By Count your tabs. Not the ones you’re using. The other ones.
There’s a flight comparison from two weeks ago. An article somebody sent you with “you have to read this.” The same jacket in three different shops, because at some point you were going to decide. A recipe for a dinner you were definitely going to cook.
You’re not going to read the article. You’re not going to buy the jacket. You’re also not going to close any of them.
I know this because I do it too. And because part of my job is thinking about the exact moment someone almost buys something, and then doesn’t. Most of the time they don’t say no. They just leave the tab open.
We like to think of choosing as the moment we’re most ourselves. Free, informed, in control. A lot of the modern economy is sold to us exactly that way: more options, more freedom, more you. And for a while it’s true. Going from one kind of yogurt to five is a genuine improvement in your life. Going from five to forty is where it starts to get weird.
In 2000, two researchers set up a tasting table in an upmarket supermarket in California. Some days it had twenty-four kinds of jam. Some days it had six. The big table got more people to stop and taste. But the people who stopped at the small table were about ten times more likely to actually buy a jar.
It became one of the most quoted studies in marketing. It’s also had a rough couple of decades. When other researchers pooled dozens of attempts to repeat it, the effect mostly averaged out to nothing. Sometimes more choice freezes people, sometimes it doesn’t, and nobody is fully sure what decides which.
So I’ll make a smaller claim, one you can check on your own screen right now. More options don’t always stop us from choosing. They make it very comfortable not to.
That’s what the open tab is. It isn’t a decision. It’s a decision you’ve put in storage. Closing it would mean admitting you’re not going to do the thing. Leaving it open costs nothing. Or at least nothing you can see.
Except it does cost something. In the 1920s, a psychology student called Bluma Zeigarnik noticed something about the waiters in a Berlin café. They could remember complicated orders perfectly, right up until the bill was paid. Then the order was gone. She took it to the lab and found that people remember interrupted tasks better than finished ones. Unfinished things stay loaded somewhere in the back of your mind.
The details have been argued about ever since, like most things in psychology. But anyone with forty tabs open knows the feeling. Every one of them is a tiny waiter, holding an order, waiting for you to pay.
Now add the rest. The unanswered messages. The free trial you meant to cancel. The plan to switch banks. The gym. None of them takes much on its own. Together they’re a low hum you stop hearing, the way you stop hearing a fridge. You only notice it when it switches off.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz, who wrote a whole book on this, splits people into two rough types. Maximizers need the best possible option, so they keep looking. Satisficers want something good enough, and stop when they find it.
In one study that followed graduating students through their job hunt, the maximizers ended up with jobs paying around 20% more. They were also less happy with those jobs, more anxious about them, and more likely to wonder about the ones they didn’t take. They won on paper and lost everywhere else.
The open tab is a maximizer’s natural habitat. As long as it’s open, the better option might still be out there. Closing it means settling, and settling feels like losing, even when what you settled on was perfectly good.
Here’s the part that’s awkward to say from inside marketing. A lot of the industry runs on that hum. The abandoned basket email. The “still thinking about it?” ad that follows you around the internet for a week. The wishlist, which is really a tab you’re allowed to keep forever. Nobody needs you to decide. They just need you to not quite leave.
And whatever you don’t decide gets decided for you. The subscription renews. The next episode plays. The version of you from three weeks ago, the one who couldn’t be bothered, gets the final say.
I’m not saying choice is bad. I like having choices. I’d rather live in a world with twenty-four jams than one. I’m saying the act of choosing got handed off somewhere along the way, and we didn’t notice, because it felt like freedom.
So here’s the least impressive advice you’ll read today. Close a tab. Not the important one. Any one.
Not because that particular tab matters. Because deciding is something you get better at by doing it, and a browser tab is about the cheapest place there is to practice.
And if you’re reading this in a tab you opened three days ago, you know what to do.
