The bank by the university gate

Plenty of people in Cairo bank where they bank because, twenty years ago, there was a branch beside the university gate.

Nobody chose it in any real sense. It was the nearest door when a first salary needed somewhere to land. Then the card was in the wallet, the transfers were set up, and moving began to feel like a weekend of forms. Two decades later it gets described as loyalty.

Marketers like to talk about preference. Much of what we call preference is convenience that has been left to settle. The water in the fridge is whatever the shop downstairs stocks. The phone network is the one the family was already on. The route to work is the one we happened to take on the first morning.

None of that is a scandal. If every decision had to be made fresh each day, nobody would get out of bed. But the habit hides how wide the room really is. Almost every one of those things could be different by the end of the month. What stands in the way is rarely a rule. It is an awkward phone call, a trip across town, a little more money this week, the mild embarrassment of admitting the old choice was never really a choice.

We will keep choosing by convenience, and mostly we should. The question worth asking, now and then, is whether the life it is quietly assembling is one we would have picked on purpose. If it is not, the answer is rarely that we had no options. It is usually that we let the nearest door decide.