It is not a mood and it is not a flaw. It is what happens when you are the last stop for every question nobody else could settle, surrounded by people who all have an interest in the answer.
Two mechanisms create it, and neither has anything to do with character.
Selection. Easy calls get handled below you. What arrives on your desk is the residue: the genuinely ambiguous, the politically awkward, the ones where reasonable people disagree. You experience this as "everything is hard now", which is accurate.
Interest. Almost everyone you could consult is affected by the answer. Your team's jobs, your co-founder's equity, your investors' timeline. None of them is being dishonest. They are being human, and you are receiving filtered information without a reliable way to tell how much filtering happened.
You are not short of people. You are short of people with nothing to gain from sparing you.
Two things, both cumulative. Deciding repeatedly without useful contradiction degrades the quality of deciding: with nothing pushing back, you stop rehearsing the counter-argument. And your field of view narrows. Without outside perspectives at your own level, habits harden into what look like principles.
The instinctive response is more experts, more coaching, more input. All useful, none of it addresses the mechanism, because you remain the person being advised. What breaks the isolation is a regular encounter with reasoning that has no stake in your answer, on the specific decision in front of you, at the moment it is in front of you.
Five Peers editorial note. Sources named in the text.
Contradiction with nothing to gain from sparing you.
Compose my board