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Do you ever have a hard time making decisions, big or small?
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Or maybe you just find the field of decision making really interesting.
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For me, the case has always been both of these things.
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I've always been so obsessed with decision making that I even tried to create my own major in it in college.
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I ended up doing more of a specialization in it rather than an entire major.
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But it's something that for more than a decade I've really thought a lot about.
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Because we all know that the quality of our choices, our decisions, shape our lives.
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And sure, some are more consequential, such as who you end up marrying or the job that you take.
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And some are less consequential, such as what you eat for breakfast.
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Granted, we know that breakfast choice can compound over a lifetime and it causes a fork in the road in terms of your future health.
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Knowing that our choices do shape our lives, the next logical question is how do we make better decisions?
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And one might think that the more we analyze, the more we think through a decision will lead to a better decision.
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That is one of many questions we're going to be unpacking in this upcoming series on decision making.
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Often the people that really think through decisions more than they need to, to a point that it's actually detrimental to their life, often there's a lot of fear there, fear of making the wrong choice.
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The problem is that we can't prevent all future pain.
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So what we're not talking about in this series is choosing so carefully and so perfectly that you make the perfect choice and you have no discomfort.
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If there was a fork in the road between two jobs and you chose one, maybe it brings a lot of benefits, but occasionally you get the Sunday scaries.
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Working for yourself might bring more autonomy or enjoyment in the subject matter potentially, but it could also be tied to less security or more loneliness.
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So we're trying to make the best decision we reasonably can, given the options available, the information we have, what matters to us, and the uncertainty that we can't eliminate.
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And that sentence I just said is not the line that I originally had when I started writing this script.
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I originally had written, so clearly we're trying to find the best path out of the options available and the knowledge we can reasonably acquire.
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I'm someone that's always trying to get more and more information to try to make the best decision I can.
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You might have heard the term maximizer and satisficer from The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.
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And maximizers are always trying to make the best choice they can.
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And if they went out looking for a sweater, for instance, they might think, well, let me research other sweater options and see if there's a better fit.
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And they might continue to research and research.
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And a satisficer might go into the store and say, I want a sweater.
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Great, this fits.
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It's a color I like, it's comfortable enough.
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It's made of a material that I want.
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Those are the standards I have.
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This fits those standards.
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I'm going to go.
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Now we're going to do a whole episode on maximizers and satisficers because as you can see, there's pros and cons there.
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And you might be able to guess what some of those are just from that example.
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But I do want to throw out that not everyone is all across the board a maximizer or a satisficer.
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When it comes to the sweater example, I would be completely fine checking one sweater option.
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But when it comes to things that are going to affect my life, I feel as though for decades into the future, such as who you marry, for example, those things I weight extremely heavily, sometimes too heavily, and that can lead to pain.
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That's something we often don't realize, is that we can analyze something so much that not only are we delaying the choice, but also we're living with a lot of regret, both before the decision, this fear of regret, we can experience that even.
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And then regret after.
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What if I had made a better choice?
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And maybe you've experienced this with work.
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You know, what if I had taken a different path?
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Would my life be better off?
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What if I had pursued a relationship with that person?
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What if I had actually moved to XYZ place when the opportunity presented itself?
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Some people have an easier time letting go of this way of thinking and just thinking, I'm making a choice.
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This is it, I'm moving on.
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And some people live a bit more in the what ifs.
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So we're going to get into that a lot more.
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But one concept that I want to get into that's pretty integral to this idea of decision-making theory is the idea of expected utility.
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Yes, I know it sounds like you're back in economics 101 and remembered utility and experiential utility.
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What are these terms?
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So experiential utility, you could think of just how much satisfaction are you getting during a certain event?
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Experienced utility of a vacation, how enjoyable is that vacation?
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But that's during the event.
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Then there is expected utility.
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How much satisfaction do you think you will get from that vacation?
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And of course, our expected utility is going to impact our decisions.
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That's how we make decisions.
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If you think something is going to make you better off.
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And then there is remembered utility, how you look back on an event after the fact.
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The problem is that these do not always line up.
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We'll do a couple examples.
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And one note is that several of these examples that I use in this episode, such as the one from the gas station and an upcoming one on apartments, are from the book The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.
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Let's first take expected utility compared to experienced.
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Imagine that you're choosing an apartment and you're weighing square footage and location, and if it has certain features, such as washer, dryer, and unit.
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And let's say that you optimize for space.
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Maybe you work from home and you want it to have enough space so that you don't feel too cooped up.
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But one month into living there, you find out that you actually would be a lot happier if you lived closer to shopping, such as grocery stores.
