It's Not Indecision, It's Devotion
The worst place to have a crisis of morality is the candy aisle at 10:30 PM. Fair trade? Organic? What parent company? Which supply chain?
I’m not trying to pick the best chocolate bar. I’m trying to pick the least harmful one in a system built on exploitation. That's what people don't get about what I call the Chidi loop: it's not about preference. It's about harm.
The Chidi Archetype
Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place is a moral philosopher who thinks so hard he literally ruptures space-time. When people reference Chidi, it's often to judge his paralysis, not honor his precision. But watch him closely: he isn't wrong about the weight of choices. He's refusing to mask the cognitive cost of seeing every angle.
For many autistic people, Chidi is recognizable - that recursive, ethical, pattern-seeking cognition that spirals through consequence and connection until choice feels impossible. I've started calling this a "Chidi loop" - my own shorthand for the particular kind of decision paralysis that stems from caring too much about getting it right.
Autistic Pattern Recognition Is Not Ambivalence
What gets dismissed as indecision is often a search for coherence.
When a brain maps connections quickly and thoroughly, every option carries weight - the job that pays well but supports a harmful industry; the restaurant with tasty food but exploitative labor practices; the relationship that feels safe but requires you to shrink.
I have a PDA (pathological demand avoidance/pervasive drive of autonomy) profile, and the loop intensifies under coercive conditions. False binaries can feel violent. Being rushed into choice feels like forced betrayal of knowing.
Demand Sensitivity and the Coercion of the Clock
One of the cruelest parts isn't the choice itself - it's the temporal violence that surrounds it. Just pick one. Hurry up. It doesn't matter.
Decision fatigue compounds with demand avoidance - not wanting to betray my own discernment just to satisfy someone else's timeline.
The pressure to choose fast assumes neurotypical processing speeds and minimal consequence-tracking. It treats depth as deficiency.
The Loop as Devotion
What if the Chidi loop isn't pathology? What if it's devotion to self-trust earned through years of learning what happens when I ignore my own knowing?
Some decisions need to be wrestled with because I understand the cost of getting them wrong: misrecognition that makes me unrecognizable to myself.
The loop is trying to keep me safe - not from the future, but from becoming someone who acts without integrity.
Navigating the Loop: Survival Is Not a Purity Test
The loop serves me, but it can't be permanent. At some point, even the most ethically complex choice requires action, and action requires accepting that no choice will be perfect.
This is where survival logic becomes essential. The goal isn't to find the choice with zero contradiction. It's to find the choice that feels most coherent with who I am and who I’m trying to become.
The audit matters more than the outcome. When I'm caught in a Chidi loop, I've learned to ask: What would it cost me to stay frozen versus the cost of choosing imperfectly?
The loop is devotion. But devotion without action becomes its own form of harm - to myself, to the people counting on me, and to the values I’m trying to protect.
The Loop Is Why I Trust Myself
That's where I'll stay: looped at times, yes, but loyal. Not to indecision, but to discernment. The Chidi loop isn't about never choosing - it's about refusing to choose carelessly.
I'll take the loop. It's the reason I trust myself to know the difference between what looks right and what is right.