Bias: Choice Overload

Introduction to Episode

0:00Hello, and welcome to Everything's Psychology. I'm Paul Davis. Normally on the podcast, if you've listened before, you will know that I interview psychologists about their work, about the books they've written, and all about a certain topic. And we've covered things from vampires to cycling, from OnlyFans through to conspiracy theories. And I'd like to get into that psychology behind things that maybe we don't think psychology is actually involved in. But the next couple of episodes are going to be a bit different.

0:33They're going to be different because I'm going to read you a story. Now, please excuse my self-indulgence, but they're fictional stories that I've written. So what on earth have they got to do with psychology? Why am I putting these into the podcast? Well, I had an idea

Writing Short Stories About Biases

0:50a couple of years ago about writing short stories all about psychological biases. Now, the behavioral biases that we talk about in the show, such as choice overload, present bias, loss aversion, hyperbolic discounting, all of these different sort of biases have an effect on our behavior. Now, normally they may affect the way that we save or don't, or the way we buy things or regret buying things. And there's various different ways in life that

1:21they affect our behavior. I thought, could I exaggerate these into a short story, a fictional story where they act upon the characters that I've built into the stories, change their timeline, and influence what they do, sometimes in a dark way, at least in a slightly macabre way, sometimes in a humorous way. But I thought, could I have fun with the idea of creating fictional stories from psychological biases? So if you like the sound of that, fantastic. The next

1:53couple of episodes are for you. If you don't, then don't worry, just skip them. The interviews will be back in the new year and I'll be interviewing psychologists about their topics as soon as I

Story Introduction

2:05can in 2026. Each of the stories I'm going to share with you starts off with a factual bit of it in the fact that I try and share with you the idea of what the bias is. I share some of the main experiments that have been about it just to introduce you to the bias and how it affects behavior. I then lead into the fictional story where this particular bias affects the characters in the story in some way. Just a quick note before I get going. I'm not a professional voiceover

2:36artist. I don't have professional equipment. I can't do voices. I certainly can't do accents. So I don't even try. But I do try and read the story slowly enough and hopefully clearly enough that it's still enjoyable for you. So I hope it's okay. This first story I'm going to read to you is

Choice Overload Explanation

2:57all about choice overload. And it will start with a brief introduction into what choice overload is before going into the fictional story which this week is called Spaghetti Sauce. I hope you enjoy it.

3:19Imagine walking into a food market and finding that they're promoting a new brand of gourmet jam. As you pass the display, the presentation of brightly colored conserve on little triangular pieces of toast piques your interest. So you stop and you try a sample. Now in one scenario, you're offered a mind-boggling array of 24 varieties of the sticky stuff. But in another, you're only offered a measly choice of six basic flavors. In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up exactly these

3:57two scenarios at a Bay Area supermarket. They found that while the larger choice certainly gained greater attention from shoppers, having more options meant consumers were only one-tenth as likely to purchase any jam. Choice is a paradox. We convince ourselves that we want it, and we certainly rebel when it's taken away from us. But when we get too much of it, we regularly struggle to make a choice.

4:28Every new option exerts a psychological burden on us, because it offers a new opportunity to be wrong. Even if we make the right choice, we'll always wonder if we would have been better off picking one of the alternatives. And this leads to an overall feeling of dissatisfaction, no matter what choice we make. Now, if this phenomenon were purely restricted to our choice of jam or any other inconsequential consumer goods, it wouldn't cause us much worry. But choice paralysis can have meaningful consequences.

5:04In a review of how employees make voluntary investment choices for their retirement, Vanguard revealed that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, the participation rate went down by 2%. By not making a choice, employees struck down with decision paralysis lose out on up to $5,000 a year from employee contributions. It's not that having a choice is wrong, and that we should all have our decisions dictated to us,

5:36but our world is now so full of so many choices, that many decide to make no choice at all. When faced with too much choice, it's easier to put off the decision until tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and never have to admit that tomorrow never comes. That's enough. 3 is a multiple of 12.

6:116 is better. That's a pure half. I can live with that. Okay, the full 12. You really can't argue with that.

Main Character's Story Begins

6:22I give the door a push to make sure it's properly shut, and I pace down the open walkway to the stairs. Looking over the balcony, I see the Lubecki kids playing with an excited dog in the ballpark below. The Lubeckis don't own a dog. I look away. I wrap my knuckles on the top of each of the six steel bollards between our apartment and the stairs, and I'm satisfied with the tinny sound that resonates from the hollow structure. As I get to the stairwell, I remember to miss the second step and take them two at a time.

