October 6, 2025 • 40 mins
Every choice you make shapes your wellbeing - and the bigger the decision, the greater the impact. So when it comes to life-changing questions like where to live, who to marry, or which career to pursue, how can you tell if you’re making the best decision for your long-term happiness?
Economists might argue that you should weigh up every single option carefully - like a gambler in a casino figuring out the odds of winning. But psychologist Barry Schwartz says you can't apply a formula to happiness. In this episode, he shares insights from his new book, Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making (co-authored with philosopher Richard Schuldenfrei), offering a more thoughtful and human approach to making life’s hardest choices.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. We're finally winding down our series on My favorite
books of twenty twenty five, and today's favorite book. Choice
deals with the problem that I struggle with a lot,
how to make better decisions. Our happiness is shaped by
the choices we make within the circumstances we're given. Sometimes
(00:37):
those choices feel obvious, like whether to open a window
when the room you're in is feeling stuffy, or whether
to grab a glass of water if you're feeling parched.
But bigger life decisions like who to marry, which career
path to follow, or where to live, can feel paralyzing.
And that kind of makes sense. The bigger the choice,
the greater it's potential to impact your life and your
(00:58):
well being. So what do you do when you're faced
with a big decision? How do you make the most
happiness inducing choice? Do you talk it through with a
loved one or therapist. Do you make a big list
of pros and con do you flip a coin? Well,
today's guest has some advice.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Hi. My name is Barry Schwartz. I'm a psychologist. I
spent forty five years teaching at a place called Swarthmore
College outside of Philadelphia. Then retired and moved to Oakland.
My interests for many, many years have been on the
intersection of economics and psychology, focused on how people make
(01:36):
decisions and also how they should make decisions.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Berry's been a guest on the Happiness Lab a few
times because I'm a huge fan of his work, so
I was super excited to see that he had a
new book out about how to make tough decisions. It's
called Choose Wisely, Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision Making.
It's co authored with Barry's former Swarthmore colleague, the philosopher
Richard Schuldenfry. I wanted to start a conversation about choosing
(02:01):
Wisely with some definitions. So my first question to Barry
was what makes a decision good?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
So a good decision is one that gets you to
things that enable you to live a good life.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
I would say, seems like you're pretty good at making
decisions that enable you to live a good life. You've
been with your wife for a long time, I think
you said in your book since seventh grade, and you
spent half your life at one university. Has this always
come easy to you? Or are there decisions that you
really struggle with?
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Too. There are very few decisions that I have struggled with.
There are people who, at least some of the time,
think their task is to get the best out of
whatever situation they're in. We call them maximizers. And there
are people who aspire to good enough. And they may
have low standards with respect to some things and high
(02:51):
standards with respect to other things. But whatever their standards are,
as soon as they find something that meets them, they
stop looking. I have always been that way. The question
in my mind was always is this good enough? And sometimes,
you know, I was pleasantly surprised. I chose good enough
and it turned out it was spectacular. But I wasn't
(03:12):
looking for perfect. I was looking for good enough. And
that makes decision making a lot easier. And that is
especially true in the modern world. You know, one hundred
years ago, there wasn't much difference between looking for the
best and looking for good enough because it just weren't
that many options. But now you could spend your whole
(03:33):
life looking for the best pair of jeans, or you know,
the best restaurant in the New York metropolitan area, or
what have you, and you'd end up dying naked and starving.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
You had this experience yourself, though, even as a good
decision maker, trying to buy jeans one time, I remember.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
It shows you how seductive it is for somebody like me.
You know, I used to buy jeans. I wore jeans
every day, and I would buy them when the old
pair wore out, when my life was embarrassed to be
seen in public with me, you know, because I didn't
like shopping for jeans. They were uncomfortable when you first
bought them, they had to wash them a million times.
So anyway, I went to the gap, which is where
(04:10):
I bought my jeans, and I told them my size,
and the clerk said, you want slim fit, easy fit,
relax fit, buttonflies, zip or fly boot cut, and I said,
I want the kind that used to be the only kind,
which of course they didn't make anymore. So I ended
up trying on all these different styles, thinking well, if
(04:32):
they go to the trouble of making them, I should
go to the trouble of trying them. And I walked
out with the best fitting jeans I had ever had,
and I felt worse. And the reason I felt worse
is that what happened when there were all these options.
Is that my standards for what counted as a good
result went up. You know, when all there was one
(04:55):
kind of genes, only an idiot would expect perfection, an
idiot or model. But I'm not an idiot and I'm
not a model, So you know, good enough was good enough.
But now when I see them making them in all
these different cuts styles, I expect better than good enough.
So what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect,
(05:15):
and so I ended up feeling like I had failed.
