Comfortable inevitability

Looked at the right way, a lack of choice can be very comforting. There's obviously the paradox of choice thing, but the main effect for me is just that a situation that's beyond my control is also beyond my responsibility. I don't have to worry about whether it should or shouldn't be the case, I just have to deal with it as best I can.

In a sense, you can think of a lack of choice as being related to focus. There is some subset of things that you are going to focus on, that you are going to make choices about, and some (much) larger subset that you aren't going to make choices about. In the case of something like whether to save all the orphans in the world or learn to levitate, that decision is out of your hands; there are no choices you can make that will bring about that outcome. In many cases, though, you do get to make a kind of meta-choice: the choice of what to make choices about.

I've found it particularly useful to use that meta-choice to add inevitability to a situation. For example, sometimes I'm struggling to finish some piece of work and getting discouraged. I start wondering if I should stop and do something else, which begins to distract me from the work itself. But if I say "well I'm definitely going to finish this, it's just a question of how long it takes", that takes the choice of whether to do it off the table and lets me focus on how to do it.

Most likely the reason this works is that we have limited resources to use for making decisions. In that context, removing choice is a way of being judicious with those resources. Inevitability, then, is just having the most available resources, and comfortable inevitability is having exactly as much capacity to decide as there are decisions to make.