The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness

If in making decisions you are often guided by a search for the best, you are going about decision making all wrong — and you’re also probably less happy for it.

In an age of information and choice abundance, we assume we can find the best of everything if we look long and hard enough. Psychologists call that tendency maximizing.

But searching for the best is the wrong goal. That is because searching is itself a cost, and most people forget to account for it. If you did, you would see that the optimal strategy isn’t optimizing at all.

There’s a better way to make decisions. To understand it, you should know about Herbert Simon, a pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, as well as a Nobel laureate in economics.

Mr. Simon demonstrated that for most decisions, humans can’t really evaluate the options available — there are too many, our information about them is incomplete and our minds aren’t built to weigh them all — and so we rely on mental shortcuts. He coined the term “satisficing” — a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice — to describe how we consider a limited set of options, then choose one that is good enough and move on to live our lives.

When Mr. Simon faced a decision, he considered a few alternatives, sometimes asked for advice, chose and moved on. He didn’t agonize, and he didn’t second-guess. “The best is enemy of the good” was the mantra he lived by.

Mr. Simon was, as he put it, an “incorrigible satisficer.” His eldest daughter, Katherine, recalled that he wore one brand of socks to avoid selecting color or style each morning, and he owned exactly one black beret at a time, made at a particular haberdashery in Europe.

According to Katherine, he said that one needed only three sets of clothes: “one on one’s body, one in the wash and one in the closet ready to wear.” He always ate the same breakfast — oatmeal, half a grapefruit, black coffee — and lived in the same house for 46 years.

“My father simplified his life in terms of his daily habits,” Katherine wrote, “thus eliminating the need to make little decisions about everything.” By taking the small decisions off his plate, that simplification freed his attention for the people and work that actually mattered to him.

The mathematician John Allen Paulos illustrated the same principle with a thought experiment in his 1988 book “Innumeracy”: How should you choose your final romantic partner? First, he argued, you should estimate the number of people you might plausibly date in your lifetime. Then date roughly the first third with no intention of committing. Use that time purely to calibrate what you liked, what you didn’t like and what you might be missing.

After that, commit to the very next person you like better than everyone you’ve already dated. Mr. Paulos was illustrating a well-known result in probability, which shows that this rule gives you the best chance of ending up with the best partner in the whole sequence. Keep pushing past that point, and you’re more likely to end up with a worse match or no one at all. The core insight — that the path to the best outcome runs directly through the willingness to stop searching long before you’ve exhausted the options — extends far beyond dating.

Psychologists who followed up on Mr. Simon’s work have shown that his personal philosophy was both efficient and wise. Shortly after Mr. Simon’s death in 2001, a team of researchers created a maximization scale to measure where a person falls on the spectrum between maximizer and satisficer. They found that it’s usually bad to be a maximizer.

Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first used the term “flow” to describe states of complete absorption in an activity, put it well. By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”

This is critical today because chronic maximizing has never been easier. In 2006 an economist calculated that the consumer options available to citizens of modern economies exceeded those of preindustrial societies roughly by a factor of 100 million. That is an almost incomprehensible multiplication of choice, and it extends well beyond consumer goods into questions of who to be, how to live, where to work and whom to love.

Social media has intensified the problem by functioning as an infinite comparison engine. When you can see a curated highlight reel of everyone else’s career, relationship, home and vacation, the very concept of “good enough” begins to feel like settling.

The pull to keep searching for something better has poisoned even the most mundane moments. Research shows that giving viewers many videos to flip between makes them more bored than if they focus on just one. One way to interpret the findings is that the mere notion that something better might be out there spoils the moment.

Studies in the United States and China show that since about 2010, young people have reported becoming increasingly bored. Dating apps have offered a version of Mr. Paulos’s thought experiment, with users forever wondering what might be beyond that next swipe — maximizing in its purest form.

And now artificial intelligence promises to help us optimize everything: our schedules, our diets, our wardrobes, our creative output. If Mr. Simon was right, the hidden danger of these tools is that they will expand the menu of options and comparisons even further.

The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami captured the maximizer’s tragedy in a short story. A lonely boy and girl meet on a street corner and intuitively recognize that they are the perfect match for each other. It’s a miracle. They hold hands and talk for hours. But then a sliver of doubt creeps in: “Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?” They decide on a test. If they truly are perfect for each other, they can part and will inevitably meet again. Then they’ll know for sure. The boy walks off to the west, and the girl to the east. They really were perfect for each other. Years later, they pass in the street, but their memories have faded. They never meet again.

Mr. Simon would not have been surprised they never met again. Whether you’re searching for a dishwasher or a date, set a good-enough standard. Stop when it’s met. Save your cognitive resources for things that matter.

David Epstein is the author of, most recently, “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better” and “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.”

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What is it that we really hunger for?

Answering this question can help us make important changes to our lives

‘White Napkin, Fork and Knife’ (2023) by Carrie Mae Smith© Courtesy of Carrie Mae Smith and Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles

I was recently helping to cook dinner for a large group of people when, while in the kitchen, chopping and chatting with the other volunteers, I suddenly thought of the Danish movie Babette’s Feast. I watched this film, a 1987 adaptation of the short story by Isak Dinesen, years ago but every now and then my mind goes back to it. 

