This week, my wife and I are celebrating our 35th wedding anniversary. Of course, the inevitable question is, “Where would you like to go for dinner?” The ritualistic play then begins as my wife tells me she doesn’t care and asks me to choose. You can guess how the story proceeds from here. It is another example of the seeming ambiguity of choice: not necessarily knowing what we want but certainly knowing what we don’t want.

In previous essays, I’ve mentioned Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and today will be no exception. Sartre describes a man and a woman on a date. The man takes the woman’s hand. She can pull her hand away or grasp his hand firmly, with either action sending a clear signal to the man. But there is a third choice: she can do neither, leaving her hand where it is and behaving as though the situation were somehow outside her decision. That refusal to decide is itself a choice.