Giving up my Watford season ticket was not just easy but an inevitable decision

L ast year a poll found that British adults make, on average, 122 decisions every day. A decade earlier a professor at Columbia University found that Americans make about 70. In 2011 a survey of Britons commissioned by a video game developer put the figure at a damningly low 27, essentially painting British adults as a breed of permanently hungry morons most frequently vexed by issues such as “what to have for dinner”, “what to have for breakfast”, “what to have in my sandwich”, and “tea or coffee”. All three surveys polled precisely 2,000 people, suggesting that researchers into decision-making are terrified of making independent decisions.

In 2006 Cornell University found that people make 221 decisions a day about food alone (though they only surveyed staff and pupils at Cornell University, who probably do a bit more thinking than average). Meanwhile the estimate most commonly cited online, of uncertain origin, suggests we in fact make 35,000 decisions a day and an article published by the British Medical Journal in 2020, with references and everything, put the figure at “between 10,000 and 40,000”.

In short, researchers have been producing wildly contrasting and evidentially suspicious figures on this subject for decades, varying so much that if I started taking decisions at birth (probably a bit optimistic) some believe I will by now have made about 479,000, and others more like 710,000,000. Either way, I’ve certainly had enough practice to find them less painful than I sometimes do. If Malcolm Gladwell was anywhere near right with his 10,000-hour rule, I would be a master decision-maker by now, a veritable virtuoso of dilemma-dodging. I would be bulldozing my way past common quandaries like a belligerent but