i do this thing that sounds dumb until you try it yourself.
you’re standing in front of two choices. doesn’t matter what. where to eat, which offer to take, whether to go out or cancel. you’ve been going back and forth for too long. both options seem fine. you tell yourself you’re okay with either.
so you flip a coin.
the coin lands. and right there, in the half-second between seeing the result and reacting to it, you learn something. either you feel a small wave of relief. or you feel this pull, like… wait. maybe best of three?
that pull is the whole point.
the coin didn’t decide anything. you just tricked your brain into showing you what it already picked.
the reaction is the information
i’ve been doing this for a while now. the pattern is always the same: i convince myself i genuinely don’t care which option wins, and then the coin lands, and suddenly i do care. sometimes it’s obvious, i literally want to re-flip. other times it’s barely there, just a half-second of “hm” before i go with it. but it’s never nothing. there’s always something.
turns out actual researchers have looked into this. there’s a 2019 study in PLOS One that found coin flips act like a magnifying glass for your feelings. the flip forces you to picture yourself with the assigned option, and that mental image makes your gut reaction louder. feelings that were too quiet to notice during the back-and-forth suddenly have volume.
steven levitt (the freakonomics guy) did something even wilder. he got thousands of people to flip coins for real life decisions. quitting jobs. ending relationships. moving to new cities. the people who flipped “make a change” were way more likely to actually follow through, and they were happier six months later. the coin basically gave them permission to do what they already wanted.
and then there’s flipism, which is apparently a named philosophy. it comes from a 1953 donald duck comic. i love that the most practically useful decision framework i use started in a disney cartoon.
nobody is 50/50
here’s the part where i go a bit further than the research.
i don’t think anyone is ever truly indifferent about anything. not about anything that matters enough to deliberate on, anyway. when someone says “i don’t care, either is fine,” what they’re really saying is “i can’t figure out why i prefer one over the other” or “the gap between them feels too small to justify having an opinion.” but the preference is there. it’s always there.
think about it. you have a lifetime of experiences, biases, tastes, moods. all of that is constantly coloring how you see every option in front of you. the idea that all of that somehow cancels out to a perfect 50/50 on any real choice feels… statistically impossible? like, maybe it’s 51/49. maybe it’s 50.3/49.7. but it’s never perfectly even. you always lean somewhere, even if the lean is so small you can’t consciously feel it.
the coin flip is a hack for finding that lean.
i know there are people who push back on this. the “it genuinely doesn’t matter” crowd. they’ll tell you some choices just aren’t worth having a preference on, and that caring about every little decision is exhausting and pointless. i’ve heard it framed as being easygoing, or practical, or zen about things.
i disagree. i think “it doesn’t matter” is just a way of opting out of the effort it takes to figure out what you want. it’s easier to say nothing matters than to sit with the discomfort of not knowing. but not knowing isn’t the same as not caring. you’re just skipping the part where you’d find out.
there’s a more extreme version of this too. people who say nothing matters at all, on a deeper level. the nihilistic angle. “why care about any choice when none of it means anything in the end?” i have thoughts on that but it’s a whole different conversation, probably its own post someday. for now i’ll just say: i disagree with that too.
but even setting the big existential stuff aside, if it truly didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have stopped to think about it in the first place. the fact that there’s a decision at all means something in you registered a difference between the options. maybe you can’t name it. maybe it’s small enough that it feels silly to care about. but it’s there. “it doesn’t matter” is almost always “i don’t want to do the work of figuring out which one i want.”
i think this is also why some people seem “indecisive.” they’re not actually missing a preference. the signal is just quiet. their gut is whispering instead of shouting, and the noise of overthinking drowns it out. the coin flip doesn’t create a preference. it turns up the volume on one that was already there.
how i actually use it
i don’t flip coins for everything. it’s for a specific moment: when i’ve been going back and forth too long and i catch myself thinking “honestly, i’m fine with either.” that sentence is the trigger. because i know now that “i’m fine with either” usually means “i can’t hear which one i actually want.”
i don’t even always follow the coin. that’s the thing people get wrong about this. you don’t have to commit to the result. you’re just reading your own reaction. the coin is the prompt, not the answer.
what i like about it is the speed. the half-second after the flip, before the rationalizing kicks back in, before the mental pros-and-cons list starts talking over your gut again. that window is the most honest i get with myself about what i want. it closes fast. but it’s enough.
i think most people spend way too long on decisions that don’t deserve the time. not because the decisions are unimportant, but because the answer is usually already somewhere in there. you just can’t hear it over all the deliberating.
a coin fixes that. it’s dumb, and it works.
— alex