Decision-making can be hard. Even seemingly innocuous choices come with a barrage of tradeoffs. At a fundamental level, every choice you make has an opportunity cost: all of the other choices you could have made that are incompatible with your current choice. Even the time and energy spent making a decision is a cost.

Yes, everything.

Why might this be non-obvious, particularly when applied across all the choices we make in a day? Many times, the problem is relatively inconsequential, so picking a random point reasonably near the Pareto frontier is fine, and you can quickly discard most options because they are strictly worse. With more important decisions, it’s possible to quickly narrow down the relevant tradeoffs by using heuristics such as values and principles (assuming your values are useful). Only a very small subset of decisions make it to the stage where we consciously consider the tradeoffs involved.

Awareness of tradeoffs is a superpower.

I’m not suggesting that we need to carefully evaluate all of the decisions we make. Some, like the order in which you put on clothes, have battle-worn heuristics. For example, putting on underwear before pants is pretty infallible. But awareness of the underlying reality - that tradeoffs are involved in every decision - can help you recognize the situations in which the general heuristics may not align with your goals. If you’re a superhero or otherwise rebelling against the societal tyranny of clothing order, then you might make a different decision - trading off comfort for whatever reason it is that Superman wears underwear on the outside. (I googled it so you don’t have to: Underpants on tights were signifiers of extra-masculine strength and endurance in 1938.)

Be suspicious of things without tradeoffs.

This is also a reminder that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is - and it’s better to know why upfront than to be blindsided by an unexpected tradeoff later on. If a proposal only has positives, find the negatives before they find you. Look out for tradeoffs everywhere, because everything is tradeoffs.