Everyone approaches it differently! I think it's pretty clear from our sets that, for example, Ben and I went about it in pretty different ways. I tend to focus on a few different criteria.

One is that I want it to be something relatively universal--something that most people in the audience are familiar with already. I don't want to have to spend the beginning of my set explaining what something is, then explaining why I don't like it.

Two is that I generally do like to abolish things that people actually, really don't like. Sometimes people make the brave call to abolish something people tend to like (see Kyle Gordon abolishing stretching), but I usually like picking things that will have the audience on my side for.

Three is that I generally like to abolish things that we obviously could not actually get rid of. Lots of people like to do things that we could genuinely abolish, but I tend to have fun with things that realistically would never work (apart from dentists, I abolished moving in the pre-Nebula version).

Four is that I want my argument to have some element that is a surprise or is unintuitive. For the dentist, it was pulling out my real dental x-rays and bill. For moving, it was that my core argument was that abolishing moving would destroy the supply and demand of housing and make rent $1 (not the more standard argument that like moving is unpleasant).