People delay because they don’t want to pay the actual price: shutting down their other possible lives.
When you choose, you don’t just spend time. You spend selves. You’re saying:
I won’t be the person who pursued that path. I won’t get those skills. I won’t live that story.
This is the friction most people avoid—not the work, but the finality.
When you delay, you keep all versions of yourself alive in theory. You preserve the story that you could still pivot, still change, still be anything.
But that story gets less true by the hour.
The Principle
The real unit of cost isn’t time—it’s optionality.
Most advice pretends you’re spending minutes. You’re not. You’re burning possible futures. Every time you move toward one thing, you’re collapsing the chance to become something else.
Most people protect optionality to the point of decay. They wait until the options evaporate, then act like the decision was made for them.
That’s the quiet strategy: delay long enough that the grief of choosing is outsourced to circumstance.
The Application
System: Optionality Cost Accounting
When facing a decision:
- List the futures you’re closing: Be specific. Name them. Stop pretending they stay open.
- Decide whether you’re willing to kill them: No partial credit. No maybe-later.
- If you’re not willing to close them, stop lying: You are not actually committed to the path you’re on. Either fully pause, or fully proceed.
Optionality is a finite balance sheet. You can’t hold everything open.
The Limit / Cost
There are domains where optionality is the point: capital markets, high-leverage negotiations, certain asymmetric bets. In those arenas, you’re paid to preserve options, not collapse them. But most people apply optionality hoarding to life choices where it quietly bleeds them out. Friends. Projects. Health. Attention. They try to keep all doors open and lose control of all of them. The cost of not choosing is usually paid in regret later—but it’s paid in waste now.