The Day I Stopped Choosing

There’s a poem most people have heard of. Robert Frost. “The Road Not Taken.” You probably know the last lines even if you can’t place the title —

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

I used to read that as inspiration. A quiet validation of going your own way. Choosing differently. Trusting your instincts when everyone else follows the crowd.

What I didn’t know — and what took me an embarrassingly long time to find out — is that the poem is actually about something else entirely. Both roads in that poem are described as worn “really about the same.” Frost wasn’t writing about a bold choice. He was writing about a friend of his who could never stop second-guessing whichever path he picked. The whole poem is about the story we tell ourselves after the fact. We make a choice, and then we construct a narrative that makes it feel like it was always the only choice.

I sat with that for a while when I first learned it. Because it made me wonder: how many of my choices were actually mine?

I’m a software engineer. I’ve spent years building things — apps, tools, systems. I know how code works. I know what a recommendation engine does under the hood. And I still fell for it. For longer than I’d like to admit.

I remember a specific stretch — I was going through something difficult. So I leisurely spent more time on my phone than usual, which for me is saying something. And I noticed that every time I opened certain apps, I came away more agitated than when I opened them. Not angry at anything specific. Just... elevated. Wound up. Ready to argue with someone I didn’t even know.

I’d scroll past a video of someone saying something provocative — not even something I cared about deeply — and I’d feel it.

The pull to respond.

To correct them.

To say something.

Even when I knew the account existed purely to provoke exactly that reaction.

I did it anyway sometimes. I’d type something. Then delete it. Sometimes I’d post it. And for a few minutes I felt something that I can only describe as a brief sense of purpose — like I had defended something important.

Looking back, I was defending nothing. I was performing for an algorithm.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t fully understand then.

The brain was not built for the current information environment. It was built for a world where if something felt threatening, it probably was threatening. Where paying attention to the bad thing — the rustle in the grass, the unfamiliar face at the edge of the firelight — was the difference between survival and not.

That system is still running in us. Neuropsychologists call it the negativity bias. It means that negative information registers more urgently, more persistently, and more memorably than positive or neutral information. One critical comment outweighs several compliments. One bad day can color a whole week. And on a social media feed, one piece of content designed to make you angry will hold your attention longer than ten pieces that make you feel peaceful.

This is not a personal failing. This is evolutionary software that was written for a world that no longer exists — and it’s being exploited by people who understand it far better than most of us do.

The term for the content that exploits it has a name now. Oxford University Press named it the official Word of the Year for 2025: rage bait. They defined it as content “intentionally crafted to provoke feelings of anger or outrage.” Not as a side effect. As the product. The anger is the point. A researcher tracked 406 rage-bait videos that generated over 586 million views combined. A hate comment earns the algorithm the exact same metric as an admiring one. The feed doesn’t distinguish. It just counts engagement.

I was contributing to that count. Regularly. Without choosing to.

That’s the part that gets me the most when I think about it now.

I thought I was making choices. I’d pick up my phone and decide what to look at. But what I was actually doing was entering an environment specifically designed to predict and pre-empt my decisions before I made them consciously. The algorithm doesn’t ask what you want. It assumes what you’ll respond to and serves it before you’ve finished the thought.

There’s a term in research for this — a “choice architecture.” It’s the design of an environment that shapes your decisions without you being aware the environment is doing the shaping. The infinite scroll was designed deliberately to eliminate natural stopping points. The autoplay exists to make the next video begin before you’ve decided to watch it. These are not defaults. They are engineered choices made by someone else, on your behalf, to keep you inside the system longer.

I build software. I know this. I knew it while it was happening to me. And it still worked.

That’s not me being hard on myself. That’s me saying the system is well-designed. It’s designed by people who study human attention and human weakness for a living. My knowing how the code works did not make me immune to what the code was optimizing for.

The poems I mentioned at the beginning — “The Road Not Taken,” “The Power of No,” “The Road Less Traveled” — all share something. They assume you are standing at a fork. They assume you can see the options. They assume there is a moment of deliberate choice available to you.

What happens when the fork has been removed before you got there?

What happens when the path was chosen, and you were placed on it, and the placement happened so gradually and so naturally that you experienced it as your own decision?

I think about the times I’ve watched something I didn’t go looking for and ended up in a comment section for an hour. I think about the times my feed shifted almost imperceptibly and suddenly I was consuming content that made me feel like the world was more dangerous, more divided, more hostile than it felt that morning. I didn’t choose that. I was brought there by incremental decisions made for me by a system that was never going to tell me what it was doing.

There’s a word I keep coming back to. It’s the last line of the note I published a little while ago, and it’s the simplest thing I know to say about all of this.

Why?

Not as a protest. Not even as a question in a big philosophical sense. Just the practice of pausing — before sharing something, before reacting to something, before deciding something has made you angry — and asking that one word.

Why am I looking at this?

Why does this content exist?

Why am I the target for it?

Who benefits from my anger here?

Research in psychology documents what happens when people deliberately activate that kind of analytical thinking before reacting — it engages what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2, the slow deliberate thinking that interrupts the fast automatic response System 1 was already running. The pause is not weakness. The pause is the moment choice re-enters the picture.

“Why?” is the fork in the road that the algorithm removed. It puts it back.

I’m not writing any of this from a place of having it figured out. I still pick up my phone when I shouldn’t. I still occasionally fall for something designed to annoy me. I’m still someone who spends a lot of time online because that’s where my work lives.

But something shifted when I understood the mechanism. When I stopped reading the experience of being online as a series of my own choices and started seeing it as a designed environment that predicts my behavior and optimizes around it — the emotional weather of it changed. The anger that used to feel righteous started feeling more like a symptom. And symptoms are useful. They point somewhere.

They ask a question.

The question is always worth asking.

Why?