It’s a natural human impulse to have an opinion on everything. Everything requires your input, everything deserves a “take,” and you need to decide everything that comes within your reach. It’s so ingrained in us that we perceive its absence in others as rude! If you and a friend are going to dinner and you ask them where they’d like to eat, you get frustrated when they say “I don’t care.” You take them not caring about where they eat as if they meant they didn’t care about the entire encounter – including spending time with you.
This is absolutely an impulse worth fighting. Life becomes incredibly free and joyous if you just let most of it happen. You can’t control the flow of the river anyway, and trying to make too many active choices is like trying to get the river to take a new shape by splashing a few handfuls of water in new directions.
Make large decisions, when they matter. When things will kill you if you don’t pick A over B, go ahead and exert your control over the world. But letting all those little things go is a marvelous way to live. Embrace “I don’t care” as a valid – even stellar – response. We shouldn’t care about most things, so we can care deeply about the few things that matter.
The Opportunity Machine 