We like to believe a choice is the moment we feel most ourselves: weighing options, sovereign, free. But the more carefully you watch the moment of deciding, the more it dissolves. The options were chosen for you. Their order was chosen for you. The version of you doing the choosing was, to a degree that should bother you, arranged in advance.
Consider the open tab. Not a metaphor: the literal browser tab you left open because closing it felt like a decision and opening something else felt like progress. You did not choose to keep it open. You chose, at some earlier point, to never quite choose, and the tab is what that non-decision looks like three weeks later.
The default is the decision. Everything after it is theater we put on for ourselves.
The cost of an open loop
An unmade choice does not sit quietly. It runs in the background, drawing down attention you do not notice you are spending. Psychologists have a tidy name for the residue: the Zeigarnik effect, our tendency to remember unfinished things more vividly than finished ones. The unfinished tab is not free. It is a small standing tax on the part of you that could have been thinking about something else.
None of this is an argument for despair. It is an argument for paying attention to who is setting your defaults, because someone always is, and it may as well sometimes be you. Close the tab. Not because it matters, but because deciding to is practice for the times it will.