6:56Many people take the stairs two at a time on the way up, but doing it on the way down requires some next-level concentration. On the way down, I pass Mrs Brockman from next door. She's carrying too many shopping bags, and I can hear a wheezing sound coming from her chest. I offer to help, but she starts her customary lecture about women like us needing to stand on our own two feet. 21 years ago, Mr Brockman left her to shack up with a transvestite called Nevaeh.

7:27Seven months after leaving, police found his limp body suspended in a mock dungeon, wearing a leather chatterty belt and a pair of silicone wearable breasts. Everyone in the flats knows, but everyone goes along with her story that he moved to Maine. In total, there are 60 steps to our floor. From here, she has 30 to go. The Sumerians could count to 60 using their hands. Hold up your left hand and use your thumb to point at your knuckles.

8:01Starting with your index finger, you get 1 to 3, then up to 6 with your middle finger. By the time you reach your last knuckle on your pinky finger, you've got 12. Now on your right hand, record the 12 by holding up one finger. Then go again on your left hand, and you'll get to 24, which you mark by holding up the next finger on your right hand. Keep going until you've used all your fingers and thumb on your right hand, and you have counted up to 60.

8:33I go even further by using my knuckles on my right hand to record each set of 12. That way, I can count to 144 using just my fingers.

8:44It was over 4,500 years ago, but the Sumerians knew their shit when it came to numbers. 60 is the lowest number that can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. This makes 60 exceptionally useful for making calculations. It's why we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 minutes of arc in one degree of an angle, and six times that number of degrees, 360, in a circle.

9:17I decide to walk on the other side of our building to get to the bus stop. The sun shines on the faded pink paint, making me feel like I'm in Cuba. I should get some of those glasses that have pink lenses. Better yet, yellow lenses, so I can feel that I'm in Mexico all the time. Have you noticed that whenever a TV show wants you to think the action is taking place in Mexico, they just put a yellow lens on the camera and increase the exposure? I've seen movies like this being filmed down by City Lake.

9:49Between takes, the actors wear oversized Canada Goose jackets to keep them warm and only strip off to their goa bearers when filming their scenes. If you look closely, I swear you can see their teeth chattering in the movies. As I near the bus stop, I see 181 pulling up. I slow my pace and look away so the driver doesn't think I'm trying to catch his ride. As I glance to see if he's pulling out, we catch each other's eyes. He tilts his head to one side and nods at the door to signal if I want him to wait.

10:22I give my head the tiniest shake and look down at my cons. He activates the door mechanism and signals to leave. The traffic doesn't immediately let him out, so I keep walking. I pass the stop and I continue to the corner of the sidewalk before I look back. The bus is moving down Roosevelt Highway, so I pivot and return to the stop. I mean, who in their right mind would catch the 181 when the 180 would be coming up right behind? One journey into town and then back again.

10:542 times 180 equals 360.

11:00Sexagesimal is the term for counting in base 60. It's a great name, and I laugh whenever I think about it. 60 is a highly composite number and has 12 divisors. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. Of which, 2, 3, and 5 are prime numbers. Dad said this must be important. He had taught maths at Creekside and claimed that numbers were in our blood.

11:32His father before him taught maths in Kabbalah, as did his father before him. This tradition stops with Amal and me, but numbers are certainly in my head. I remember feeling sad when he told me that this sequence was called Regular Numbers. The name makes the numbers sound so dull and unimportant. I felt they deserved better.

11:56The next day, Dad was late home, and we were having dinner when he came in. Excitedly, he pulled out two packages from his satchel and gave one each to Amal and me. We ripped off the cheap tissue paper and found we each had a new t-shirt with 5 smooth written on the front in cobalt blue, cooper black lettering. Dad explained that the regular numbers which makes up the sexagesimal system are also called 5 smooth, as they only have 2, 3, or 5 as their prime factors.

