02 · Why You Open Steam and Close It Five Minutes Later

The pattern is always the same.

You finish work. You’re tired but you have an hour or two before bed. You open Steam, ready to play something. You scroll through your library. Something looks interesting. You hover over it. Something else also looks interesting. You compare. You scroll past both. You notice a game you forgot you owned. You consider it. Five minutes pass. You close Steam. You open YouTube.

What just happened.

This is decision fatigue meeting variety in real time. After a full day of decisions at work, your System 2 is depleted. It can still process information, but it can no longer commit. Each game you scroll past requires a small evaluation. Right genre? Right length? Right mood? Multiplied by 80 games, that’s 80 micro-decisions, none of which result in action.

The library becomes a gauntlet of “maybe later.” Each game gets evaluated, none get chosen.

The reason it ends with YouTube isn’t laziness. YouTube requires zero decisions. The algorithm picks for you. You’re not abandoning gaming because you don’t want to play. You’re abandoning gaming because choosing has become the bottleneck, not playing.

The fix that doesn’t work: more recommendations

The intuitive solution is to ask Steam to surface something. “Show me what to play.” But this is the same problem in different clothing. Steam will surface 5-10 candidates. You now have 5-10 micro-decisions instead of 80. Better, but not solved.

A better surface still ends in the same place if your System 2 has nothing left to give.

The fix that works: remove the choice from the equation

Whatever you would have chosen tonight is fine. The perfect choice doesn’t exist. The variance between “best game tonight” and “fifth-best game tonight” is small compared to the variance between “any game tonight” and “no game at all.”

The most underrated way to handle decision fatigue is to delegate the decision somewhere harmless. Roll a die. Let a random picker choose. Set a rule: the first game I see when I open Steam is what I play, no scrolling allowed.

Once you’re twenty minutes into something, you’ll either be enjoying it or you won’t. Both are useful information. Neither requires you to have made the correct choice an hour ago when you were too tired to think.

One more thing

I built Maida specifically for this state of evening. It shows one game at a time. There is no library view, so there’s nothing to scroll. You either try the game it shows you, or you say “not now” and see another one. After three or four cards, you’ve either started playing or you’ve genuinely confirmed you’re not in the mood, in which case YouTube was the right answer all along.

If the browsing-loop is the part of your evening that’s been frustrating you, Maida is here.