Keeping Options Open Has a Hidden Cost

December 20, 2021

The instinct to preserve every possible choice feels rational but is often deeply wasteful. The cost of keeping doors open is paid in the currency of commitment, focus, and the compounding returns you forgo.

"In their frenzy to keep doors from shutting, our participants ended up making substantially less money (about 15 percent less) than the participants who didn't have to deal with closing doors. The truth is that they could have made more money by picking a room any room and merely staying there for the whole experiment!"

Ariely's door-closing experiments are a vivid demonstration of a universal human failure. When participants could see doors disappearing, they frantically clicked to keep them open, even though doing so cost them money. The rational strategy was to commit to the highest-value room and stay. But the emotional pain of watching a door close of losing an option forever overrode the math. "We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open. It's just the way we're wired."

This maps directly onto career decisions, strategic planning, and even equity compensation. Byrne Hobart notes that employees holding stock options face asymmetric downside because they are far less diversified than their investors: "It's a lot easier to create a portfolio of 20 angel investments than to create a portfolio of 20 angel-funded jobs." The option value of keeping possibilities open looks attractive in theory but imposes real costs in focus, energy, and the ability to compound expertise in a single domain.

Erich Fromm identified this in 1941: modern democracies do not suffer from a lack of opportunity but from a "dizzying abundance of it." The fear of missing out drives us to spread ourselves across too many pursuits, never committing deeply enough to any single one to achieve mastery. Meanwhile, as Ariely warns, the doors that close slowly childhood, health, relationships are the ones we most need to pay attention to, and they disappear while we are busy keeping trivial options alive.

Takeaway: Deliberately close doors that do not deserve your attention the cost of keeping them open is measured in the depth of commitment you deny to things that matter.