Why We Delay Career Decisions — It Is Not Laziness

According to PISA 2022, 39% of 15-year-olds across OECD countries have no career plans — a share that grew by more than half between 2018 and 2022. Researchers identify three distinct types of career decision difficulty: they look the same from outside but need entirely different responses. The advice "just decide" is one tool aimed at three different problems.

The standard advice sounds reasonable enough: you need to start somewhere. It assumes the delay is a willpower failure that effort can fix. In 2013, Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl published a different account in Social and Personality Psychology Compass: when a task triggers anxiety, postponing it is not self-sabotage — it is optimal short-term mood regulation. The brain is doing exactly what it is built to do. The problem is the time horizon, not the wiring.

Why "just decide" fails as a command

If delay is anxiety regulation, then the push to "just decide" adds more load to the same system that is already overloaded. The anxiety around the choice does not disappear — it tends to deepen. That is how many people end up spending years in apparent "deliberation" that is functionally a pause.

The OECD report Teenage Career Uncertainty (2024), based on PISA 2022, found that 39% of 15-year-olds across OECD countries have no career plans at all. The proportion grew by more than 50% in just four years, from 2018 to 2022. This is not a statistic about individual indecision — it reflects a systemic rise in anxiety around career choice.

According to ACT's 2025 survey of U.S. high school students, just over half (53%) had settled on a career direction. Nearly half had not — across all grade levels, not just ninth grade.

Three different problems behind one word

In 1996, psychologists Itamar Gati, Miram Krausz and Samuel Osipow published a taxonomy of career decision-making difficulties in the Journal of Counseling Psychology. Surveying more than a thousand students, they found that "indecision" covers three fundamentally different processes — each with its own exit.

Lack of readiness. The person is not yet motivated to engage with the decision, or is chronically indecisive across all domains, or holds a dysfunctional belief — "I must know the answer before I can start thinking." This is not about missing information; it is about the relationship to the decision process itself.

Lack of information. About themselves (which interests, what matters in a job), about careers (what the actual day-to-day looks like), or about how this type of decision is made. This is the most common type — and the one that responds to concrete action.

Inconsistent information. Enough is known, but it does not add up: conflicting values, family pressure, a gap between what feels interesting and what feels "serious" or "safe." More facts here do not help — they add noise.

Treating all three as one problem and offering a single fix is roughly as useful as prescribing the same medication for a broken bone, a virus, and a burn.

The brain is not postponing a career — it is postponing the anxiety attached to it. That distinction changes where you start.

What indecision costs beyond the obvious

Uthayakumar, Schimmack, Hartung and Rogers, writing in the Journal of Vocational Behavior (2010), tested whether career decidedness predicts subjective well-being. It does — independently of personality traits and other factors. The implication is not that happier people make better decisions. It is that having a direction, even an approximate one, reduces psychological load on its own.

That is counterintuitive. It feels as if the anxiety will lift once the "right" answer appears. In practice, waiting for certainty is itself a source of ongoing stress. An approximate decision with room to revise outperforms the search for a perfect one with a single attempt.

Where to start depends on which obstacle you have

If the main problem is missing self-knowledge, a career interest assessment converts a vague "I don't know" into a concrete interest profile and a set of careers to explore. That reduces uncertainty — and with it, some of the anxiety. If the problem is missing knowledge about a specific career, a 30-minute conversation with someone in that field gives more useful information than three articles about it.

If the difficulty is a values conflict, more options do not help. Explicitly ranking priorities — what matters most in work right now versus in five years — often turns a fog into a choice between two specific paths.

Across all three, one principle holds: any action that reduces uncertainty also reduces anxiety. Not eliminates it — but reduces it enough to make the next step possible.

Sources

1. Sirois, F. M., & Pychyl, T. A. (2013). Procrastination and the Priority of Short-Term Mood Regulation: Consequences for Future Self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011
2. Gati, I., Krausz, M., & Osipow, S. H. (1996). A Taxonomy of Difficulties in Career Decision Making. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 43(4), 510–526.
3. Uthayakumar, R., Schimmack, U., Hartung, P. J., & Rogers, J. R. (2010). Career decidedness as a predictor of subjective well-being. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 77(2), 196–204.
4. OECD (2024). Teenage Career Uncertainty: Why It Matters and How to Reduce It. oecd.org (PISA 2022 data).
5. ACT (2025). High School Students' Career Choices and Career Confidence. act.org

This material is educational and does not constitute professional counselling. The test result is an assessment based on the RIASEC model, not a diagnosis or a guarantee.