The Orange Light Problem

On decision-making and why consistency is hard.

There’s a traffic light near my place that has its moments with me. Long signal, predictable timing, and long enough to decide. Some days I ease off and wait for red. A part of me that’s early, or patient, or just being that person today.

Other days I go. Not reckless. Just already committed before the thought fully forms. It is the same road, same light, but a different me when I make that decision. The strange thing is, you won’t remember it since it’s too small. In reality, the version of you that made that call was real — real enough to surprise you, if you were paying attention. And almost certainly going to make a different call tomorrow.

You do this with money too, where you spend easily on a Tuesday and feel the same purchase differently on a Friday. You do it in conversations, with the friend who needs advice, with the colleague who catches you on the wrong morning. The decision looks identical from the outside. The person making it is different every time.

Once you become consciously aware, you start noticing something unsettling : the person making the decision today isn’t always the same one who made it yesterday.

The Obvious Stuff First

Yes, mood affects how you decide. So does sleep. So does whether you’ve eaten, whether the last meeting went well, whether someone cut you off in traffic twenty minutes ago. You react to situations with varying intensity like how you would to a prick, a tickle or worse, intense pain.

These are real and intuitively obvious. But they’re also the first things we reach for when we want to explain away the inconsistency, and once we’ve named them, we move on, still believing that a better-rested, less-stressed version of us would decide correctly and consistently every time.

That’s where it gets interesting. Because the inconsistency runs deeper than circumstances or situations.

Are you just tired or are you someone else?

Daniel Kahneman's big insight (the one that made Thinking Fast and Slow required reading in every business school) was that we have two modes of thinking. System 1 is fast and instinctive. System 2 is slow and deliberate. The popular reading is: slow down, think it through, and the problem resolves. But here's what that misses. System 2 is still being operated by whoever showed up that day. The thinking is slower. The thinker is the same variable.

Most decision advice assumes the problem is how we think. Think faster, think slower, use better frameworks. That premise assumes a stable decision-maker. What if the real problem though is simpler and stranger: the person making the decision keeps changing?

Some days you’re pretty careful. Measured, considered, a little risk-averse. You ease off the accelerator. You sleep on the difficult email. You say let me think about it and mean it.

Other days a different version shows up. Not worse, not irrational but just differently configured. Quicker and more willing to back themselves. The orange light is a suggestion and the difficult email gets a faster, incisive reply.

These aren’t just moods or situations that reset your rhythm as much as they are temporary identities, complete with their own logic, risk tolerance, and sense of what’s obvious. The unsettling part isn’t that you move between them but that while you’re inside one, the others feel completely foreign.

The pretty careful version can’t imagine why the reckless one jumped that light. The reckless one, in their moment, couldn’t imagine why anyone would wait. They don’t talk to each other. They just take turns doing what they think is right.

Enter the framework

So what do we do about this? We build systems.

Pros and cons lists. The 10-10-10 rule, second-order thinking, decision matrices, etc. Heck, there’s an entire industry of books, newsletters, podcasts, consultants that’s built around the promise that if you just have the right framework, you’ll transcend your own variability. You’ll get consistent outputs regardless of which version of you walks in that morning. It’s a reasonable response to a real problem that should work. I don’t think it does.

Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist who spent years studying why people make irrational decisions, found something that’s more unsettling than the irrationality itself: we’re not randomly irrational. We’re predictably irrational. Our inconsistencies follow patterns. Which means someone who understands your patterns, a good negotiator, a skilled marketer, someone who knows you well, can predict your decisions better than you can.

The framework doesn’t fix this. Because you don’t apply a framework neutrally either. The version of you that’s feeling expansive will unconsciously weigh the pros differently. The tired version will reach for the framework that justifies the path of least resistance. The reckless version will fill in the matrix and still arrive at the answer he’d already decided on before he picked up the pen. The framework feels objective but the person wielding it isn’t. So what are we actually doing when we reach for a decision-making framework?

