About This Book

This book began as an attempt to understand a recurring pattern I kept encountering across different systems, places, and forms of work: outcomes that were widely attributed to choice often turned out to be the result of what no one chose at all.

Much of my professional life has been spent building digital products—interfaces that guide behavior by showing some options, hiding others, and selecting defaults in advance. Decisions in these systems are rarely neutral. Over time, it became difficult to ignore how often results emerged not from deliberate user decisions, but from the path of least resistance built into the system itself.

As my work expanded across different countries, organizations, and institutional contexts, the same pattern appeared outside software. Careers followed inherited tracks. Bureaucracies enforced assumptions without stating them. Cultural norms reproduced themselves without explicit agreement. In many cases, nothing was actively decided—yet the outcome was remarkably stable.

This book does not argue that people choose badly. It questions the assumption that choice is the primary force shaping outcomes in the first place. Many of the most consequential results in life, organizations, and systems arise through non-decision: defaults that persist because interrupting them requires attention, energy, or legitimacy that is rarely available.

The aim of this book is not to improve the reader, optimize behavior, or suggest better decisions. It is to offer a lens for noticing what is already happening when nothing seems to be happening. To distinguish between what was chosen and what was simply inherited. To make visible the background conditions that quietly shape trajectories long before agency enters the frame.

This project exists in two forms. The book presents a coherent argument at a given moment in time. The website is a living version of the same work, where ideas may be refined, expanded, or clarified as the project evolves. New editions may follow, but the core ambition remains constant: to treat defaults not as tools to be deployed, but as structures to be seen.

If this book sharpens your ability to notice those structures—whether in products, institutions, or your own surroundings—it has done its job.