The story is about a woman named Babette Hersant who, having escaped the violence of the Paris Commune of 1871, finds herself in a small coastal town in Denmark, where she is taken on as a housekeeper by two ageing spinster sisters, Martine and Filippa. The sisters live as part of an ascetic Lutheran community that is growing older and increasingly discordant. After 12 years, Babette comes into a small, unexpected fortune and she decides to use the money to cook and host a lavish feast for the community with ingredients sent from Paris. 

Concerned by how luxurious it all seems, the townspeople make a pact between themselves that they will eat the food, but they will not show any pleasure or make any comment about it. Yet during the meal they are overwhelmed by Babette’s cooking and by her gracious offering. They can’t stop themselves from expressing their joy and slowly, as the meal progresses, they begin to settle their quarrels and make peace with one another. They had come for food but found what they really needed: reconciliation and renewed joy. 

Between my own recent cooking experience and my memories of this film I started to wonder how often we recognise what it is we really hunger for — and how a greater awareness of this might lead to shifts in our own lives.

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I like the seeming simplicity of the 2023 work “White Napkin, Fork and Knife” by contemporary American artist Carrie Mae Smith. The daughter of a butcher, Smith spent time working as a chef while deepening her art practice. Her work considers themes of labour, class, tradition, love and utility. This painting shows a plain silver knife and fork lying on a folded white napkin set against a cream background. There is no place setting, but the napkin appears to be thick and slightly frayed around the edges, which makes me imagine this could be at a public eatery rather than in a private home. 

We often turn to food not simply to stave off hunger but as a way to feed or recall a certain emotion

While considering this image, I wondered about a few things. The first was perhaps obvious — what do I feel like eating — and strangely enough, I started thinking about peanut butter and honey sandwiches, a combination I still love and discovered in elementary school at my then best friend’s house. We were close friends for decades until something caused a large rift between us. It took me years to get over the loss of that friendship. And there are still days I think of that friendship and feel a tangible wave of sadness. 

It is a small example, but it highlights the idea that we often turn to food not simply to stave off hunger but as a way to feed or recall a certain emotion, whether it’s one we are conscious of or not. How many of us when we are sick or sad suddenly yearn for a dish our father or mother made, or our favourite ice cream? The important point for deeper reflection is that our hungers can sometimes tell us more about what we want than we register on a surface level. 

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“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”, the 1818 work by the romantic painter Casper David Friedrich, is one of the most recognisable and studied paintings in the world. A solitary man stands triumphantly on a precipice gazing over a foggy vista. His back is towards us, a compositional device known in German romanticism as the Rückenfigur, enabling us to imagine ourselves also in the landscape. This painting is often seen through the lens of man’s longing for freedom, for individuality, or a deepened recognition of the rest of the natural world. 

‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich © Alamy

But it came to mind while writing this column’s theme because I’ve always seen Friedrich’s figure as surveying new territory. Each of us sees art from the unique position of our own lives and collective histories. There are multiple reasons, which I needn’t get into, as to why this image of a lone, well-dressed, European man standing somewhat resolutely on a mountain peak suggests to me themes of imperialism, unmitigated desire, a hunger for something perhaps still to be named. Art can be so powerful in the way it awakens threads of thought, and this work makes me consider a strain of western individualism that suggests personal hungers should be met, no matter the human or ecological cost.

Considering this in a way perhaps more applicable to our daily lives, I wonder if some of our interpersonal conflicts arise because we remain unattuned to the specific things for which our friends and loved ones hunger. Have you ever asked someone to share with you what they are deeply hungry for, whether physically, emotionally, spiritually, and then to consider when and from where they imagine that kind of hunger began? I wonder what would open up with those kinds of leading questions and the space to consider and offer our answers.

The Scottish painter Caroline Walker (whose current exhibition, Caroline Walker: Mothering, is showing at Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, in Cornwall) makes work that explores the experiences of women, considering interiority, domestic life and working environments. Her 2021 painting “Newborn Check” depicts two female medical professionals checking the vitals of a newborn baby. The woman in dark blue scrubs holds the infant gently under its back while listening to its heartbeat. The other woman in the grey scrubs observes ready and attendant. I love this close-up depiction of these women at work and for whom part of their job is literally to monitor the health of beating hearts that have just entered the world. 

Caroline Walker’s ‘Newborn Check’ (2021) © Caroline Walker. Courtesy the Artist; GRIMM, Amsterdam/New York/ London; and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

There is something about this image that makes me wonder if the labours of our lives might reveal something about the things we have hungered for over the years. The path to becoming a doctor is long, intense and at times, I suspect, quite gruelling. Yet I can imagine there are many times, when a patient is successfully cared for, healed or has had their life improved, when being a doctor must feel deeply satisfying. 

Whatever the reason we follow the path of paid or unpaid work, there is a need that drives us. Sometimes that need is primal, like the need to simply be able to sustain our own lives and those of our family. Sometimes it is a need to contribute to the wellbeing of others. Sometimes the need is less altruistic, and is about meeting the expectations of others, so as to feel validated, to feel purposeful or to achieve a certain level of success as defined by society. 

When reflecting on the life choices we have made, do we feel driven by the same hungers as before? And, if not, what deep need are we still trying to satiate?