12:33Amal never wore his, so it stayed in a drawer until I was older, and the larger size could then fit me. I still wear it to bed every night. I get on the bus and walk down the aisle, lightly tapping the second, third, and fifth metal upright as I make my way to my favourite seat. It's nearly always free, as it's the only one where the decal on the outside blocks the window. If I pressed my face to the window, I would be able to see the streets of Fairburn pass by,

13:05but that would miss the point of sitting in this seat. The journey to the food market is exactly 24 minutes. I put on my beats and put out my cell. Spotify has suggested some new playlists. The heading, Made for Elle Suleyman, is set in their new font, Spotify Mix. I recently watched the launch video and listened to their overly enthusiastic creative director and explained how it signified breaking free from traditional typographic constraints.

13:37It looks a lot like a Helvetica knock-off to me. In the first playlist, they put three tracks from Tycho. They're not together, but it still feels lazy, so I move on. The second playlist seems to be based on the time that I got into listening to Yo-Yo Ma. His macabre cello played over a scene from Daredevil where the kingpin was making an omelette. It was such an everyday thing to be doing, but the combination of the deep cello notes

14:07and the complete lack of emotion as the oversized baby man chopped spring onions made the scene pregnant with malice. Amal and I thought it was cool, so we looked up the track. I played it on repeat for about three days. I thought the intellectual sound of Yo-Yo's cello would help with my web design. It didn't. I looked up and saw that we were approaching the Beginnings Senior Centre. I didn't really know what went on in there, but the name struck me as an oxymoron.

14:41When Amal and I were little, Mum and Dad used to drive past and say that was where old people used to have injections to make them start growing younger again. When we were older and they were gone, we watched Benjamin Button on Netflix and I realised where they lifted the idea.

14:58Passing the Senior Centre meant I had 12 minutes left before my stop. My phone had gone back to sleep, so I pressed the screen and go back to Spotify. There are six daily mixes, a mixtape of new music, a playlist of songs released this week, and a beta feature where an AI DJ sifts through my listening history and introduces tracks in an uncanny valley voice reminiscent of a sanitised iced tea. I think I'll just find an old favourite myself.

15:30I pull out my notebook and sift through the pages to find where I have written my catalogue of playlists and albums. My therapist taught me to make a list when I feel overwhelmed or out of control. I've made so many bad choices in the past, and now I constantly worry about whether what I'm doing is right. In my head, options float around and never settle in one place. They overlap and they multiply as they collide together to form meta-possibilities.

16:01Writing them down removes their autonomy to attack my senses. They become physically bound to the paper and are given the discipline my brain fails to provide. To-do lists are back in style again now. My Insta feed is full of people offering improved list management techniques and selling second brain systems to help organise my life. I once made a list of all the productivity systems I should try one day. My therapist said to scribble a hashtag in the top right corner of each page.

16:35This helps me re-find lists when I need them. Flicking through the hashtags, I find one called Hashtag Shakes I get distracted and scan the list. Almond Butter Cherry Coffee Eggnog Honeycomb Hydrox Green Tea Gold Rush Butter Pecan Sea Salt Spumoni Tea Berry And Whirly Burly I remember this was the menu of flavours at Alberto's Shake Shack

17:07We went for Tea's birthday. Tea had a whirly-burly and it immediately gave her the shits which dripped right down her white tights. I never ended up getting a shake for myself. Flicking backwards and forwards, I see that I've written several music lists. Some are playlists, some albums, and some are just individual tracks I want to remember. They're in no particular order and spread out through my notebook. For lists like this, I manually draw a small box to the left of each item so it becomes a checklist.

17:43In my sessions, Dr Moskovitz will often review them to see what I've managed to achieve. None of the playlists I've noted down have been checked off yet. Maybe I should create a list of all my music lists. The bus is now approaching the stop nearest Wayfields. I close my notebook and draw the connected band around the cover. I snap the elastic twelve times onto the hard cover and the sound echoes down the bus. An old man with a greyhound, that's the spit of Snoop Dogg,

18:14turns to see what's causing the noise, but I avert my eyes and just walk past them.

18:21One of my favourite movies is The Wolf of Wall Street. It's exactly three hours long. That's 180 minutes of watching Leo snort half of Columbia up his hooter. For movies, they use vitamin powder in place of cocaine. While filming, Jonah Hill consumed so much vitamin D powder that he was admitted to hospital with bronchitis. If I made movies, I'd tell them all to finish on a five smooth number, but I'll stay away from the coke.

18:53We have the Babylonians to thank for how we time things. They divided an hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds. When you say a film is three hours, you're actually adopting an ancient number system that says it's three units of 60. It blows my mind to think that this was developed over 4,000 years ago. As well as time and angles, the Babylonians used their advanced mathematics to study the night sky.

19:30Using just maths, they discovered that Jupiter takes 12 years to orbit the Sun. From this, they divided one Earth year into 12 sections, and named each after the most prominent constellation at that time. The Zodiac is really a coordinate system for computing celestial positions, not some baloney for forecasting when lonely people will find happiness. The mumbo-jumbo spouted by nefarious con-artists purporting to be able to predict people's future should be made illegal.

20:04Of course, I would say that. Typical Pisces. 12 is my special number. It's a divisor of 60, and it would be easier to use for base numbers. A base is just how many unique symbols you have before you need to combine them to form higher numbers. Adopting 12 as our base would make everyday life a lot easier because it's so much simpler to divide. 12 is also a 5-smooth number. There are plenty of food markets closer to our apartment,

20:40but the ultra-bold blue lettering adorning wayfields reminds me of my 5-smooth t-shirt. I take it as a sign that I should shop here. Some people like shopping, but for me it's a battleground. The cart-wielding shoppers are my enemy, and every aisle is a trench I need to traverse to gain the victory of the exit. With every turn, I'm faced with brash signage, shamelessly screaming for my attention. I can't just grab some spinach.

21:11I need to come face-to-face with Grover and Ernie from Sesame Street, needling me to eat brighter.

21:19Rice cake packaging boasts that they now have a new look but the same taste. I can't help but think that they should have spent more time making them taste less like ceiling tiles. Stickers on chicken wings state that they are 100% natural, but surely not as natural as being attached to a healthy chicken. And I'm told that the creamy blue pearlescent shampoo has a new and improved formula. How can something be both new and improved?

21:50Corn yellow signs waft above my head with a scarlet sans serif shouting in capitals that own brand soda is $1 each or $10 for $10. It doesn't even make sense that there's a sign for this. If all this wasn't enough,

Shopping Experience

22:06my buying journey is accompanied by the discordant symphony of screaming infants wanting to be somewhere else. Preening preteens gathering around the latest celebrity-endorsed toxic scent. And endless broods of postpartum women clucking about the latest momfluencer trend for wake windows. I bet they're all vaping in a locked toilet by 10am just for five minutes of alone time.

22:32Ironically, I don't use a list for shopping. I get the same items every time I visit. There are 15 aisles in total, but I never buy anything from aisles that aren't regular numbers. This isn't a problem when buying fresh produce, as every store puts these by the entrance. This is a trick by consumer psychologists who want you to feel that everything in the store that they sell is fresh and natural. It's why you never see towers of toilet paper when you first walk in.

23:04Problematically, they have put all the bathroom products in out of 10, but I often gain the system by grabbing what I need from the end of display promotions.

23:14We are used to 10 meaning 10. But in a duodecimal system, 10 means 12. Historians think we use 10 as the base for our numbers because we have 10 fingers. What a ludicrous foundation to base mathematics on. There's a British actress who was born with six fingers on each hand. What would have happened if she started her own counting system? She didn't, though. She had sex with James Bond and then died covered in crude oil.

23:45It sounds strange to have anything other than a system where 10 means 10. But number systems are only based on what everyone agrees is the large unit. Decimal means that 10 is the large unit. So, 1, 0 means 1, 10 and 0, 1s. Computers use a binary system where 2 is the large unit. So, 1, 0 means 1, 2 and 0, 1s.

24:16If we used a duodecimal numeral system, 12 would be the large unit. So, 1, 0 would mean 1, 12 and 0, 1s. I sometimes think I could use this reasoning to buy items from aisle 10. But I know that's not what Wayfields really mean. So, I just can't bring myself to do it.

24:39Amal has asked if we could have spaghetti bolognese tonight. We're vegetarian, but we saw an Italian chef make it on opera with grated tofu. He was a big, burly man with a Salvador Dali moustache and looked more like a wrestler than a chef. I bet there is a wrestler chef in WWE. I can imagine his shtick would be twirling a pizza base up in the air as he manoeuvred around the ring, distracting his opponent before landing the dough on their face and performing a brain buster on them.

25:11The chef on opera didn't do any of this. He just grated the tofu and fried it up. It looked a lot like cat litter.

25:20Spaghetti is part of Amal's latest idea to travel the world in food. He says that just because he can't walk doesn't mean that his taste buds can't have wanderlust. It's nearly 13 years since the accident that paralysed Amal and killed Dad. A classic psychology experiment showed that people have a baseline level of happiness and no matter if they win the lottery or become paralysed, they will return to their baseline within a couple of years. We don't gamble, so we'll never know if this is true for winning the lottery,

25:55but we all struggled for much longer.

25:58I was precisely 11 when the accident happened. Amal was 14. Neither are smooth numbers. Amal wanted to go to Topgolf, as they had just opened a new game where you could hit angry birds down the fairway to knock down different structures. Now honestly, that did sound cool, but it was my birthday, so it was my choice. Instead, I picked the Centre for Puppetry. Tia had recently been and had her picture taken with Sprocket from Fraggle Rock,

26:29and I wanted some of that action for my feed. Dad said a friend worked at the Georgia Institute of Technology, so we could park there and walk through Midtown and get hot chocolate on the way. We never made it to Midtown, as a car transporter crashed through the barrier on the 85 and singled us out amongst all the traffic. Amal was in the front with Dad, and they took the impact. I remember the shock of hearing the bellowing horn,

27:00followed instantly by a sharp cracking at the front of our Toyota Camry crumpled. As we span across the highway, the transporter's persistent horn created a Doppler effect, where its scream became louder and softer on each spin. As all this was happening, I distinctly remember thinking that if I'd chosen Topgolf, we'd have taken the 12 instead. I still haven't met Sprocket.

27:28There's a growing number of people around the world who believe we should ditch our decimal system in favour of using duodecimal or dozenal numeration. The Dozenal Society of America was founded in 1944 and has been quietly highlighting the inadequacies of our incumbent mathematical methodology. They post videos online that show how the decimal system handicaps the teaching of arithmetic, which has the knock-on effect of us not fully understanding

28:00the physical world around us. People only use the decimal system because they think there's no other choice. If this idea took off, there would need to be two new symbols for the extra numbers in the system. Zero to nine would remain as the R. Ten would be X and pronounced as DEC. Eleven would be E and pronounced as L. When you include zero, L is the 12th number in the series.

28:30That's why Dad named me L. I find the Italian food in aisle 12.

Finding Italian Food

28:38After scouring the shelves for some time, I finally see the gluten-free spaghetti hidden on a low shelf next to something called ziti, which looks like tiny dog dicks. The spaghetti sauces are further along the aisle and as I wheel my overloaded cart along, I can see the checkouts beckoning through the tunnel of red and white jars. As I stand in front of the display of sauces, I start to feel hot.

29:07Simply traditional, zesty, extra basil, light, roasted garlic, old world traditional, super chunky, red pepper, cabernet with herbs, nice and spicy, arabiata, and bizarrely even hint of vodka. And that's just one brand. I can see labels from ragu, prego, classico, protoli, rouse, homemade, carbone, tantilo, tutoroso, Newman's own, mazzetta,

29:38hunts, and wayfield's own brand. I can feel my eyes swelling and my vision starts to blur. I just want to sit, but where are those tiny little stools on wheels when you want one? I step back and knock into a member of staff stacking tins of chopped tomatoes into a pyramid display. He looks about 13 years old and is wearing a large golden badge, saying, I'm here to help. I apologise, but his phlegmatic expression

30:09tells me that the last thing he wants to do is help. I move away from the wall of sauces back to the safety of the spaghetti. I breathe in for a count of four. Then hold for a count of four. Then out for another four.

30:26Dr Moskowitz says this triggers my body's relaxation response and activates my parasympathetic nervous system. As my vision starts to focus, I watch an old man wearing a fedora take four cans of tomatoes from the display. He takes them from one of the protruding edges of the pyramid like it's a game of Jenga. The dour teen looks crestfallen. I pull out my notebook and I find a new page. I scribble

30:56hashtag spaghetti sauce onto the corner of the fresh sheet and start to write a list. Think about how much twelve crops up in life. We count eggs in twelve. We send loved ones twelve red roses. There are twelve inches in a foot. We get taught our times tables up to twelve. In Germanic languages, like English, we have unique words for eleven and twelve

31:27which are never used again. When writing, we're taught to spell out the numbers zero to twelve but from thirteen onwards, we're allowed to lazily revert to using numbers. Sesame Street trains kids to count to twelve by following the animated journey of a pinball as it ricochets around the impossible course of the machine's innards while the pointer sisters vocalise the numbers' importance with their funky dozen or earworm. This can't all be by chance.

32:00It must mean something.

32:04Back at the apartment, I unpack the shopping. Amal is playing a new game on the meta quest where he becomes a Norse god and leads a band of mortals on a quest to enlightenment. There's a special mode so he can play from his wheelchair. I tried the headset once but I freaked out not being able to see the real walls of the room. Within seconds, I banged into a shelf and knocked over Mum. Her ashes are in an ornate, curvaceous samovar beside Dad's perfect square container.

32:36We moved her and Dad out into the hall in case of future clumsiness. Mum passed away four years ago from cancer. After Dad died, she'd split her time between caring for Amal and working at the bakery. She'd always bring home discarded hoagies that hadn't raised properly. Amal and I still have a hoagie with grilled halloumi and roasted vegetables each year on her birthday. They don't taste the same and we can't decide whether they've changed or we have.

33:08She never blamed me for the crash. She said it was a freak accident and my decision to visit the puppets had nothing to do with what happened. She told me that researchers found that there were more swimming pool drownings in the years when Nick Cage released a movie. Her point was that nobody blamed the star of Conair for the aquatic casualties. We looked it up and found that in 2007 Cage released four movies and 122 people

33:39drowned in their swimming pools. It was a record year and I worried that was a lot for his conscience to handle.

33:47When I worried about the choice I made on my birthday she used to hold me tight and say ad hoc ergo prompter hock. I never understood what she meant but I savoured the safety of her embrace. I drain the spaghetti and sprinkle over the fried tofu. It looks like a bright orange bird's nest with added gravel. Amal takes off his headset and looks down at the plate that I've just put on his lap tray. If I look in your notebook

34:19would I find a list of spaghetti sources? He asks rhetorically while attempting the impossible task of combining some dry spaghetti and tofu on his fork. He gives up and uses his fingers instead. It's the appointment tomorrow I remind him. You go. I'm not up to it. He hasn't gone to any appointments for months. I'm his power of attorney and can attend on his behalf. He has home visits from care assistants who take regular

34:50blood samples so I don't push him to come. I know it would be better if we went together but the thought of getting him over to South Fulton on public transport fills me with dread. After the 180 we'd have to catch the 93 and then the 78. What kind of numbers are those?

35:11In high school we learnt that Pythagoras calculated the length of one side of a right-angled triangle by knowing the size of the other two sides. Now it might be clever but it's hardly going to earn him a Netflix special. When teaching Dad couldn't share the more interesting aspects of Pythagoras but at home I would sit and listen how he was reportedly seen in two places at once that one of his thighs was golden and that he killed

35:42a venomous snake by biting it in half and that numbers whispered their secrets to him. Move over David Blaine Pythagoras is in town. When Dad sat in his chair and regaled me with all these tall tales of ancient Greece I stopped picturing Pythagoras as this vanilla old dude wearing a toga and boring people with turgid tales of triangles. He became a mathematical superhero living his life by numbers and harnessing their power to be at one

36:13with the world around him. Over the last two millennia we've lost all our respect for numbers. Modern mathematicians treat them like laboratory rats subjecting them to endless torture until they succumb and betray the universe's secrets. Dad taught me to respect numbers. Life taught me to listen to their whispers. The medical centre

Medical Centre Visit

36:38is in a perfectly square white building opposite a storage depot. I speculate if extra space storage seconds as an overflow morgue for John and Jane Doe's. I imagine stacks of unidentified cadavers kept on ice next to a divorcee's bloated belongings that don't fit in to their new companionless one-bed apartment. I would definitely watch an episode of Storage Hunters where they clang open the metal shutter of a unit and find

37:09rows upon rows of blue stiffs with toe tags Atlanta's very own purgatory. I walk up the five steps from the sidewalk to the building. There are another two up to the foyer but I take them both at once. Six is better than seven. Amal's consultant is on the fourth floor but I take the stairs. As I turn the last corner in the stairwell I see the final flight and stop. I've counted 56 so far

37:40and there are eight steps left. I take them two at a time. The waiting room is full of sick people. They don't look it but I know they are. Well why else would they be here? I stand by the water faucet and watch as a teenager in shorts is wheeled into an oversized lift. The orderly guiding him has thick black hair which is hair sprayed into an Elvis quiff to match his sideburns which extend down his cheeks to a sharp

38:10point like an arrow indicating where his chin should be. I wonder if he plumped for this period of Elvis because it conveniently matched his own portly stature. If I'd seen him 15 years ago would he have been wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a lay plucking on a humiliatingly small guitar? car? The cheap plastic clock on the wall tells me it's now 8 minutes after my appointment. I check my Casio. It uses multi-band

38:426-wave SEPTA technology to sync to a central atomic clock every 3 minutes. It says the same as the clock on the wall.

38:53Amal Suleiman appears on the large flat-screen monitor in a block serif that I don't recognise. I walk down the long corridor to the room number shown on the screen and feel that the carpet here makes me bounce up and down as I step. As I walk into the consultation room Dr. Cortell offers me his hand and asks if Amal is with me. He seems perturbed when I tell him that it would just be me and indicates that I should sit in the single chair he's put in

39:23front of the desk.

39:26There's another doctor with him who looks like she's a model for a photo library. She wears her coffee brown hair up but a single lock of a beautifully conditioned mane escapes down her face and cascades over the shoulder of an obligatory long white coat. She has an actual stethoscope around her neck. I've watched enough Grey's Anatomy to know that doctors don't use these anymore so I'm immediately wary of her. Kortel starts as he always does by reciting

39:57a barrage of details from various charts and printouts. When we came with mum I just had to sit in the corner. I'd scroll through my fees to keep busy as mum and Amal pretended to understand. Now it's my responsibility to pretend but the words slide straight off my brain and onto the floor. I look down and imagine seeing a soup of medical jargon around my feet sinking slowly into the deep shag of the carpet. El, do you

40:27hear me? Kortel said. Not waiting for my answer he repeats it in simpler terms. Amal's latest blood results indicate that there is a chance he might have Addison's disease. It's a rare disorder of the adrenal glands. The supermodel doctor asks if I have noticed any changes in Amal recently, lack of energy or mood changes. After hearing that this was the case, they look at each other earnestly.

40:59It turns out that Addison's can be controlled with medicine, which replaces the hormones naturally created by the adrenal glands. Amal will need to take this medicine for the rest of his life, but it shouldn't affect him any more than that. The glamour doc congratulates herself for catching it at this point, as left untreated, it can full adrenal crisis, and even death.

41:25Cortell picks up where the fit physician left off, and tells me that they believe in patient centred care and giving full autonomy to those under their supervision. I interpret the medical jargon to mean that despite spending years of their life learning about the workings of the human body, they want to shift the burden of picking a mouth treatment to someone who designs websites for a living. I realise I'm dead right when he recites a list of names. Hydrocortisone,

41:56prednisone, mitoprednilisoline, dexamethasone, and hydrocortisone, sodium succinate. I can also choose if I want the corticosteroid from Pfizer, Tiva, Sanofi, Milan, AbbVie, AstraZeneca, or Organon. He starts to relay the risks and the benefits of each, but his voice turns fuzzy and I slip my shoe off and start curling my toes between the soft pile of the carpet.

42:28In eight months, I turned twenty-four. Most people my age would arrange wild parties to chug endless buds or shoot tequila shots with people they want to impress. I didn't get into that life. Not just because I needed to care for a mull, but the thought of wedging myself into dingy bars filled with clammy men in tight tees and teetering women taking selfies as proof that they're living their best life makes me sick in my own mouth.

42:58Despite this gulf in life choices, I'm still excited about my birthday. my last five smooth year was four years ago. I lost my virginity on my 20th birthday at Bear Creek. It sounds romantic, but I'm sure I spotted someone perving on us from the new builds on Augusta Drive.

43:19Making any serious decisions when I'm 23 would be foolish. I can't risk it when I'm so close to a pure dozen all year. I need to listen to the whispers. When I'm 24 I'll be better. I'll be able to make choices and I'll work back through my catalogue of lists to break the unhealthy groove Dr. Moskovitz says I've created for myself. I realise that Kortel has stopped talking and both of them are looking at me over the expanse of

43:50their oak desk. Realising they expect a response I reach into my inner pocket and pull out my notebook. Don't worry I say I'll make a list.