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a lot of the fear that we have around choosing, a lot of the anxiety that we have that comes with freedom, a lot of it's very irrational.
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Before the choice, there's all these fears of like, well, what if I choose the wrong one?
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What if I make a mistake?
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What if I regret not going down this other path?
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Whereas what we find is that after you have chosen that you have chosen,
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your feelings are quite different.
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They are similarly irrational, but in a different direction.
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And so in this chapter, it's probably useful to start out by going through what is the psychological process of choosing and committing?
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What does that feel like?
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How does that actually function within your mind?
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And how do you end up coming to see it down the road after the fact?
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Now, as soon as we started working on this episode and on this chapter, my mind immediately went to a researcher that I'm a huge fan of, who I think his work is very relevant and appropriate here.
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And that's Dan Gilbert, who is one of the preeminent happiness researchers, positive psychologists out of Harvard.
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And Gilbert is a super interesting guy because I think in a lot of ways he's,
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His life story kind of illustrates a lot of the points he makes about commitment and choice and choosing.
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So quick bio, Dan Gilbert, he dropped out of high school at 15.
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He grew up near Chicago.
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It sounds like he was a bit of a hippie, a bit of a free spirit, a bit of an estate, if you will.
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He started hitchhiking around the country.
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He was reading a lot of Eastern philosophy.
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He was meditating.
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He was into all sorts of woo-woo stuff.
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And he initially wanted to become a creative writer.
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Yeah.
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So he settled around Denver with his girlfriend and his son, and he started writing science fiction on a typewriter.
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Now, at the time, he wanted to support his young family.
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So he went back to school and then he started going to community college.
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And when he arrived at the community college and wanted to sign up for creative writing courses, they were all full for that semester.
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And so he looked at the course listing and he asked himself, what class will help me write science fiction better than anything else?
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psychology.
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That makes sense.
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Like if I want to be a better writer, I should probably understand a little bit about human psychology.
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So he took the psychology course.
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He loved it so much.
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He just went all in on it.
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You could say he committed to it.
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Within a year, he had stopped writing fiction entirely and he was enrolled full-time at UC Denver.
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Within 10 years, he had a PhD from Princeton.
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And within 20 years, he was a tenured professor at Harvard doing some of the
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that people like you and I talk about today.
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Did you know any, I didn't know any of this story beforehand.
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He's written, you know, Stumbling on Happiness, his biggest book probably, and lots of other books.
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And I've read all of his research.
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I had no idea about this whole background of his.
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Well, it's funny, actually, I do know one story about him, which is why I thought of him for this chapter.
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And we'll get to that story in a second.
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But yeah, I didn't know that he kind of came from this bohemian aesthetic life.
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And then like,
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Found psychology, went all in on it.
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I mean, it's actually, it's a beautiful representation of kind of what this whole episode is about.
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Like he found a thing that resonated, decided, right?
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He cut off the alternatives, went all in on it, and it paid off in a massive way.
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He's got this great quote, by the way, where he said, make a plan for your life and then be grateful when it doesn't go that way.
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Yeah.
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He's full of those, yeah.
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I love him.
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So Gilbert is really famous for having a lot of kind of counterintuitive happiness research.
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He has all sorts of findings that show that a lot of what we expect to make us happy doesn't make us happy.
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And a lot of the
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Stuff that we expect to make us unhappy doesn't really make us unhappy and vice versa.
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In a lot of cases, the things that we remember as making us happy actually didn't make us that happy at the time.
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And that basically our perception of our own happiness is very unreliable.
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It's quite relative given the circumstances.
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Now, this is going to be really important in a minute once we kind of come back to commitment.
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His foray into this line of research actually totally happened on accident back in the early 90s.
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He was having lunch with a colleague and it just so happened that both him and that colleague had endured like pretty awful years.
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They both had.
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people close to them pass away.
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They both had some pretty significant professional setbacks.
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They had some problems in their personal lives and they were sitting there talking about it, but also kind of analyzing themselves as I guess psychologists do when they sit and have lunch for a long time.
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And they realized that both of them actually felt a lot better about their situations than they would have guessed beforehand that they were handling everything that
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much better than they would have predicted.
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And that looking back, things were actually not as awful as they sounded initially.
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So this got them curious of like, why don't we try to measure people's forecasting into what's going to make them happy and what actually makes them happy?
