Even how we dress for work has taken on a new element of choice, and with it, new anxieties.
Both books point out how the growth of material affluence has not brought with it an increase in subjective well-being. But they go further. Both books argue that we are actually experiencing a fairly...
The best you can do is keep yourself from brooding about it.
Restricting yourself in this way may seem both difficult and arbitrary, but actually, this is the kind of discipline we exercise in other aspects of life. You may have a rule of thumb never to have mo...
Ninety percent of adults spend half their waking lives doing things they would rather not be doing at places they would rather not be.
Knowing what’s good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So: Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for good enough; Scrutinize how you choose in those areas;...
It is called prospect theory, and it was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. What the theory claims is that evaluations are relative to a baseline. A given experience will feel positive if...
In general, human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how various experiences will make them feel.
In a recent survey, 93 percent of teenage girls surveyed said that shopping was their favorite activity. Mature women also say they like shopping, but working women say that shopping is a hassle, as d...
Freedom to choose has what might be called expressive value. Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.
Even though we don’t expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.
But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.
But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual’s pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if constraint sometimes affords a kin...
Being able to criticize our own certainties is often a painful struggle, demanding some courage as we try to stand back and impartially judge ourselves and our own responsibility.
AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind...
A large array of options may discourage consumers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So consumers decide not to decide, and don’t buy the product. Or if they...
Will argue that: We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them. We would be better off seeking what was good enough in...
Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters.
The key fact about psychological life in societies in which you have little control over these aspects of life is that you also have little expectation of control. And because of this, I think, lack o...
The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer...