The day you signed the papers, you stood outside the civil affairs bureau for five minutes.
There was no pouring rain. The sun was bright, and people were walking their dogs. You touched the divorce certificate in your pocket. A thin booklet.
You thought you would cry. You didn’t. You thought you would feel relieved. You didn’t.
You just felt: It’s so quiet.
Then you returned to the home you now live in alone, and opened the fridge—empty. You realized: What to eat tonight is the first decision you have to make post-divorce.
Not a big one. But entirely yours.
When most people discuss divorce, they focus on the decision of “whether to leave.”
But rarely does anyone tell you: After a divorce, the number of decisions you need to make exceeds all the decisions you made during your entire marriage combined.
What to do with the house. Whether the kids should change schools. Do you update your insurance beneficiaries. Where to spend the New Year. Do you keep in touch with the ex’s family. What to do alone at home on a weekend.
Within a single month, you will make more than twenty critical decisions.
A hidden function of marriage is offloading a massive amount of daily decision-making.
When two people live together, many things are divided by default—who manages the finances, who picks up the kids, whether to eat out or cook at home. You don’t need to think through every single item because someone else is carrying that weight with you.
After a divorce, all these decisions fall squarely back on your shoulders.
Herbert Simon, the 1978 Nobel laureate in Economics, spent his life studying one question: How do humans actually make decisions?
His findings upended the assumptions of every economist at the time.
Economics had long assumed that humans are “rational agents”—identifying the optimal solution from all possible options. Simon said: Incorrect.
The human brain is not a computer with infinite processing power. There is a cap on the information we can process, a cap on the number of options we can endure, and a cap on the energy we can spend on a single decision.
Exceed this cap, and the quality of your judgment begins to plummet.
He called this state: decision fatigue.
Herein lies the concept of “satisficing.”
Simon argued that people do not endlessly pursue the optimal solution—that is too expensive; the toll is too high. People stop when the first “good enough” option appears. Not the best, but “acceptable.”
This is not laziness. This is another form of rationality.
In your first year post-divorce, what you need is a “satisficing solution,” not an “optimal solution.”
You will notice a strange pattern.
In the first three months after a divorce, you are surprisingly decisive on the big things—moving, handling assets, notifying family and friends. Because these matters have clear deadlines; external pressure forces your hand.
But from the fourth to the twelfth month, you start constantly getting stuck on the small things.
What to eat tonight. Whether to reply to that WeChat message. Whether to renew the kid’s extracurricular classes.
These are trivial matters. Yet they quietly drain your judgment every single day.
Simon’s research demonstrates that people do not collapse under major decisions. They break down slowly from the cumulative attrition of countless minor decisions.
Those who emerge successfully from a divorce are not stronger than you.
They simply did one thing earlier than you: they established new defaults.
In marriage, you had defaults—visiting the in-laws on weekends, paying the mortgage at month’s end, taking the kids on summer vacation. These defaults saved you massive amounts of mental energy. After a divorce, all defaults are voided. You must rewrite a new set.
Wednesday is the kids’ time, non-negotiable. Review finances on the first Saturday of every month. Never make important decisions late at night.
These are not rules. These are methods to preserve your brain’s mental bandwidth.
Only with defaults in place will you have the energy to handle the things that truly require judgment.
During those five minutes standing outside the civil affairs bureau, your brain was executing a system switch.
Switching from “we” to “I.” Switching from a joint decision-making system to a solo system.
This switch does not happen overnight. It takes about a year. In the interim, you will repeatedly feel like you are making mistakes—some truly are mistakes, while others simply haven’t yielded results yet.
But a year later, looking back, you will realize: you did not collapse under any single decision.
You stood up, bit by bit, through the very act of “deciding everything alone.”
The fridge is empty. You open the food delivery app.
This is your first satisficing solution. Imperfect, but good enough. Start here.
[ One Thought ] — Decision-making can be practiced.
