Skip Logic
The Relief of Certainty
Have you ever made a decision, then immediately questioned whether it was the right one?
You volunteer for that stretch assignment — even though you don’t really have time for it — because it shows initiative.
You buy a new car — even though the monthly note will stretch you financially — because it feels like a marker of success.
Or, you decide to lock yourself in a room and live stream your entire life for a full year so you can lose weight.
That last one may sound unrealistic.
It's not.
Last month Skip Boyce, a 49-year-old man in Utah, made the drastic decision to isolate himself from his wife, four kids, and the rest of the world — until January 2027 — in an effort to get healthier.
If you've been reading Sunday Setup long enough, you know this is the point I usually try insert a few light-hearted jokes.
Not today.
Stay with me.
A Clean Decision in a Messy Situation
When I first read about Skip, my reaction was probably the same as yours: "Why would someone do that?"
But the more I read — and the more places I saw the story reported — the less interested I became in whether this was a good idea or a bad one.
What stayed with me wasn’t the extremity of the decision. It was how understandable the reasoning felt.
We've all been so frustrated with something or someone that we've considered a "nuclear option" just to relieve the pain, but we never follow through.
Skip did.
By locking himself in a room, he figured he could eliminate an entire category of decisions that kept derailing him.
Skip talked openly about struggling with his mental health and feeling stuck. That's when I stopped seeing him as an oddity and started seeing him as a person — one who made a very clean decision in response to something that felt unbearably messy.
Granted, most of us won't commit to locking ourselves in a room for a year, but we will look for quick exits out of uncomfortable situations.
Not because we’re lazy.
But because small discomforts drain us quietly — and we want them to stop.
The Skip In Us
At work, this often shows up as micro-avoidance.
Instead of avoiding work, we avoid the tiny moments where something could go wrong or reveal uncertainty.
We open the email, reread it, tweak one sentence, then close it — not because it's hard to write it, but because sending it creates a moment where someone might disagree, misunderstand, or respond poorly.
Instead of giving direct feedback, we update a process or create new guidelines just to avoid uncomfortable conversations.
Instead of deciding, we schedule another meeting.
It often looks responsible. It often sounds strategic.
But underneath, it’s the same impulse: designing our environment so we don’t have to encounter a small, repeated discomfort.
The risk of decision elimination isn’t that it avoids discomfort. It’s that it removes something else along with it.
When we design our environments to eliminate friction, we don’t just remove pain — we remove feedback. We remove the moments where we learn how to adjust, recalibrate, or grow in small ways.
Discomfort isn’t always a signal to escape. Sometimes it’s information.
And when we design it out entirely, we lose the chance to hear what it was trying to tell us.
I don’t know if Skip made the right decision. And honestly, that’s not my call. Only the person inside a decision knows what it costs them to keep making it — and what it might cost them to stop.
From the outside, it’s easy to measure choices by optics or outcomes. From the inside, decisions are often about relief.
We all look for ways to make life feel more manageable.
Sometimes that means changing habits. Sometimes it means changing environments. And sometimes it means changing the number of decisions we have to make in a day.
The interesting part isn’t which choice is right.
It’s noticing what you’re trying to escape — and whether it’s asking to be avoided or understood.
Question of the Week
What decision are you tempted to make right now, not because it’s right, but because it would make something uncomfortable disappear?
One More Thought
If this essay lingered and left you wanting more, I got you!
I recorded a short audio conversation that goes a bit deeper and explores why avoiding discomfort feels like progress.
Are you subscribed?
If you enjoyed this article and want more weird stories that make corporate life make sense, Sunday Setup lands in your inbox every Sunday at 3:30 PM ET.
Click the button below to get a weekly does of humor and mindfulness to help beat the Sunday Scaries.
