi would be proud of.

With our grease-splattered walls starting to prove a health-risk, I have bitten the bullet and arranged for a builder to come and install the splash back. Hopefully this self-imposed deadline will force me to make a selection and stop looking for the ‘perfect’ tile.

But I digress. What I’m describing here is the creeping presence of indecisiveness in my life, which seems to have a shapeshifting quality, proliferating into other quotidians. Getting a haircut, buying clothes, deciding what to eat for dinner. All of these relatively inconsequential tasks—decisions which I previously made swiftly—are now drawn out for two or three times longer than before. My sense is that within this impasse something else is at work—something preventing me from making the active choice to commit to something.

One rather obvious explanation for my tile commitment-issues might be the unabashed consumerism to which I am evidently enthralled. However much we try to refrain from participating in the industrial complex of our material culture, it’s a relationship which throws up no-end of ethical quandaries for us to navigate and seems impossible to sever ties from completely. Should we spend £2.65 (each!) on tiles that are made in the UK but have a lower environmental footprint? Or is that a ridiculous sum to spend on something destined to be spattered by tomato sauce? These dilemmas can lead to a sort of impasse in which there's no ‘right’ choice. Just the least bad one.

I recently shared my concerns with my friend Lauren May, an organisational psychologist within the NHS. She highlighted a 2021 research study which showed that 32% of American adults reported feeling so stressed about the pandemic that they struggled to make even basic decisions, like what they should wear or eat. Millennials (48%) were the group most likely to struggle with what this study referred to as ‘decision-making fatigue’. As the pandemic progressed, participants reported as needing more emotional support than they had received and also didn’t feel that they were doing enough to manage their stress—reports of which were higher for ethnic minorities.