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And you will keep this in mind next time you choose an apartment.
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This is one reason why sometimes, as we get a little bit older and wiser, we can make better decisions because we've learned what matters to us through experiences.
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Sounds good enough in theory, but here is a problem.
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Sometimes remembered utility is different from experienced utility.
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How we remember an event, what we think made us happy, is not always what actually made us the happiest.
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The peak end rule is by Daniel Kahneman, a huge contributor to the field of decision making.
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What he found is that often the way we remember events is based on the peak experience, the best experience in it, and the very end of the experience.
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So let's look at how they studied this in the lab before my dating example.
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They played a noise that was loud and not pleasant to listen to for eight seconds.
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And then they played another sound that was 16 seconds long, and the first part of that was loud and unenjoyable, same sound.
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And then the second eight seconds was just slightly less loud.
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So the end that they remembered was not as unpleasant.
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Later, participants were asked which experience they would rather repeat.
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More participants chose the longer 16-second version.
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The reason why this is not exactly the most logical choice is because both parts are unpleasant, and clearly you'd be better off with the eight seconds of unpleasantness.
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It's just that because it ended with being less unpleasant, they remembered it more fondly.
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I'll give my dating example now.
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So there was a person that I dated that I don't think I would be good with, but it had lots of highs and lows and excitement, and the peak was absolutely it was peak.
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It was stimulating and novel, and you know, those relationships that feel a little bit like magic, lots of chemistry.
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But there were lots of valleys too that came with it.
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And you might relate with some relationships that you've had.
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And I think part of the reason it was so hard to move on from this relationship, why they kept entering my mind and I would miss them and idealize the relationship and wonder if we should get back together is because of the peak end rule by Kahneman, where that relationship had a really high peak.
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So it made me view the whole relationship more fondly as opposed to asking how happy I was in that relationship as a whole, on average, if we put it all together, those experiences.
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And here's the problem is that not only is there this little quirk in how we think about decision making, humans have a lot of quirks in how we think about decision making.
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In fact, there's a whole area of psychology that studies heuristics.
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So, for example, if you went past a gas station and you saw that there was a discount for using cash compared to a charge for using credit, even if it was the same amount, you would choose the option that offered a discount for cash.
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Because at least then, if you used credit, you wouldn't have the perception that you were being dinged for it.
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And there are so, so many ways that we use these mental shortcuts in our day-to-day life.
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And this wouldn't be as big of a problem if there weren't so many decisions that we now make on a day-to-day basis.
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We have more options now in many parts of the world, in many situations than we ever had before.
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Where do we want to live?
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Who do we want to be with?
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What job do we want?
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So this gift of optionality, which is so important, can often also, in some instances, feel like a burden that we're trapped under, especially for people that weigh decision making very heavily, that try to do the quote right thing when there isn't always an optimal path.
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They can still feel like they're searching and searching for one.
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And so, what do we do about this?
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The original intent of this series was going to be how do we make better decisions?
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Now that's a huge and broad field.
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So we will come back to the field of decision making quite often on this podcast.
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But instead, I want to approach a very specific question.
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Do these more options make us better off?
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And to what extent?
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Because we know that some options are better than no options.
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We know that.
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We want some choice.
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But are a thousand options better than a few?
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That's going to be a through line in this series.
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Now, I want to get into a little bit more of like meat and potatoes psychology stuff that could be helpful and tangible.
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And then at the end, we'll touch a little bit more on what I'm planning to cover in the rest of this series.
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And in doing that, I do have a bit of a confession.
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I alluded to it earlier, but I just want to make it point blank very clear here.
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A lot of my study of decision making has been out of fear, which was really surprising to me when I first started digging into this series.
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Because, like I said in the beginning of this episode, this is something that I've been obsessed with for basically almost my entire life, because it wasn't just in college that I started getting interested in it.
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I've thought through choices very intently, even since I was a kid.
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You know, the decision to take part in a certain activity over another and what ramifications that might have down the line.
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And behind this, again, is fear.
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Fear of choosing wrong, fear of regret.
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And often this fear led to analyzing in a way that was not constructive.
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Now, what does that lead to?
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Long, long, long pro-cons list, reading more and more information, talking to more people at one point in time where I was reading about my chances at a certain career, because it was one that I didn't know what the outlook would be like for that career.
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I was reading about it so much for oh, I think a couple of years while I was pursuing other things.
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I was thinking, do I want to change this career?
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Do I want to change this career?
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And I could have just tried it in that time.
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In those one to two years, I could have tried it.
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And then I had shame and regret for how long I deliberated about it.
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So this is not something that is benefiting our lives in a lot of ways.
