I watched the first half of ‘Fight Club’ on BBC2 this evening. I'd managed to get to this point without having seen it.

Then I decided I couldn't be bothered to watch the rest; I'd got as far as the actual fight club itself, with the much-quoted list of Rules, and at that point my main curiosity about the film (largely of the form ‘in what context did all these famous quotations occur?’) was satisfied, and I found my secondary curiosity about what happened next wasn't strong enough to make me carry on watching. If I'd been reading a book, I'd probably have put it down, done something else for a while, and perhaps come back to it later; in fact, perhaps I will read the book some day. But a film, particularly one on TV where you can't press Pause, simply didn't make that easy, so I didn't do it.

The funny thing was … it was a really weird feeling, just giving up like that in the middle of watching a film.

I've always been a stubborn sort; I've always lived my life on the fundamental principle that you decide what you're going to do, then you do it. It's a very basic assumption. It's where I find courage or resolve, if I need to do something difficult or unpleasant: first I decide to do it, in a calm and clear state of mind, and then I go and actually do it. If, half way through, I suddenly feel that I'd like to change my mind, I just remind myself that the decision was made when I was thinking clearly and considering all aspects of the situation, and shouldn't be reversed merely because the short-term unpleasantness of the task seems a lot larger now than it did then. But on a deeper level, even that amount of detail is unnecessary: I carry on doing what I'd previously decided to do because that's just the way it works. You decide, then you do. You don't decide, start doing, re-decide, faff about, decide something else, start doing that, change your mind again, do the Hokey Cokey and fall over in confusion; that way lies madness. Decide, then do. That's just how it goes.

This frame of mind is so firmly ingrained that it takes a conscious effort to override it. The only reason I was watching Fight Club was because I felt like it, so of course it made perfect sense to change my mind if I didn't feel like it any more. It would have been ridiculous to sit in front of the rest of the film, on my own, for no good reason, if I actively didn't want to do so. Yet to override a prior decision and change my mind half way through a planned activity felt deeply, deeply strange.

(Of course, just like anyone else, I sometimes stop doing a planned activity because I run out of energy. Particularly activities such as coding, which require constant energy input. But I always intend to come back to them, so it's not quite the same.)

As an exercise in relaxation, I've spent the whole of today doing exactly what I felt like. Usually I decide what to do based on how well it would fit into the time before I do something else, and on whether it would leave me a sensible set of things to do the next day (don't use up the one thing that was going to relieve the monotony in the middle of doing a much bigger thing later), and on whether I'm expecting any phone calls likely to interrupt me, and so on. Today I have consciously ignored all of those factors, and decided what to do based solely on what I felt like doing. It's been a liberating and relaxing experience; I urge anyone else who habitually over-analyses their decisions to give it a try! But no part of it felt even nearly as weird as stopping watching a film half way through just because I couldn't be bothered to watch it any more. I feel strangely proud of that achievement, and yet strangely unsettled by it.

Speaking of over-analysing … perhaps I'll shut up now. :-)