Back in the early 2000s, Roy F. Baumeister and his team at Case Western Reserve University embarked on a groundbreaking study of a psychological concept they termed ‘ego depletion. ’ This novel idea proposes that our psychological resources, though vast, are not infinite and are depleted with each use.

Okay, no huge light bulb there. Human beings have a vast wealth of resources, but those resources are not unlimited.

But the whole thing got interesting when Dr. Jean Twenge, recently married, joined the team. Reflecting on her experience of the exhaustion of compiling a wedding registry, she wondered if the act of making decisions might draw from the same limited resources. “‘By the end, you could have talked me into anything,’ Twenge told her new colleagues.”

They began to study the impact of ego depletion on decision-making. They initiated new experiments studying just what kind of resources we expend every time we make a decision. What they discovered gave rise to another new and now widely used concept: “Decision fatigue.”

These experiments demonstrated that there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control. When people fended off the temptation to scarf down M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations. When they forced themselves to remain stoic during a tearjerker movie, afterward, they gave up more quickly on lab tasks requiring self-discipline, like working on a geometry puzzle or squeezing a hand-grip exerciser. Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted.

One study proved the real-world impact of decision fatigue. The study looked at judges and parole decisions. What they found was that when making parole decisions immediately following food breaks, judges issued a favorable ruling +/- 65% of the time. That number gradually decreased throughout the day to just around 0% immediately before the next food break. There were significant differences in favorable rulings—even among similar cases.

The research shows that every decision we make costs us something. Even small decisions like whether to have lasagna or hot dogs for supper or what to wear in the morning use up our resources.

Think about how exhausting it is to find something … Anything … on Netflix if you don’t already know what you want to watch. You can spend an absolute soul-sucking amount of time hunting for something. Because, I mean, with 80 gajillion movies and shows, there’s got to be something on!

So, it’s no wonder we try to duck decision-making responsibilities whenever possible.

“Where do you want to go for supper?”

“I don’t care. You decide. I chose last time.”

Because we instinctively know these decisions cost us something, we try to avoid them. And while decision fatigue might mean nothing more than that you eat something you don’t particularly care for or watch a horrible two-star straight-to-video flick like The Open House because, as the subtitle is quick to point out: “You Can’t Lock Out What’s Already Inside.”

But while our dining and cinematic tastes can withstand the occasional bad decision brought on by decision fatigue, the same can’t be said of our relationship with other human beings. If we’ve wasted all our resources on deciding whether or not it feels like an Arby’s night, it’s more difficult to work up the energy to embrace someone we don’t particularly care for or who doesn’t seem especially useful to us.

We can’t escape it. We constantly make decisions about people. But what’s telling is how we prioritize our responses to them.

Even Jesus can’t get away from making decisions about people.

In our Gospel, Jesus has just calmed the storm and exorcised the demons from the Gerasene demoniac. He crosses back over the recently-calmed sea, where he’s approached by an important man, a leader of the synagogue named Jairus. Up to this point in Mark, Jesus has been getting a bad reputation for hanging out with the wrong sort of folks. He’s paying attention to all the wrong people, healing lepers, paralytics, and the demon-possessed.

Back in chapter two, he does some leadership recruitment—not at the finest business schools—but at a “tax booth,” where he calls Levi. Then, he adds insult to injury by going to Levi’s house to eat with a bunch of “tax collectors and sinners.” People are starting to talk. You have to be a bit more discerning about the company you keep. Jesus is getting a bad reputation.

So, when Jairus prevails upon Jesus to come see about Jairus’s sick little girl, everyone’s relieved. Jairus is the kind of ally Jesus is supposed to cultivate. He’s head of the Men’s Morning Breakfast down at the synagogue, president of the local Lion’s club; he’s got money, contacts. He can help Jesus network.

The disciples must have been thinking, “Finally. Now, we’re getting somewhere.” Do a favor for this guy, and there’s no telling what kind of political capital Jesus can start building.