What's running in the background
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A few months ago I opened the settings on my phone and checked which apps had been using my location in the background.
I expected maybe five or six. There were over thirty. Apps I’d downloaded two or three years ago and hadn’t opened since. A restaurant reservation app from a trip I took in 2023. A weather app I’d replaced. A fitness tracker from a gym I cancelled. All of them still running, still pinging my location, still doing whatever they were designed to do when I first said yes to them. I hadn’t thought about any of them in years. They hadn’t stopped thinking about me.
I spent ten minutes turning them off and deleting the ones I didn’t recognize anymore. And then I sat there for a second, because the thing that struck me was how long they’d been running without me noticing. I’d said yes once, moved on with my life, and the process kept going. Nobody asked me again. Nobody checked in. The default was to keep running, and the default won because I never came back to question it.
That’s when I started thinking about how much of my life works the same way.
The background process
Your life is full of things that are still running because you said yes to them once.
Old beliefs about what you’re good at, formed in your twenties, that you’ve never revisited even though you’ve changed. Commitments you made to people or organizations that auto-renewed without you checking whether they still make sense. Spending patterns that started when you were in a different financial situation and kept going because you never sat down and looked at them. Relationships you maintain out of habit that drain you every time you show up but you keep showing up because the default is to keep showing up.
None of these things announced themselves. They didn’t send you a notification asking if you’d like to continue. They just kept running, consuming resources, because the default setting for almost everything in life is “on until you turn it off.”
I had a conversation with a founder on the podcast a while back who told me she does a quarterly review of every recurring commitment in her life. Not just subscriptions, but relationships, beliefs, assumptions about her business that she made when the company was five people and she was still operating on at fifty. She said most of what she finds during these reviews is fine, still serving her, still useful. But every quarter she finds two or three things that have been running in the background, costing her time or energy or money, that she would never have started today if someone asked her fresh. The only reason they’re still going is that nobody asked.
That idea stuck with me. The gap between what you would choose today, starting from scratch, and what you’re currently living with because you chose it once and never went back. That gap is where most of the friction in a busy life hides.
Why we don’t check
In 1988, two economists named William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser published a paper called Status Quo Bias in Decision Making. They ran a series of experiments showing that people disproportionately stick with whatever the current default is, even when better options are available, even when the cost of switching is low, even when they can see the better option right in front of them. The default wins because the default doesn’t require a decision. Choosing something new does. And the brain, whenever possible, avoids decisions it doesn’t have to make.
Samuelson and Zeckhauser found that this bias gets stronger, not weaker, as the number of options increases. The more choices available, the more likely people are to stick with whatever they already have. The complexity of evaluating alternatives makes the status quo feel safer, even when it isn’t.
One of the most striking demonstrations of this came from organ donation research. In countries where organ donation is the default, where you have to opt out if you don’t want to participate, donation rates hover above ninety percent. In countries where you have to opt in, rates drop to around fifteen percent. The difference between ninety percent and fifteen percent isn’t a difference in values. People in both groups feel the same way about organ donation when you ask them. The difference is which option requires a decision and which one runs in the background.
That finding tells you something uncomfortable about your own life. The things that are currently running, the subscriptions, the commitments, the beliefs, the patterns, are not running because you actively chose them today. They’re running because you chose them once and the default kept them going. You are living, right now, with the accumulated defaults of every version of yourself that came before you. And most of those defaults have never been reviewed.
The audit
The founder I mentioned does her review quarterly. I’ve started doing something similar, though less structured. Every few months I try to look at what’s running and ask a version of the same question about each one: would I start this today?
It applies to everything. The commitment I’d never take on if someone asked me today, knowing what my schedule looks like now. The subscription I’d never re-sign up for if I had to do it from scratch. The relationship I’d let go of if it weren’t already in motion. The belief about myself I’d update if I looked at the evidence instead of running on the version I installed at twenty-five.
The answer is usually yes. Most of what’s running in my life is running for good reasons. But every time I do this, I find a few things that shouldn’t be there anymore. A commitment I took on when my schedule was different. A belief about what my audience wants that was based on data from three years ago. A pattern of saying yes to a particular kind of request because I said yes once and it became the default.
The interesting thing is that these background processes don’t feel like problems while they’re running. They feel like normal. They’re woven into your routine so completely that questioning them feels unnecessary. You’d never think to audit something that doesn’t appear to be broken. But the cost isn’t visible the way a broken thing is visible. The cost is in what you’re not doing with the resources those processes are consuming. The time you’re spending on a commitment you’d never start today. The energy going into a relationship that stopped being mutual two years ago. The mental bandwidth occupied by a belief about yourself that the evidence has already overturned.
(This is where DeleteMe comes in. More on that below.)
The background process you forgot about
One of the background processes I discovered during one of these audits was something I’d never thought to look for: my personal information circulating on data broker websites.
I knew data brokers existed in the abstract. Companies that scrape public records and build profiles on people, profiles that include your home address, phone number, age, relatives’ names, estimated income. I just assumed it was a background-noise kind of problem that didn’t touch me in any practical way.
Then I looked. I searched my own name on a few of these sites and found listings I didn’t know existed. Old addresses. A phone number I’d changed. Details about family members. All of it there because at some point, through public records or old accounts or data I’d shared with services I’d forgotten about, I’d said yes to a process that never stopped running.
DeleteMe is what I use now to handle this. You tell them what you want removed, their team submits removal requests across hundreds of broker sites, and they keep monitoring for new listings that pop up. It runs in the background, cleaning up the other thing that was running in the background. If you’ve never looked at what data brokers have on you, try DeleteMe for free. It takes about five minutes to see what’s out there.
What the audit is for
You don’t need to question everything all the time. That’s exhausting and counterproductive. You just need to periodically check what’s running and make sure the things consuming your time, energy, attention, and identity are things your current self would choose, not just things your past self forgot to cancel.
The most intentional people I know aren’t working harder than everyone else. They’ve just gotten in the habit of reviewing what’s running in the background and shutting down the processes that no longer serve them. They treat their commitments, beliefs, relationships, and defaults the way you’d treat your phone: something that works better when you periodically check what’s running and close the apps you’re not using anymore.
The unexamined default is the most expensive thing in your life. Not because any single one of them is ruining you. Because thirty of them, exposed together, are consuming resources you don’t realize you’re spending. And the only way to find them is to look.
Thank you for reading,
— Scott
Sponsor: DeleteMe — Remove your personal information from data broker sites. Your name, address, phone number, and more are being sold online without your consent. DeleteMe finds it and removes it. Try it free.