The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness
Takeaways:
Psychologists argue that the internet has offered us a level of choice & information overload that weighs our psyche’s down. In an era defined by information overload and endless choices, many people fall into the trap of “maximizing” — the belief that with enough searching, the internet will always provide us with the “perfect” option. But this is wrong.
Herbert Simon, a Nobel laureate psychologist, offers a more rational framework for how humans actually make decisions. He calls it “satisficing” — a blend of “satisfy” and “suffice.” Rather than exhausting time and energy hunting for the absolute best option, satisficing means limiting the options you make available to yourself and choosing the first option that satisfies.
By considering only a limited set of alternatives, satisficing means choosing something good enough and moving on rather than exhausting every option. Simon embodied this personally — wearing only one brand of socks, one type of hat, and eating the same breakfast daily — stripping away trivial choices to free his attention for what actually mattered.
Research shows maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their lives, more prone to regret, and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Committing to a choice rather than perpetually weighing alternatives frees up enormous energy for actually living.We simply have too much choice right now– and it is up to us to limit it. Social media offers an endless well of videos that promise to solve the “problem” of boredom, but leave us feeling lethargic and uninspired. Artificial intelligence threatens to deepen the problem further, promising to optimize everything from our schedules to our creative output — expanding the menu of options and comparisons even further.
We have to self-regulate to maintain mental bandwidth for the things that make us happy, putting Simon’s theory of “satisficing” into practice is the way to do it. We must save our cognitive resources for the things that matter.
by David Epstein for The New York Times:
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