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And this kicked off a series of fascinating findings that Gilbert later kind of packaged together and labeled the psychological immune system.
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And the idea behind the psychological immune system is that the same way our body will fight off bacteria and a cold virus or...
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Our psychology also seems to have a bit of an immune system to keep unhappiness and misery at bay.
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So it turns out that we will misremember things in our favor, that we will highlight things in our past that make us happier and happier.
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subtly kind of forget the things that were unexciting or uninteresting.
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We will overestimate things in our future to generate a large sense of optimism and hope.
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Whereas like once we actually get the thing that we're excited about, it's never as good as you think it's going to be.
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And so he identified all of these different ways that our mind is kind of
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irrational and inaccurate in terms of what it predicts and what it expects.
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And it seems to consistently be irrational and inaccurate in the same direction, which is to make us mildly happier.
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Our psychological immune system takes many different forms.
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It comes in rationalizing, post hoc justifications, reframing situations, finding silver linings to terrible things that
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It also involves a series of cognitive biases that we are just like not even aware of when they're happening.
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So my favorite story involving Dan Gilbert is actually about one of those biases.
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He had been with his girlfriend for like 15 years or something.
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They'd never gotten married.
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And he was talking to a colleague about some of his recent research.
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And he actually found that putting constraints
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on somebody made them more satisfied with their situation than removing the constraints, right?
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It's, it's kind of Sartre and the prisoner of war camp.
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It's like he found the more constraints you put on people, the more satisfied they seem to be with that situation.
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After the fact, his colleagues said, oh, that's really interesting.
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That's like a very strong psychological argument for marriage.
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And Dan Gilbert sat there for a second.
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And up until that point, he had never really believed in the value of marriage.
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He saw it as kind of a pointless legal formality.
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And he sat there and he was like, oh, shit.
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And he went home and immediately proposed to his girlfriend.
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And sure enough, he later said, getting married made me happier with my relationship.
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It's that barrier to exit that makes you more satisfied staying where you are.
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Now, this is important for commitments because it turns out that there are a lot of aspects of our psychological immune system that are kind of geared towards nudging us to be satisfied with our decisions, even if it wasn't the greatest decision in the world.
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Right.
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So the fear that the estate has, which is like, I can't make a choice.
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What if I make the wrong choice?
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What if I'm not happy?
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What if this other choice was the better choice?
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The dizziness of freedom, the dizziness of freedom.
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It turns out.
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Once you've made the choice, your mind will unconsciously start justifying that choice to yourself and finding reasons to be happy about it.
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And I think this is actually an important part of our psychological software.
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Evolutionarily speaking, evolutionarily,
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Optionality was very scarce throughout most of human history.
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And so we have a very strong bias towards maintaining optionality.
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But then it makes sense once you have kind of walked through that door and closed the other doors, it makes sense that you would have a bias towards justifying that decision and being happy with whatever resulted from it.
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opposite, opposite biases, depending on when, like that you were talking about that anxiety before the decision versus the different anxiety you might have after it.
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They're completely different mechanisms.
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It seems like, yeah.
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And I come back to the cold pool metaphor, right?
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It's like,
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The fear of jumping in is only matched by the satisfaction once you're already in.
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Like, nobody ever jumps into a cold pool on a hot summer day and is like, why did I do this?
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I made the wrong decision.
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I should have jumped into the hot tub instead.
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Like, it's, no, you're like, this is nice.
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The cold pool example, you can't.
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jump out of the cold pool as if you've never done it before, right?
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Whereas that door study I was talking about where you get the three doors, always keeping those three options open, there's a difference there.
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There's a qualitative difference there too.
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Categorical difference there actually, the reversible versus unreversible.
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And that's actually something they see in the research is that the psychological immune system actually kicks in the strongest when you have an irreversible decision.
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So you make a decision and you can't go back on it.
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you're probably going to be more satisfied with it just because you have no other option in that case.
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So kind of in the short term, if you're making these decisions, you have these irreversible decisions that you need to make.
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There is a little bit of an argument for like, just make the decision.
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Just do it.
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And your brain will kind of follow you there.
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I think in the modern world where there is, it's more like the open door study, or it's more like the door study where you can keep all of these doors open if you want to.
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There might be a better door down the hall almost at all times.
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I think that's where a lot of us get stuck.
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We have the optionality to keep all those doors open.
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Yeah.
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But the psychological immune system works best when there are these kind of like irreversible decisions, or at least ones that we perceive as irreversible.