We’re not making better decisions. We’re making the decision feel more legitimate. We’re giving ourselves, and anyone watching, a process to point to. The framework becomes an alibi. I ran it through the matrix. I weighed the options. I followed the process. Whatever happens next, the responsibility is at least partially absorbed by the system.

This is the distinction worth sitting with: discipline and consistency are not the same thing.

Discipline is showing up to the process. Consistency is getting the same output. You can be religiously disciplined about using a framework, never skipping a step, always running the analysis, and still be wildly inconsistent in your outcomes. Because the framework is only as neutral as the person feeding it inputs. And that person changes.

We’ve built an entire practice around decision-making tools that deliver the feeling of consistency without actually producing it. The orange light is still happening. We’ve just built a dashboard around it.

The Part That’s Hardest to Admit

There’s a concept called confabulation. One that’s rooted in psychology but often appears in my world of AI prompts to prevent my favourite LLMs from drifting into space :) Originally it described something that happened to patients with certain brain injuries, they would invent memories to fill gaps they weren’t aware of, and believe those memories completely. They weren’t lying. The brain, faced with a gap in continuity, fills it in seamlessly, without flagging the edit.

We all do a version of this when it comes to our decisions. Here’s what happens after you make a call: you tell a story about it that’s coherent and retrospective. I did this because I value X. I chose that because I’m the kind of person who Y. The story makes you legible to other people, and more importantly, to yourself.

Robert Cialdini, who wrote Influence, identified something he called commitment and consistency bias i.e once we’ve made a decision, we unconsciously bend all subsequent thinking to stay consistent with it. We don’t just tell a story about the decision. We recruit everything that comes after to defend it. The inconsistent self makes the call, the framework provides cover, and then consistency bias seals the whole thing behind a narrative that feels like it was always the plan. The gap between who made the decision and who remembers making it gets papered over so smoothly you never feel the seam.

Which means a lot of what we call knowing ourselves is really just familiarity with our own story. The explanation we’ve repeated until it feels like memory.

Even Game Theory Knew

Here’s the thing that should settle it. Game theory, the coldest, most mathematical way humans have ever tried to model rational decision-making, had to build in a workaround for this exact problem.

It’s called a pre-commitment device. The classic example is Ulysses tying himself to the mast so he couldn’t steer toward the Sirens. He knew that future-him, in the presence of the Sirens, would make a different decision than present-him wanted. So present-him physically constrained future-him’s ability to decide.

Think about what that assumes. It assumes you are multiple people with conflicting interests. It assumes that the version of you who decides in the moment cannot be trusted to align with the version of you who set the intention. It assumes the inconsistency is so fundamental that the only solution is to remove the choice entirely.

This isn’t a self-help book talking. This is the most rational tradition in decision science quietly admitting: you are not one person. And even if you have the best framework in the world, the person using it tomorrow morning might have different ideas.

So What Do You Do With This?

I don’t think the answer is to stop using frameworks. A pros and cons list is still more useful than nothing. Sleeping on a decision is still better than not sleeping on it.

But there’s a different relationship you can have with your own decision-making once you accept what it actually is. The next time you make a call you feel certain about, say a conversation, a commitment, something you said yes or no to, just pause for a second before you file it away as you. Notice who’s in the room and which version of you showed up today wearing those clothes. It’s not to second-guess the decision but just to be honest about who made it.

I noticed something similar during a brief period when I tried to practise Vipassana meditation more seriously. Decisions didn’t suddenly become wiser, but they did become slower. The gap between impulse and action widened just enough for you to see the version of yourself that was about to act.

It didn’t remove the variability. It just made it harder to pretend it wasn’t there. And that small honesty which is just knowing which version of yourself is in the room turns out to be more useful than any framework I’ve tried. Not because it makes you consistent. But because it makes you honest about the fact that you aren’t.

EFTW is a fortnightly essay on human behaviour, modern life, and the things we don’t say out loud. If this one made you think, forward it to someone who’d appreciate it.