The Tyranny of the Available
I am a 37-year-old man who has to be protected from ice cream.
Not by anyone else. By myself, earlier in the day, when I’m a different and more capable person. That version of me doesn’t buy ice cream. He knows what happens if he does.
It’s not widely known, but there exists a universal law of physics that reads “If there’s ice cream in the freezer, Machiel will eat ice cream”. The distance between “ice cream exists in my house” and “I am eating ice cream” is about four meters and zero decisions.
The mechanism
Here’s the thing I’ve come to believe: available things become defaults.
Your phone is in your pocket. It becomes the default way to fill dead time. Instagram is on your home screen. It becomes the default app you open. Beer is in the fridge. It becomes the default drink after work.
This isn’t about weakness. It’s about the path of least resistance when you stop actively choosing — which is most of the time. When you’re tired, you don’t make decisions. You just do what’s easiest. And what’s easiest is whatever’s closest.
The corollary is useful: if you want to change your habits, change your defaults, and to change your defaults, change what’s available to you.
Via negativa
The Stoics and Nassim Taleb (I am a fan boy) would approve: subtraction before addition.
First, remove the bad defaults:
- I don’t buy ice cream. Problem solved at the source.
- My phone lives in a different room while I sleep. The default when I wake up is now not scrolling, but going back to sleep.
- I don’t keep alcohol in the house. If I want a drink, I have to go get one. That friction is usually enough.
- I stripped my phone’s home screen. No social apps visible (in fact, I uninstalled most of them). If I want LinkedIn, I have to search for it. One extra step turns out to be one step too many when I’m just trying to fill thirty seconds.
These aren’t acts of discipline. They’re acts of resignation — acknowledging that future-me cannot be trusted. So present-me rigs the game.
Then add the good
Once you’ve cleared out the defaults that work against you, you can install better ones:
- Exercise clothes laid out the night before. The default in the morning becomes “put these on” rather than “decide whether to exercise” or “ooh, what’s happening on X today?”
- Book on the nightstand instead of phone. The default bedtime activity shifts.
- Fruit in the fridge, visible, at eye level. The default snack becomes the one you see first.
None of this is revolutionary. But the framing matters: you’re not building willpower. You’re engineering your environment so willpower becomes mostly irrelevant.
The higher stakes version
This principle scales beyond snacks and screen time and also applies to some real serious issues.
Suicide prevention research shows something counterintuitive: when you reduce access to means — bridge barriers, gun storage laws, smaller medication packaging — suicide rates drop. People mostly don’t just find another method. The impulse often passes.
Addiction recovery programs obsess over environment for the same reason. Change your haunts, change your friends, change what’s physically available to you. It’s not about being strong enough to resist. It’s about not having to.
And people don’t cheat on their partners because they’re uniquely weak or immoral. They cheat because they put themselves in positions where cheating becomes available. The drink with the coworker that becomes a habit. The DMs that drift. If you never create the availability, you never have to resist.
The common thread: you can’t make a decision you’ve already made.
The mental version
To me the most interesting part of this principle is that it seems to extend beyond physical availability.
What thoughts are available to you? What does your brain reach for?
Even though I’ve always been suspect, the availability mechanic might explain why affirmations work for so many people. So it’s not magical thinking, but rather changes what’s mentally accessible. Repeat something enough and it becomes a default thought pattern, you are creating your mental environment and defaults.
This is also why the people around you matter so much. Spend time with people who think in scarcity and complaint, and those thoughts become your defaults. Spend time with people who default to curiosity and agency, and you absorb that instead.
You’re not just choosing your friends. You’re choosing your available thoughts.
In closing
If you take this seriously, you have to admit something: you are not the captain of your ship. You’re more like a chess player who gets to set up the board before the game, but then has to play with whatever pieces are in front of you.
The version of you at 9pm, exhausted, decision-fatigued, just wanting something easy — that version is going to do whatever’s available. You can’t talk them out of it. You can’t motivate them, at least not most of the time. You can only make sure the available options are ones you won’t regret.
I don’t keep ice cream in the house because I know who I become at 9pm. That guy cannot be reasoned with. He can only be contained.
It’s not discipline. It’s environmental design.