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This lends itself to Dan Gilbert's point that like increasing constraints are
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on your decision actually increases your satisfaction with that decision.
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Like the more irreversible you can make something, the more satisfied with it you'll probably be.
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It's funny, actually, I just saw this yesterday on social media.
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It was an interview with the sports journalist Stephen A. Smith.
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He was like, I have a friend whose prenup, I believe, is the most perfect legal document ever written.
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It's a prenup of only one sentence.
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You want to guess what the one sentence is?
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Whoever leaves gets nothing.
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How's that for incentives and irreversibility?
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Yeah.
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There's been decisions that I've made where it was just like, oh, I got all these options in front of me.
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And I felt that dizziness of freedom before.
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And as soon as I made one, I just instantly almost felt better about it.
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When I finished my master's degree, I was like still like, I don't know what I want to do with my life type of thing.
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And I said, screw it.
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I'm going to go live in South America for a little while.
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And I was so anxious before that.
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And I was like, I don't know what I want to do, blah, blah, blah.
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And as soon as I made that decision, I was like, there's there was clarity.
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I knew exactly what I needed to do.
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I need to buy this ticket.
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I need to sell all my stuff.
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I needed all of these things like just fell into place.
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I think that's part of it, too, is it gives you this clarity again, almost no matter what it was.
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That honestly probably wasn't a great decision of mine to do.
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I probably should have just kept going on a more stable career path at the time.
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But that said, I made the decision, and it removed a lot of that uncertainty around it.
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You're alluding to something.
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This is actually a point I made in Subtle Art, and it's something that I believe very strongly, but it's very hard to communicate.
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I think people who are
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very aesthetic in the way they live.
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They don't understand.
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What you just described is a very subtle form of freedom in that
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When you cut off the alternatives, it actually frees you to focus on the thing that you chose on, right?
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And that's actually a very powerful form of freedom.
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Hey, everybody.
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Hope you enjoyed this video.
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It was just one clip from a much larger, more thorough episode.
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If you want to watch or listen to the full episode, click on the link in the description.
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And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide with all the resources, citations, and exercises at solvepodcast.com slash commitment.
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See you in the next one.
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a lot of the fear that we have around choosing, a lot of the anxiety that we have that comes with freedom, a lot of it's very irrational.
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Before the choice, there's all these fears of like, well, what if I choose the wrong one?
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What if I make a mistake?
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What if I regret not going down this other path?
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Whereas what we find is that after you have chosen that you have chosen,
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your feelings are quite different.
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They are similarly irrational, but in a different direction.
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And so in this chapter, it's probably useful to start out by going through what is the psychological process of choosing and committing?
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What does that feel like?
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How does that actually function within your mind?
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And how do you end up coming to see it down the road after the fact?
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Now, as soon as we started working on this episode and on this chapter, my mind immediately went to a researcher that I'm a huge fan of, who I think his work is very relevant and appropriate here.
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And that's Dan Gilbert, who is one of the preeminent happiness researchers, positive psychologists out of Harvard.
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And Gilbert is a super interesting guy because I think in a lot of ways he's,
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His life story kind of illustrates a lot of the points he makes about commitment and choice and choosing.
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So quick bio, Dan Gilbert, he dropped out of high school at 15.
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He grew up near Chicago.
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It sounds like he was a bit of a hippie, a bit of a free spirit, a bit of an estate, if you will.
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He started hitchhiking around the country.
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He was reading a lot of Eastern philosophy.
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He was meditating.
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He was into all sorts of woo-woo stuff.
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And he initially wanted to become a creative writer.
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Yeah.
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So he settled around Denver with his girlfriend and his son, and he started writing science fiction on a typewriter.
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Now, at the time, he wanted to support his young family.
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So he went back to school and then he started going to community college.
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And when he arrived at the community college and wanted to sign up for creative writing courses, they were all full for that semester.
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And so he looked at the course listing and he asked himself, what class will help me write science fiction better than anything else?
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psychology.
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That makes sense.
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Like if I want to be a better writer, I should probably understand a little bit about human psychology.
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So he took the psychology course.
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He loved it so much.
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He just went all in on it.
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You could say he committed to it.
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Within a year, he had stopped writing fiction entirely and he was enrolled full-time at UC Denver.
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Within 10 years, he had a PhD from Princeton.
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And within 20 years, he was a tenured professor at Harvard doing some of the
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that people like you and I talk about today.
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Did you know any, I didn't know any of this story beforehand.
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He's written, you know, Stumbling on Happiness, his biggest book probably, and lots of other books.
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And I've read all of his research.
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I had no idea about this whole background of his.
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Well, it's funny, actually, I do know one story about him, which is why I thought of him for this chapter.
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And we'll get to that story in a second.
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But yeah, I didn't know that he kind of came from this bohemian aesthetic life.
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And then like,
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Found psychology, went all in on it.
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I mean, it's actually, it's a beautiful representation of kind of what this whole episode is about.
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Like he found a thing that resonated, decided, right?
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He cut off the alternatives, went all in on it, and it paid off in a massive way.
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He's got this great quote, by the way, where he said, make a plan for your life and then be grateful when it doesn't go that way.
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Yeah.
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He's full of those, yeah.
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I love him.
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So Gilbert is really famous for having a lot of kind of counterintuitive happiness research.
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He has all sorts of findings that show that a lot of what we expect to make us happy doesn't make us happy.
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And a lot of the
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Stuff that we expect to make us unhappy doesn't really make us unhappy and vice versa.
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In a lot of cases, the things that we remember as making us happy actually didn't make us that happy at the time.
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And that basically our perception of our own happiness is very unreliable.
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It's quite relative given the circumstances.
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Now, this is going to be really important in a minute once we kind of come back to commitment.
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His foray into this line of research actually totally happened on accident back in the early 90s.
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He was having lunch with a colleague and it just so happened that both him and that colleague had endured like pretty awful years.
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They both had.
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people close to them pass away.
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They both had some pretty significant professional setbacks.
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They had some problems in their personal lives and they were sitting there talking about it, but also kind of analyzing themselves as I guess psychologists do when they sit and have lunch for a long time.
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And they realized that both of them actually felt a lot better about their situations than they would have guessed beforehand that they were handling everything that
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much better than they would have predicted.
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And that looking back, things were actually not as awful as they sounded initially.
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So this got them curious of like, why don't we try to measure people's forecasting into what's going to make them happy and what actually makes them happy?
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And this kicked off a series of fascinating findings that Gilbert later kind of packaged together and labeled the psychological immune system.
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And the idea behind the psychological immune system is that the same way our body will fight off bacteria and a cold virus or...
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Our psychology also seems to have a bit of an immune system to keep unhappiness and misery at bay.
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So it turns out that we will misremember things in our favor, that we will highlight things in our past that make us happier and happier.
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subtly kind of forget the things that were unexciting or uninteresting.
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We will overestimate things in our future to generate a large sense of optimism and hope.
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Whereas like once we actually get the thing that we're excited about, it's never as good as you think it's going to be.
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And so he identified all of these different ways that our mind is kind of
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irrational and inaccurate in terms of what it predicts and what it expects.
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And it seems to consistently be irrational and inaccurate in the same direction, which is to make us mildly happier.
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Our psychological immune system takes many different forms.
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It comes in rationalizing, post hoc justifications, reframing situations, finding silver linings to terrible things that
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It also involves a series of cognitive biases that we are just like not even aware of when they're happening.
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So my favorite story involving Dan Gilbert is actually about one of those biases.
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He had been with his girlfriend for like 15 years or something.
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They'd never gotten married.
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And he was talking to a colleague about some of his recent research.
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And he actually found that putting constraints
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on somebody made them more satisfied with their situation than removing the constraints, right?
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It's, it's kind of Sartre and the prisoner of war camp.
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It's like he found the more constraints you put on people, the more satisfied they seem to be with that situation.
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After the fact, his colleagues said, oh, that's really interesting.
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That's like a very strong psychological argument for marriage.
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And Dan Gilbert sat there for a second.
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And up until that point, he had never really believed in the value of marriage.
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He saw it as kind of a pointless legal formality.
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And he sat there and he was like, oh, shit.
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And he went home and immediately proposed to his girlfriend.
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And sure enough, he later said, getting married made me happier with my relationship.
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It's that barrier to exit that makes you more satisfied staying where you are.
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Now, this is important for commitments because it turns out that there are a lot of aspects of our psychological immune system that are kind of geared towards nudging us to be satisfied with our decisions, even if it wasn't the greatest decision in the world.
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Right.
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So the fear that the estate has, which is like, I can't make a choice.
