Decisions That Feel Spontaneous Usually Aren't. Most of Them Are Reruns With New Details.
A decision that arrives with a strong sense of spontaneity — impulsive, in-the-moment, unplanned — is usually taken at face value as evidence that it actually was unplanned, generated fresh in that instant rather than shaped by anything preexisting. The feeling of spontaneity, though, is a subjective experience, not a reliable report on the actual mechanism that produced the decision.
Many decisions that feel spontaneous turn out, on closer inspection, to be reruns of a familiar pattern wearing new surface details — a different person, a different job offer, a different purchase, but the same underlying selection rule firing in response to the same category of trigger it always responds to, simply fast enough and familiar enough to feel unplanned rather than patterned.
This happens because a well-worn pattern operates efficiently — it doesn't need conscious deliberation to fire, which is exactly what produces the sensation of spontaneity. The absence of visible deliberation gets misread as absence of any underlying process at all, when it's actually evidence of a process so practiced it no longer needs deliberation to run.
Not every spontaneous-feeling decision is a rerun — genuine novelty exists. But the feeling itself is not a reliable signal either way, and decisions that feel most spontaneous are worth checking, specifically, against the pattern they might be a fast, familiar rerun of.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai