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My first Weekly Chart… about what?!
Hi! I’m Erle, data visualization developer at Datawrapper. I’m excited to share with you my first Weekly Chart, on a topic you might relate to: decision fatigue.
Two weeks ago, I left Milan behind after three years and moved to Catania, Sicily. I had to decide what to take with me, what to give or throw away, how to pack up my stuff, and how to divide my time between packing, working, and saying goodbye to friends and acquaintances. And once I arrived in Catania, I had to choose which of the many boxes to unpack first, which furniture to reassemble, which essentials to buy and where to buy them in this new city, and when to make time for these things alongside my job.
All this is probably why thinking about my first Weekly Chart filled me not only with excitement, but also with dread. So many interesting topics to explore, so many ideas vying for attention! It made me feel overwhelmed, and frankly also a little anxious. In short, I was suffering from a very familiar problem: decision fatigue.
Officially, decision fatigue is an “impaired ability to make decisions and control behavior as a consequence of repeated acts of decision-making.” Informally, many people use it to describe the stress they feel when being presented with too many options, closely related to FOMO, or fear of missing out. It could even make a good Weekly Chart topic… but I’d still have to choose a data-driven angle.
- Number of news articles about decision fatigue over the years?
- Common coping strategies for decision fatigue?
- My own long lists of un-started books/games/movies/series?
- Generational differences in experiencing decision fatigue?
- Or maybe mentions of the term “decision fatigue” on social media over the years?
In the end, I decided to investigate social media, specifically Reddit, because I was curious about how decision fatigue has impacted my own and subsequent generations (the first ones to use social media from a fairly young age).
Looking at the chart, it certainly seems that discussion of decision fatigue has been growing, with a notable bump in the years after COVID. However, I didn’t want to draw any hasty conclusions: maybe that was simply a byproduct of the increase in published posts overall?
The number of posts published on Reddit has been growing steadily over time, but this alone doesn't account for the jump in posts mentioning decision fatigue! The increase since 2022 really does reflect more interest in the topic.
I was also interested in the comments each post generated. Could I detect a pattern of engagement over time?
Since the pandemic, there has been a steady number of highly popular posts about decision fatigue. Several posts with a high number of comments touched on career and everyday life choices, including food choices. Some examples are:
- “being a woman is a full time job - im sick of it” (386 comments)
- “I hate eating. It gets in the way of what I'm doing, costs money, takes time, is difficult to make a decision, and is generally obstructive to anything I'm doing” (463 comments)
- “Help!! Which rug works better? Or should we go back and get one with more color?” (555 comments)
- “What is the biggest life decision you’ve ever made with the least forethought?” (the most commented post, with 726 comments)
Another thing that really stood out to me was the number of posts in subreddits about ADHD and autism, which include several of the most commented posts. Users in these threads especially reported struggling with decision fatigue in everyday life choices, such as what to wear and what to eat.
All in all I had a lot of fun digging through this data. One of my favorite posts was in the subreddit AskReddit, and posed the question: Your username is now your superpower, how will you save the world?
Says a user called OutsourcedDinnerPlan: “I will tell people where to eat. This in turn reduces decision fatigue for the entire world. The lack of decision fatigue frees up immense amounts of brain power all over the world, and we enter a golden age of innovation that makes the last decade look like the stone age.”
To save myself from the decision fatigue trap the next time I’m writing a Weekly Chart, I took some of Reddit's suggested strategies to heart. I started making a list, so that I always have some potential topics lying around; I’ve decided to prioritize topics that are closer to my core values; and I’m trying to tell myself that in the end, it’s not such a big deal which topic I choose. And if all else fails… Reddit told me I can also just flip a coin.
Doing research on Reddit
With a largely Gen Z and millenial user base, Reddit seemed to be just the place to research whether young people were preoccupied with decision fatigue. And since the site is largely public, I hoped it would be relatively easy to assemble raw data on its posts.
Initially, I wanted to keep things simple by using the readily available Reddit search.json API endpoint. Since this endpoint limits its results to the 100 most relevant posts, I assembled all subreddits of the returned posts (89 in total), and wrote a Python script that ran the same query for each subreddit. I reasoned that the subreddits with the top relevant posts might also be the most relevant subreddits for further discussion of the topic. In this way, I assembled 544 posts.
At this point, my fear of missing out on relevant data got the better of me. Given the limits of the search.json endpoint, I decided to create a Reddit account, which allowed me to use the Reddit API (using the Python Reddit API Wrapper package). I then repeated the process, first doing a general search of the term “decision fatigue,” followed by a search per subreddit. I ended up with a total of 893 posts in 175 subreddits, a dataset that I was reasonably happy with. Although (disclaimer!) it probably still doesn't cover the full range of Reddit content on decision fatigue — I didn't search for related terms like “decision paralysis” or “menu anxiety,” and I only searched in post text and titles, not in comments.
Finally, while creating the charts, I was very happy with our new line labelling algorithm, which neatly positions the most interesting values on the line! For all code and data used in this Weekly Chart, you can see this Github repo.
Further reading
- For a deeper dive I highly recommend this 2011 article from The New York Times, which summarizes a lot of the research on decision fatigue and offers some really interesting insights.
- The very first Reddit post on decision fatigue (published August 19, 2011), which mentions that article.
- An interesting Linkedin blog post on generational differences in decision fatigue
- The op-ed that popularized the term FOMO.
Phew, writing this blog post sure was a lesson in how to deal with my own decision fatigue! Next week, you’ll be treated to another Weekly Chart from our developer Toni. See you then!
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