Decision fatigue, office perks, feudalism

23 March 2025

Actions and decisions, that’s all we have. In the early years of the 21st century, minimal garb was fashionable among the tech giants. There are articles and theories and interviews about Mark Zuckerberg’s grey t-shirts and Steve Jobs’s black turtleneck. A popular theory is that this helps reduce decision fatigue. If you have to make a lot of important decisions in the span of your day, and if they are going to consume you, then it might help to get out of the house without having to make any decisions. It’s irrelevant if the theory is accurate, but it is quite believable. Simply so because all of us have experienced fatigue while deciding what to wear, what to eat, what to watch.

Salespeople

I love talking to salespeople as a customer. It is truly rewarding, and I have certain theories of my own on how they add value to my life. My running shoes are wearing out, and say I want to buy new ones. One approach would be to buy a new pair of the exact unit that I already own. Ehh, even if that was possible, I am probably eager to see what’s new. They keep changing things. There are new materials, and there’s always fashion. I now walk into a shoe store and go to the Running shoes section to see a panel of 50 shoes. Which one do I want? They’re all running shoes. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in concepts like numerology or favourite colour. If I did, I would appreciate those more than the salespeople.

Five minutes later, I lifted a few shoes from the panel and tried to twist them a little to see if any of them were so piss-poor material that they’d break in front of me. I have tried to feel the fabric. Am I supposed to want the softer touch or coarser? How do I know which material is more breathable? According to the label, one of them is “Max” breathable and one of them is made out of a fabric called Air (TM). Before I tried to put the shoe on my face, thankfully, a salesperson walked up to me.

“Can I help you?” ”Umm yea… I want to buy new running shoes”
They immediately pick one to show me ”Here, try this one. This is the latest in our Kite series of shoes. This is the bestseller”
Really? Because this was kept on column 2, row 3 among your 5 by 10 panel. That is quite random
“Ah wow, yea looks nice. Do you have this in different colours?”
“Oh of course. We have white, black, navy blue”, the salesperson signals to a colleague to bring live samples of different colours.
“Umm, which one do you think is most versatile?”
“You can’t go wrong with white.”
“But won’t that get dirty?”
“Nah you don’t have to worry about that. This material doesn’t stick on much dirt to it, and you can wipe it off easily”

I am out of reasons to stop myself from buying the shoe, well aware that it is I, who willingly entered this shoe and expressed a voluntary desire to make the purchase.
“Let’s pack it up then!”

I am grateful for this interaction because any of those 50 shoes on the panel would’ve fulfilled my objective, but it is still hard to know the right answer. Problem-solving is easy. …solving is hard. Salespeople distil our propensity to take a decision against factors which have a vague or unmeasurable impact. I am grateful to them for easing my pain by sacrificing a small part of their conscience. In the enactment above, you can fathom that they probably lied to me. The shoes are definitely getting dirty with some use, and I have no way to verify their bestseller list. Well, maybe I could insist on a dirt demonstration or a copy of their sales statistics to verify their claims. But that’s not the point. I wanted to be lied to, in exchange for moving on.

Another example, which as of yet, I’ve found to be unique to Indian garment shops. They would show you some options, and as you’ve made up your mind about one of them, they’ll not stop showing you options for a bit. They’ll open up more salwars, more shirt fabrics, more colours that you’ve already indicated you’re not interested in. My theory is that this works because they are fatiguing you into saying yes and sticking to your first choice because “No, I don’t like any of this” also takes strength.

Office Perks

An employment contract is quite different from a consumer goods purchase. For example, the buyer and seller are flipped, and you’re selling something non-material, i.e. your soul. Labour, you’re selling your labour. But it is not quite asymmetric. The employers also do have to compete to snatch potential top performers. Thus, they have to do a sales pitch, which among other things includes “perks”. Free food daily, free massages once a week, concert tickets monthly, yearly vacation retreat.

What if, as a hypothetical, I am a really boring person who likes spending time away from anything that society deems as fun? Why can’t I get paid more cash instead of these perks? Even if enough people want this, this is hard. Some perks are not easy to put a monetary value on. For a lot of them, there are group benefits. The company pays for breakfast for 500 people, so it’s cheaper for everyone. So it makes sense. Because the company is paying in bulk, I can now enjoy things that I’d not have enjoyed otherwise. Hold on, what if there are no blueberries on the breakfast menu, but I really like blueberries for breakfast? Ah, it’s really simple. I can just apply to work at the company next door. They have all the berries. So, what options do I have? Kill my desire to have blueberries. Take a career decision based on this. Buy my own blueberries. I can’t help but wonder that this would not be a problem if there was no breakfast offered at all.
As a side note, having baked my head in the sun enough, I feel confident that it’s, anyway, not indeed cheaper for companies. That’s just believable because hey, bulk discounts exist. But I don’t need this to carry on my argument.

Perks do to our choices as employees exactly what salespeople do to us as customers. They bridge the gap to a decision once all employment options have crossed the threshold of what we were looking for in the first place. But in this case, I am not grateful for this. Robbing me of my choice and freedom and forcing me to make career decisions coupled with food and spa options is feudalism.
“I believe my working hours should be shifted by 1 hour”
“Oh, sorry we are short-staffed. But if you stay in longer than 7 pm, here’s a dinner coupon!”

Among the panel of 50 companies that I could work for, I want to work for the best one. I do not want the pain of breathing the inner soles of all of them to decide which one would let me breathe and let me fly at the same time, so I shall willingly give up my thinking and pledge my allegiance to which offers the highest CTC and the best perks because that’s what I’m told matters. If you’re wondering about my usage of the word “feudalism” to describe this condition, it is so because of the following two characteristics of workplace perks:

  1. We lack the political power as working-class citizens to do something about this. Making decisions trivially based on CTC and perks is truly what is in our power to do, much like choosing the lord who would feed me and not kill my family, I would be grateful to have a job which would feed my family and not make me kill myself.
  2. We are actively made to believe that we should be grateful for the generosity of our lord in not only feeding us but also providing us with these pleasures of life which we would not experience otherwise. You can’t afford a five-star hotel bedroom for a conference on your own money, peasant.

The article is an attempt to characterise office perks. Along with these two, the third characteristic is the vague valuation. They are the colour and material of the shoes which you’re going to get tired thinking about, and thus, find it easier to just go with the flow.