Someone making decisions for me

These days, there are so many choices to labor through, from the most basic, such as paper or plastic at the grocery（食品杂货店） checkout counter, to the nearly suicide-inducing, such as the friends-and-family plan or unlimited texting.

In these tough times, the abundance of life-changing decisions—finances, health care, career moves—can be overwhelming（压倒性的，势不可挡的） . But don’t take it from me. Ask the guy who wrote the book The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. That would be Scott Plous, a psychology professor at Wesleyan University. “There’s no question that we have more choices than ever before,” Plous agreed. “And decisions are generally harder and more time-consuming when there are lots of alternatives.”

Even Steve Jobs, whose technology allows us the misery of 18,000 music selections in our pockets, has to counteract so many choices by wearing the same outfit—blue jeans, black turtleneck（高领翻毛衣） , New Balance sneakers—every single day of his life. With every move you make, you’re bombarded withpredicaments（窘况，困境） from the banal to the extraordinary, and you obviously can’t trust yourself to make the right decisions anymore—look where that’s gotten you.

I know I’m not alone in this. We’re all feeling a little needy. Whom can we turn to? Friends and family always have their own agendas; therapists are useless. So, who’s left?

Strangers, of course. They’re everywhere.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman behind me one morning in the queue at Dunkin’ Donuts. “I’m currently asking strangers to make all my decisions. Would you mind picking out a dozen doughnuts（甜甜圈） for me?”

“I’ll order two, but then you’re on your own,” she said.

“Never mind.”

Everyone knows the first two doughnuts are the easy ones.

“I’ll do it, but you’ll have to tell me what you like,” a gangly（身材瘦长的） woman who had overheard theprevious exchange said.

“Thanks, but that kind of defeats my purpose,” I responded. “As long as you’re paying,” a thick-armed guy shrugged at me just as it was his turn to order.

He attacked the chore with glee（快乐，欢欣） . His choices were a blur of glaze and frosting. He stopped only once, looked back at me and said, “Sprinkles, two sprinkles,” and they fell into the box with the majesty of a fireworks grand finale.

It was a win-win, a successful random act of indecision（优柔寡断，犹豫不决） (RAI). And I was striking a blow for science. “Your experiment will reveal how much pleasure in a dessert comes from it simply being a dessert, rather than a dessert that you would have chosen,” Plous had observed. “In many cases, the difference in benefit between two choices is smaller than we’d guess.”

This may be the best idea I’ve ever had. For two weeks, I relinquished（放弃，放手） control over my decisions. I turned the reins（肾脏，腰部） over to perfect strangers.

At a Starbucks, I was perspiring（流汗） heavily from a bike ride when I started to ask the woman beside me what I wanted to drink. She cut me off midway through my spiel（流利夸张的讲话） about how I was conducting a social experiment and whatnot（放古董的架子，不可名状的东西） .

“Just have a water,” she said, snatching a bottle from the front case and thrusting it at me.

She herself ordered something that took the barista（咖啡师） 11 moves to make, but I was suddenly a model of simplicity: a sweaty man drinking cold water.

Moments later, I asked a man at the newsstand if I should become a night shaver instead of a morning shaver. I always wanted to be a night shaver—go to bed cleanly shaven and wake up with sexystubble（发茬，须茬） that would be alluring（诱惑的） until at least noon and...

“Absolutely not,” the gentleman said.

I’m sure he’s right.

Later in the day, when I asked a sandy-haired woman at Old Navy to pick out a shirt for me, she quickly devoted herself to the cause.

“I want you to have a crisper（保鲜盒） , cleaner look,” she exclaimed.

I was still feeling crisp and clean when I stopped at the library. The mission: to give a stranger the chore of selecting a book for me to read.

“You sure? Picking out a book... that’s kind of an intimate decision,” the chosen one said. She was sitting at a tiny table with a little boy and looking up at me as if I were one more irritation in an already long day. But once I said I was positive, she popped up as if she’d just adopted me.