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So what should we do instead?
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Just so this isn't all saying, oh, wait till we get to this series.
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I do want to throw out one thing here as a tangible thought.
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And I'd love to hear your thoughts too, back in a voicemail or a comment on YouTube.
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But Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice, like we talked about, where I've been pulling some of this from, he has a more recent book called Choose Wisely that I would love to read at some point.
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But the main idea behind it that I've read is something that I've found in my own life, which is our decisions are shaped by our values and what's important to us.
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So if we go back to that apartment example, there was no right apartment.
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It's what did that person value?
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Square footage or did they value location?
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And again, sometimes we might need to experience something to even know what we value, to get feedback from the real world and the consequences of our action.
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And consequences don't always have to be a huge bad thing.
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It's just, oh, I learned, I learned from that experience.
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And I've noticed that a lot of the best decisions that I've made, or when I actually start to change my behavior, is when I do tap into my feelings more.
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Often I would tune out my feelings.
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And I don't want to just say here, like, oh, trust your gut and trust your intuition, because of course there can be issues where we think something is our intuition or our gut, but really it's just the result of trauma we haven't worked through.
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But I do think that if we completely tune out our feelings, we are losing a huge part of what makes decisions.
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The areas where I've had no problems making choices have been areas where I'm very in tune with how I feel.
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For instance, I think what I pride myself on most, I was reflecting before this about what are the areas that I feel like I've made really good decisions.
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And one of them has been friendship.
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I have wonderful friends that I value a lot, that I respect a lot.
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And I have never once agonized over who I should be friends with.
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It's something that I just trust that, you know what, I'll be able to tell if someone aligns with me in terms of values, if I feel good around them, or if I feel a little bit uncomfortable.
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I feel this sort of pit in my stomach of something's not right in this connection.
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And it's interesting because it's informed by values I could write out if you asked me, could you write out logically why you click with this person?
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I'm sure I could over maybe why a certain friendship grew apart, but it's an area where I wasn't doing more and more thinking, where I didn't think, oh my goodness, my entire life rests upon this.
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And I find it really interesting that I've made, in some ways, better choices, or at least ended up happier with those choices without the additional analysis.
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Now, Barry in his book would not argue that we should not do analysis.
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And I'm looking forward to diving into that book of his another time.
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But for this series, we'll stay more squarely in his book, Paradox of Choice, and the sheer number of choices that we have competing, because that's enough to chew on right now.
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And in fact, what are we going to chew on specifically?
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Let's talk about that.
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We are going to do not necessarily in this order, and I cannot promise everything will be its own episode.
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We see what comes out of the research, the conversations with people, but the things I plan to look into are the maximizers and satisficers, which we touched on a little bit earlier, but basically, satisficers are people that say this is good enough when they're making a decision.
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And maximizers are trying to generally make the best decision.
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And this leads to unfortunately a lot of issues, but there are things that we can do to learn how to satisfice a bit more often.
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So that is one topic we'll get into.
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And I also want to go into the paradox of choice broadly.
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Let's do like a dive into that book, some main takeaways and do more choices make us better off?
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We'll talk about decision fatigue, what's fact or what's fiction there?
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Do we get fatigued from making a lot of decisions?
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Should we go on a choice diet, as someone I know calls it?
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And we'll also go into how this is affecting dating.
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Again, especially if you live in a place like New York City, like I do, you could be on a date with someone and know that in your age range, people that are attracted to your gender, that live close enough to you, that if you apply all those filters, there could be thousands of people that you could technically be on a date with potentially at this very moment.
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And how does that affect how you interact with the person that's maybe sitting across from you on a date?
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Does it affect the way we experience love and relationships?
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I also then want to move to how this affects culture and the vast amount of choices we have when it comes to art, entertainment, and the fact that so many of us now have so many options.
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We're all exposed to different media.
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And how does that affect the zeitgeist?
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And then we'll also talk about how this might affect where we live.
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I'm excited to dig into all of this with you all.
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If you would enjoy discussing this with a friend that you have, go ahead and send it to them.
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We'd also, again, love to hear from you in our voicemail speakpipe, which is linked in the show notes or in a comment on YouTube.
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Let me know if you have any requests for this series while I'm still working on it.
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I would love to add your input, your takes, your questions, or directions that you think would make this conversation more interesting or useful to you.
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Thank you so much for being with us.
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And we will be back in two weeks to embark on that series.
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We've been posting a little bit less because I am aiming to get ahead for future episodes so that we can collaborate across the team a little bit easier.
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I've been cutting it a little close with upload times, so I appreciate you being here and speak to you in two weeks on Sunday.