Preface

This is a short book about what happens when no one is choosing.

We tend to explain outcomes with preference, intention, and decision. But many of the forces that shape lives, organizations, and products operate without being selected in the moment. They come pre-filled: inherited options, assumed baselines, entrenched procedures, and paths of least resistance that quietly produce stability.

I call those structures defaults. A default is not just a setting in software. It is any outcome that reliably occurs because deviation requires extra effort, attention, permission, or justification. Defaults endure not because they are best, but because interrupting them is costly—and the cost is usually unevenly distributed.

The aim here is not to make you more decisive or more disciplined. It is to help you separate what was chosen from what was merely allowed to continue. Once that distinction becomes visible, the world starts to look less like a collection of decisions and more like a landscape of inherited paths.

The structure is simple. Quickstart builds the concept in layers. Core explains how defaults form, where they hide, and why they persist. Vignettes are short recognitions—small scenes where a default briefly shows its outline. Finally, an Essay steps back to consider implications without turning the argument into advice.

If this book works, you will finish it with a new reflex: when an outcome appears inevitable, you will ask not “Who chose this?” but “What kept happening when no one chose?”