Software decision paralysis

I have a major problem with making decisions and sticking to things. ADHD people tend to suffer from decision paralysis, where an overwhelm of information gets you locked up and stressed. I also get a lot of “what if” questions coming in, worrying about the future, over things I simply do not need to worry about right now. I’m not sure if this is OCD, I do suffer from symptoms of that, but I do know my brain wants to keep opening the doors it had already shut.

It’s particularly insidious when it comes to software.

Back in 2020, as everyone was locked away in their homes due to COVID, I was busy juggling Animal Crossing on the Switch alongside constant distro-hopping between Arch Linux and Gentoo. That was a right pain, and I felt I couldn’t stop. I’ve always been on and off with Linux back then in general and it was only recently that I decided enough was enough and I went back to Windows. (and no, I did not use Gentoo in the end. In fact, I don’t wanna even recommend a distro as I’m not even sure what I’d use nowadays.)

However, that wasn’t enough, and the loop briefly got reopened as I tried Niri, ran into very similar (and also unique) problems, and went back to Windows. Now, seeing the issues with Linux and the responses from the community when they’re brought up, I’m not switching to Linux until I’m essentially forced to. But that is still not enough to close that fucking loop. Even as I choose things, my brain keeps wanting to reopen the doors it shut over very minor flaws in the software I use, and it gets annoying.

My brain kept reopening the doors on music streaming too. Should I keep Apple Music, or should I go back to Spotify? I shut that door months ago, but my brain kept prying it open. I’ve had it with ChatGPT vs. Claude, spurred on by Claude seemingly been worse on web search than ChatGPT.
It’s even affected this site again – a minor issue with WordPress (Open Graph plugins being a bit shit, kinda subsided with the Atmosphere plugin creating rich previews on Bluesky, et al.) led me to look at Astro-erudite again, and the developer has addressed issues I’ve actually ran into, by replacing the use of MDX with pure Markdown. The only thing is, I don’t know a good Markdown editor for me to go back to that, and I would absolutely need to vibe-code plugins to convert Markdown to HTML (I am not a web developer). It’s gotten annoying and I’d rather not be stressed over things that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t really matter at the moment. I just want to slam these fucking doors shut. Sometimes things get so bad that I would eventually let Claude make the decisions for me, which – no matter where you land on the AI political compass – is a fucking terrible idea. This was notable when I used Linux, and is why I don’t want to touch that OS at the moment.

Unlike something like food, when I start cooking the food (or ordering it) then the decision is final. I’m eating that whether I like it or not. With software, because of how reversible the decisions actually are, even if you need to prepare everything again, there isn’t really an objective method of “locking in” a decision.

For me, right now I’ve created conditions in which I think would allow for that door to be opened in a reasonable manner. In the case of Linux, I’ll allow myself to re-consider if Microsoft makes a decision so productivity-killing that switching would make sense, or if I have proper enthusiasm for it (which, I don’t at the moment). For WordPress, a worry that came up that fuelled my overthinking was finances, and for that I will let myself decide later, it’s not something I need to worry about at this moment. Some tinkering also helps, but not in the annoying way – changing the font of Windows’ terminal or my website helped a little.¹ I was inspired by Astro-erudite to change the sans-serif font of my site from Geist to IBM Plex Sans, and honestly, it’s a nice vibe.

And of course, some uncertainty acceptance and allowing myself to live in the present will go a massively long way, as well. It’s something I do struggle with, even outside of this.

1. A friend theorised that I’m not used to not tinkering, but I don’t think it’s that, otherwise I wouldn’t be so stressed. It’s entirely about decision making. ↩︎