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What if I make the wrong choice?
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What if I'm not happy?
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What if this other choice was the better choice?
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The dizziness of freedom, the dizziness of freedom.
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It turns out.
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Once you've made the choice, your mind will unconsciously start justifying that choice to yourself and finding reasons to be happy about it.
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And I think this is actually an important part of our psychological software.
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Evolutionarily speaking, evolutionarily,
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Optionality was very scarce throughout most of human history.
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And so we have a very strong bias towards maintaining optionality.
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But then it makes sense once you have kind of walked through that door and closed the other doors, it makes sense that you would have a bias towards justifying that decision and being happy with whatever resulted from it.
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opposite, opposite biases, depending on when, like that you were talking about that anxiety before the decision versus the different anxiety you might have after it.
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They're completely different mechanisms.
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It seems like, yeah.
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And I come back to the cold pool metaphor, right?
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It's like,
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The fear of jumping in is only matched by the satisfaction once you're already in.
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Like, nobody ever jumps into a cold pool on a hot summer day and is like, why did I do this?
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I made the wrong decision.
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I should have jumped into the hot tub instead.
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Like, it's, no, you're like, this is nice.
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The cold pool example, you can't.
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jump out of the cold pool as if you've never done it before, right?
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Whereas that door study I was talking about where you get the three doors, always keeping those three options open, there's a difference there.
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There's a qualitative difference there too.
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Categorical difference there actually, the reversible versus unreversible.
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And that's actually something they see in the research is that the psychological immune system actually kicks in the strongest when you have an irreversible decision.
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So you make a decision and you can't go back on it.
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you're probably going to be more satisfied with it just because you have no other option in that case.
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So kind of in the short term, if you're making these decisions, you have these irreversible decisions that you need to make.
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There is a little bit of an argument for like, just make the decision.
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Just do it.
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And your brain will kind of follow you there.
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I think in the modern world where there is, it's more like the open door study, or it's more like the door study where you can keep all of these doors open if you want to.
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There might be a better door down the hall almost at all times.
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I think that's where a lot of us get stuck.
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We have the optionality to keep all those doors open.
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Yeah.
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But the psychological immune system works best when there are these kind of like irreversible decisions, or at least ones that we perceive as irreversible.
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This lends itself to Dan Gilbert's point that like increasing constraints are
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on your decision actually increases your satisfaction with that decision.
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Like the more irreversible you can make something, the more satisfied with it you'll probably be.
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It's funny, actually, I just saw this yesterday on social media.
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It was an interview with the sports journalist Stephen A. Smith.
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He was like, I have a friend whose prenup, I believe, is the most perfect legal document ever written.
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It's a prenup of only one sentence.
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You want to guess what the one sentence is?
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Whoever leaves gets nothing.
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How's that for incentives and irreversibility?
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Yeah.
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There's been decisions that I've made where it was just like, oh, I got all these options in front of me.
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And I felt that dizziness of freedom before.
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And as soon as I made one, I just instantly almost felt better about it.
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When I finished my master's degree, I was like still like, I don't know what I want to do with my life type of thing.
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And I said, screw it.
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I'm going to go live in South America for a little while.
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And I was so anxious before that.
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And I was like, I don't know what I want to do, blah, blah, blah.
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And as soon as I made that decision, I was like, there's there was clarity.
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I knew exactly what I needed to do.
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I need to buy this ticket.
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I need to sell all my stuff.
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I needed all of these things like just fell into place.
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I think that's part of it, too, is it gives you this clarity again, almost no matter what it was.
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That honestly probably wasn't a great decision of mine to do.
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I probably should have just kept going on a more stable career path at the time.
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But that said, I made the decision, and it removed a lot of that uncertainty around it.
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You're alluding to something.
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This is actually a point I made in Subtle Art, and it's something that I believe very strongly, but it's very hard to communicate.
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I think people who are
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very aesthetic in the way they live.
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They don't understand.
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What you just described is a very subtle form of freedom in that
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When you cut off the alternatives, it actually frees you to focus on the thing that you chose on, right?
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And that's actually a very powerful form of freedom.
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Hey, everybody.
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Hope you enjoyed this video.
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It was just one clip from a much larger, more thorough episode.
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If you want to watch or listen to the full episode, click on the link in the description.
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And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide with all the resources, citations, and exercises at solvepodcast.com slash commitment.
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See you in the next one.
