A restaurant menu offers choices inside decisions the diner never sees.

A menu presents choice inside a set of decisions already made. What is available, what is affordable, what the kitchen can produce, what the owners want you to pick: all settled before you arrive, and your freedom operates entirely within them. The experience of choosing is real and its boundaries are somebody else’s work.

Most choices you make have this shape. Before congratulating or blaming yourself for a decision, it is worth asking who set the options. That question is more useful than agonising within them, and it points at the place where change is actually possible, which is usually one level up from where you are choosing.