Decision Fatigue and the Art of Replacing Socks

The average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day.

Assuming the average adult also sleeps eight hours a day, that gives us sixteen waking hours (or 960 minutes) in which to make those decisions. That’s roughly 36 decisions a minute, or just over two per second.

Decision Fatigue is a real condition where people get tired of making decisions. If you have ever asked Google why Steve Jobs wore the same outfit every day (a black turtleneck with blue jeans and New Balance tennis shoes), you’ll run across the term. By not having to decide what shirt, pants, and shoes he was going to put on each morning, Jobs was saving a few brain cycles that could be spent later in the day on more important decisions.

I have twenty different pairs of shoes. I am no Steve Jobs.

Back in 2016, I threw away most of my underwear and replaced them with identical pairs. My choice had nothing to do with decision fatigue. What I noticed over time was that I had three pair of underwear that I really liked (these super comfortable Hayes boxers) and thirty pair that I didn’t like wearing. Every morning I would dig through my drawer full of drawers looking for boxers I liked. Eventually, I bought three more three-packs of the boxers I liked, threw all the others away, and wrote a blog post titled “Life’s Too Short to Wear Underwear You Don’t Love” about the experience.

The last sentence of that blog post reads, “Next month, I’m going to treat myself to some new socks.” It took me three years, but I finally did it.

I guess I’m easy on socks. My socks last a long time. Some of the socks in my sock drawer were older than my teenagers, and yet none of them were worn out.

Somehow, it appears I have never bought the same style of socks twice. Some of them were long. Some were short. Some were too short. Some had gray where my toes went. Some didn’t. Some had gray where my heel went. Some didn’t. Some had both. Some had neither, leaving the foot to decide its path.

Based on my personal experience, the odds of pulling two random socks from my dresser and having them match were 8 bazillion to one. It literally never happened. Each morning I would remove two socks from the drawer, sigh when they didn’t match, and lay them on top of my dresser. Then I would pull out two more socks and check each one to see if either of them matched either of the ones already on top of my dresser. I’m not kidding when I say there were mornings when I had ten or more socks piled up and every one of them was slightly different. On some days I must have spent half of my 35,000 daily decisions searching for matching socks. Steve Jobs would not approve!

So like I said it took another three years, but about a month ago I emptied my sock drawer into a white garbage bag and replaced them with twenty-four (twelve pairs) of socks I ordered from Amazon. They’re gray. I’ve never owned gray socks, and no one in the house has any either, so I decided to go for something unique. Like the black boxers, when I spot them in the laundry pile, I know what’s mine.

Except, I don’t love them. I mean they’re okay and all, but… they’re a little long, and they’re a little tight. I must’ve whined about them one too many times because last week Susan bought me two bags of white socks from Kohl’s. So now my sock drawer has two different kinds of socks, long gray ones and short white ones, but I can live with that. Even with gobs of sleep gunk in my eyes, I can tell which ones are gray and which are white, so finding a matching pair is pretty simple. Now I’ll have to use one of my 35,000 daily decisions to decide if I want to wear gray socks or white socks.

I’ll live.

I currently own 10 pairs of pants, about 75 shirts, and roughly 25 pairs of shoes. I’m not sure which (if any) of those I’ll pare down next. I’m really not out to eliminate all clothing-related choices from my mornings. Just the frustrating ones.