15 March 2026

The Coffee Order Problem

I ordered the same coffee at the same café for about three years before a change in the milk supply caused a temporary shortage that forced me to order something different. The something different turned out to be noticeably better. I have now been ordering it for four months.

This is a small and almost entirely inconsequential story, but I have been thinking about what it reveals. The original coffee was fine. It was perfectly adequate. There was no reason to change it, and so I did not change it, for three years, despite the fact that I was visiting a café with an extensive menu and presumably some imagination about what it had to offer.

The comfortable default is one of the more reliable enemies of discovery. Not because defaults are bad — often they are calibrated by experience and represent genuinely good choices — but because the condition of not-questioning is almost indistinguishable from the condition of not-thinking. You stop registering the choice as a choice. The decision is made once, and then it is made forever, until something external forces a reconsideration.

I am trying to notice the places where I am on automatic. The route I walk, the format I default to, the way I begin a piece of writing. These are all choices that have stopped feeling like choices. Some of them, when I look at them, turn out to be good. Others are just old.