There's a particular flavor of indecision that strikes when the options are roughly equivalent. You're not torn between something obviously good and something obviously bad — that's an easy call. You're torn between two restaurants that both sound fine, two apartments that each have different tradeoffs, two job offers that would take your life in different but equally plausible directions. The more similar the options, the harder the decision feels, which is exactly backward from how we'd expect rationality to work. If the options are close, it shouldn't matter much which one you pick. And yet those are precisely the decisions we spend the most time agonizing over.
The economist Herbert Simon coined the term "satisficing" in 1956 to describe a decision strategy that seeks a result that's good enough rather than optimal. He contrasted it with "maximizing," the attempt to identify and select the single best option across every relevant dimension. Simon's insight was that maximizing is often irrational, not because having the best outcome is bad, but because the cognitive and time costs of evaluating every possibility typically exceed the marginal benefit of choosing the best over the merely good. In other words, the search for the perfect decision is itself a bad decision.
More recent research by the psychologist Barry Schwartz has fleshed this out. His work on what he calls "the paradox of choice" shows that people with more options are not only slower to decide but also less satisfied with their choice after the fact. When you've compared fifteen restaurants, the one you pick carries the weight of all the ones you didn't — the imagined meals you'll never have. When you picked between two, the unchosen option fades quickly. This isn't just an abstract finding; it maps directly onto the experience of scrolling through a streaming service for thirty minutes without watching anything, or reading reviews of twelve nearly identical products until you're less confident than when you started.
The useful takeaway is this: if a decision is genuinely difficult because the options are close, the difficulty is a signal that the stakes of choosing "wrong" are low. The hard part isn't the choice — it's the feeling that the choice is hard. These are different problems, and the second one is solved not by more information but by a commitment mechanism.
This is where randomizers come in, not as a gimmick but as a legitimate decision tool. Flipping a coin or spinning a wheel when you're stuck between two equivalent options does two things. First, it forces a decision, which is valuable because the cost of continued deliberation usually exceeds the cost of either outcome. You've been going back and forth for twenty minutes about where to eat dinner; neither option is going to be materially better than the other, but those twenty minutes of your evening are gone either way. Second, and more interestingly, the moment of the reveal tends to surface a preference you didn't realize you had. If the wheel lands on Thai food and you feel a flicker of disappointment, you now know you actually wanted Italian. The randomizer didn't make the decision — it forced your subconscious to show its hand.
None of this applies to decisions with genuinely asymmetric outcomes. Choosing a medical treatment, accepting a job with significantly different long-term trajectories, deciding whether to move across the country — these are not coin-flip situations, and treating them as such would be reckless. The boundary is straightforward: if you've done the analysis and the options are still close, a random pick is a rational way to break the tie. If you haven't done the analysis, do the analysis first.
The broader principle is that your time and mental energy are finite resources, and spending them on low-consequence decisions is wasteful in the same way that spending money on things you don't value is wasteful. Recognizing when a decision doesn't deserve more deliberation isn't lazy — it's a skill. And sometimes the best tool for exercising that skill is the simplest one: a coin, a wheel, a yes or no, and the willingness to commit to whatever comes up.