Why this post is late and some thoughts about decisions

I'm back in Berlin. My first thought when I left the subway to my flat was that I don't want to be back here. It's the same thought I had the last time I came back from a week of vacation. Last time, I got sucked back into everyday life and forgot about it. I'm not sure how (or if) I will prevent it from happening again.
When I entered my room I was surprised just how minimalist it is after I spent some time in flats with proper interior design. I also reflected on my writing over the last two weeks. I'm surprised how easy it was. I remember some posts that were hard to write or took longer than usual, but all in all, this is the first post I'm publishing after 13h. I knew this would happen someday, and I thought it would happen sooner.

I'm writing this post so late, because my train left Hamburg at 11:36. Writing a post usually takes me 1.5-2h if I'm focused and fit. This week, I was neither. I would barely be able to finish it before taking the train, with packing my things and driving to the train station. Instead of forcing it, I decided I would enjoy a final breakfast with my family before leaving. From the start, my contingency plan for writing was to simply come back to writing in the afternoon or evening. Since I planed for this situation, it was an easy decision to make.

Decision making and probabilistic thinking are fascinating topics. Humans have many biases that make hard rational decisions hard. That's why I like poker so much (not that I have spend much time learning about it yet). Professional poker is all about mathematical analysis and separating a decision from it's outcome. Only because you've won a bet doesn't mean you should have made it in the first place. One of the biases that makes our decisions worse is that when you are in a situation very similar to one you were in before, you tend to think it will be different this time. But of course, it never will. The last time I fell for this I even wrote about it.

At the beginning of my vacation, I wrote about how I would stop tracking my diet as an experiment for how well I would be able to keep up my good habits. I slipped the first day and just gave up. In hindsight it's obvious that this would happen. Looking back, I probably just didn't want to think about my diet during my vacation, didn't want to acknowledge that, and framed it for myself as an experiment.

It's just like Richard Feynman said: "You must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool."