On Having Enough Socks

Gwern Branwen's November 2017 essay using socks — that everyone always seems to run out of — as a small but precise example of human procrastination and irrationality. He runs personal experiments and online surveys, finds the failure mode is consistent across people, and argues that "running out of socks" is what happens whenever a task lacks both natural triggers (no sock pain until you're already in trouble) and explicit deliberative thought. The piece generalises into a small theory of why obvious life-improvements often go undone.