Ilias Ennajmi — Why people act, who profits

The tyranny of the open tab

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

The most expensive number is the first one

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Show someone a price and you have not just made an offer. You have set a reference point that every later number will be measured against. The first figure does not describe the value of the thing. It manufactures the scale on which the thing will be judged.

This is why the menu lists a dish nobody buys at a price nobody pays. It is not there to sell. It is there to make the second-most-expensive option feel reasonable, which it only does because the first one moved the goalposts before you noticed there were any.

::interactive::

A discount is a confession about the first price. Someone decided what you would tolerate, then let you feel clever for paying less.

You cannot opt out of anchoring, but you can choose your own anchor before someone chooses it for you. Decide what a thing is worth to you in advance, in your own units, and the seller’s opening number becomes information instead of instruction.

You are your defaults

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ask someone why they bank where they bank, vote how they vote, or take their coffee the way they take it, and you will usually get a reason invented on the spot. The honest answer is almost always the same: it was the setting they were handed, and changing a setting requires a reason, while keeping one requires nothing at all.

We treat identity as a series of decisions. It is closer to a series of decisions never made. The country you were born in, the language your thoughts arrive in, the assumptions you mistake for common sense: none of it was selected from a menu. It was the menu.

A preference you have never questioned is not a preference. It is an inheritance you are still paying interest on.

The useful move is not to burn it all down. That is just choosing the opposite default. It is to audit. Pick one setting you have never examined and ask whether you would choose it again from scratch. Most days the answer is yes, and that is fine. The point is that, for once, it was an answer.

You can’t buy attention, only rent it

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a comforting fiction in marketing that attention can be acquired: bought once, owned thereafter, banked like a customer list. It cannot. Attention is rented, the lease is short, and the landlord raises the rent precisely as you come to depend on the address.

Every channel follows the same arc. Early, it is cheap and generous, because it needs you more than you need it. Then it fills, the algorithm tightens, and the reach you once got for free now carries a toll. The platform was never your audience. It was the road between you and them, and it can charge whatever the traffic will bear.

If a single channel can switch off your business by changing a setting, you were never the owner. You were a tenant.

The only hedge is to convert rented attention into something you hold directly: a relationship, a habit, a reason to come back that does not route through anyone else’s algorithm. Spend the rented reach buying your way off the rental market.

Nobody wants the product

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nobody wants a drill, the old line goes, they want a hole. It is truer to say nobody wants the hole either. They want the shelf, and the kind of person who has the sort of home where the shelf is up. The product is the last, least interesting link in a chain that starts with who someone is trying to become.

This is why feature lists persuade so poorly. A spec sheet answers a question the buyer is not really asking. They are not weighing your gigabytes; they are checking whether owning this makes them more like the person they picture when they picture themselves at their best.

Sell the after-photo of the person, not the before-photo of the product.

The best positioning barely describes the thing at all. It describes a self, and quietly lets the product become the cost of admission. Get the identity right and the features become evidence. Get it wrong and no feature will save you.

The myth of the rational actor

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

At the center of a great deal of economics stands a character who has never been seen in the wild: a person with stable preferences, perfect information, and the cold consistency to act on both. He is convenient, tractable, and entirely imaginary, and we have built much of the modern world on the assumption that he is us.

Real people are not irrational so much as differently rational. We are loss-averse, present-biased, exquisitely sensitive to how a thing is framed and who is watching. These are not bugs in the human; they are the human. The model is not describing us badly. It is describing someone else.

A theory whose central character is fiction will predict a world that does not arrive.

The fix is not to abandon models (we cannot think without them) but to remember they are maps, and to stay loyal to the territory when the two disagree. The map that insists the river is not there does not move the river.