And it occurred to me that this is life for
people in rich, democratic societies, and it is incredibly wasteful
of resources, and it is incredibly detrimental to people's well being.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
I think another thing that happens in the modern day
isn't just that we have this like incredible overwhelm of choice,
you know, BOOKA and super Fly, all this stuff with jeans.
We also live in a world where we get lots
of information about them too. I'm experiencing this because I'm
trying to buy a new projector. You know, we used
to have a projector that we watch movies on the
projector just died, and so I go on the web.
(05:57):
There's millions of projectors. But it's not just the choice.
It feels to me also like it's the information that's
out there. So first I go on you know, Wirecutter,
the New York Times, and then I see a million
different views that people have. It feels like I'm supposed
to be optimizing, because otherwise, why would there be not
just so much choice, but so much information about my
choices out there?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
You're exactly right. It's like only an idiot would fail
to take advantage of all the variety and all the information.
There's enormous pressure. You know, satisficing is good enough. The
way people hear that when I give talks about this
is satisficing is settling. The word settling is not neutral.
(06:40):
When people describe you as settling, they're criticizing. Why would
you set? And of course you're right. Nowadays, the information
and misinformation is so abundant, you know, it's effortless. When
I was applying to college one hundred years ago, you'd
send off to a college and they'd send you their
(07:00):
course catalog which was incomprehensible, and you know, a million
pages thick, but that's what you got. So you had
to do decide where to apply to college as a
seventeen year old with this incredibly unwieldy information and it
took weeks for it to come. So how many colleges
you're going to apply to given how effortful it is
(07:22):
to get information that is then effortful to make sense of.
Is that the world we live in now? Absolutely not.
You can get all the information you want about every
college in the United States in a half hour, So
why not take advantage?
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Yeah, I think this idea that we need to optimize
everything is just the kind of current culture, right, But
this is also something that economists have been telling us
for a long time. There's this idea that we're supposed
to optimize our decisions. And so in your book you
review this kind of classic formula that we use to
make rational decisions. Tell me what this formula is and
explain why you've pushed against it so much.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Sure, so, what we've inherited from economics is the idea
that a good decision is one that maximizes utility.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
And maybe just define for listeners who are totally unfamiliar
with this stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah, utility is whatever you think it is. So you
decide what's worth what you know you may be turned
on by esthetics, and I may be turned on by
the size of my bank account, and somebody else may
be turned on by being able to hit tennis. Ass
whatever it is, you should be choosing in a way
(08:30):
that maximizes that thing for you, and then you go
through the world making decisions so that you get the
most utility out of every decision that you possibly can.
So rational choice theory grows out of economics. It's been
around for a very long time, and it makes good
intuitive sense. If your goal when you're making a decision
(08:53):
is to maximize utility, then for every option you face,
you need to know two things. One how good will
it be? How util will it be? Two? How likely
is it that if I choose it, it'll actually be
as good as I think? Because the world is uncertain,
(09:13):
very much analogous to the bets we make in a casino,
you need to know two things, how much will I
win and how likely am I to win it. You
multiply those two things together and you get a quote
expected utility, and then you simply choose the option that
has the highest expected utility. And that's the way you're
(09:36):
supposed to go through life. The thing to notice is
that it assumes that the decisions we make are like
decisions we might make in a casino, that there are
numbers that can be attached to the value of each outcome,
and there are numbers that can be attached to the
likelihood of getting that value, so you know there's no
(09:57):
uncertainty when you're playing roulette or blackjack. You can attach
both potential gains and probabilities to all those gamps. That's
the way the games are set up. Using your college,
deciding what to do for the weekend, deciding who to
interview on your podcast don't seem to be like that,
but the push from economics is find a way to
(10:20):
quantify and you will enhance your rationality. So that has
been the normative standard for a century. What happens is
that your science moves in the wrong direction, and then
social institutions move in the same direction, and before you
know it, it got like fish not knowing they live
in water. It's hard to imagine there's another way to
(10:40):
organize your life and another set of things to care about.
So you know, rational choice theory is probably not a
phrase that is familiar to most people, but I think
the way they think you're supposed to make decisions is
an embodiment of rational choice theory with some of the
rough edges sort of sanded down a little bit. And
(11:03):
the point of the new book, which is called Choose Wisely,
is that rational choice theory is a disastrous standard to
use because most of the decisions we make, even minor
ones and certainly major ones, are nothing like casino gambles.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
So in your book, you tell some of these powerful
stories of like how bad this rational choice theory, or
maybe like even this cost benefit analysis. Is you tell
a story about Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Can
you share that example and why it illustrates why reducing
choice to all these kinds of numbers might be so dangerous,
So for people.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
In your audience who are not one hundred years old,
the United States fought a war in Vietnam. