While cooling down after a mile run, my wife checked on me to see if I was in the garage. We looked at each other and I opened up to her that I have been having decision fatigue. When I talked about it and how I feel she kind of brushed it off and reached for the door–I hate when she does this because I am discussing a problem that demands a solution and she just gave me a cold shoulder. Not discussing a problem is a problem. I asked her to hear me out.
I told her, “I am tired of making decisions lately, both internally and externally. I am overwhelmed by these decisions that we need to make, or do we really have to make them? We’ve been to these stores multiple times in the past 2 weeks and we spend at least 2 hours each store. I don’t want to spend my half of my day shopping! It takes so much of our time and when it’s my time to do the things I need and want to do, I don’t have the energy anymore! I am tired, I am tired of making these unnecessary decisions that I know we can streamline but choose not to. Are you not tired of making these decisions lately?”
She replied, “No, I am not tired.”
I was surprised that she wasn’t overwhelmed with making and changing decisions. What does that mean? Does it mean that I’m the only one thinking about optimizing the daily decisions that we make so we can have more time on doing things we want to do? Or she just doesn’t care that she makes these repetitive decisions every single day?
In my case, I don’t like to decide on the “little things”–either I do it or I don’t, I will or I won’t. This is the reason why actively making decisions exhausts the hell out of me and I know I’m not the only one.
I told her that if we’re wasting 3-4hrs in Walmart because we’re picking and choosing in real-time and not making a list of what we need to buy, why don’t we just subscribe to Walmart+ so we avoid wasting 3-4 hours there, the 20-minute travel time each way and about an 30 minutes of loading and unloading the stuff that we bought.
To decide: It’s either we pay to have more time, commit to the 2-hour rule (which has been broken multiple times) or we’d have to do errands separately.
She agreed that we pay for Walmart+ and I still don’t want to spend more than 2-hours per store to shop. I have more things I’d like to spend my hours with.