Making Decisions When You Have No Preference

“I do not mind” may be an honest description of preference, but it leaves the labour of choosing with somebody else.

You will be asked, regularly, to make choices about things you genuinely do not care about: where to eat, what to watch, which route to take. Your honest answer is that you have no preference, and your instinct is to say so, believing this to be accommodating. You have placed a burden disguised as flexibility upon the person who must now decide, and that person will rarely thank you for it.

When you say ‘I do not mind’, you transfer the labour of deciding to someone else while retaining the right to be quietly dissatisfied with their choice. A specific form of selfishness has put on the face of agreeableness.

Choose one of the acceptable options: “Let us try the Italian place,” or “Seven o’clock suits me.” The content matters less than relieving a trivial decision of the friction it has somehow acquired.

When the options are genuinely equal, alternate who chooses, toss a coin, or select the nearest. A simple rule prevents indifference from becoming paralysis.

If the other person reveals a preference, accept it plainly: “You seem to want Thai; let us do that.” The result remains equal to you and improves for them.

Chronic indecision looks like a lack of engagement. A man who never chooses is a man who never commits, and the people around him will eventually stop asking for his input altogether. When that happens, he will discover that he does, in fact, have preferences; he simply never bothered to express them until the option was removed.

Practise deciding where the stakes are low, since this is where hesitation has the least excuse and choice is easiest to exercise.