Decision fatigue "refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making." Studies have found decision fatigue to lead to irrational trade-offs, impulse purchasing, and impaired self-regulation, although one professor observed that people who believe willpower is a limited resource are more affected than those who do not. I choose to believe that willpower is unlimited. However, I am well aware that in the absence of conscious and deliberate intervention, my internal monologue tends to get louder, more disruptive, and increasingly negative when I don't want to make a decision because I would rather be doing something else.

As a connected concept, information overload is "a term used to describe the difficulty of understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue." Basically, when we're bombarded by more data than our brains can process, it impairs our decision-making.

Autocracy "is a system of government in which supreme power (social and political) is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control..." In essence, a system in which (for everyone but the autocrat), all decisions and consequences thereof are nominally someone else's responsibility. I say "nominally" because, as history has shown, people can always choose to fight - it just costs something.

The following is an extreme simplification of what I found to be an interesting idea. In the modern information age, in the U.S., we have access to an enormous amount of data, and have the opportunity to make decisions about many, many small things throughout the day. If we deplete the reserves we can (or want to) call upon making a thousand small choices, what happens when we're faced with a big, complicated choice with consequences that can positively or negatively impact thousands, millions, or billions of human lives?

"I'm spent. Can't somebody else take this one?"

"You bet," says the would-be autocrat with a smile.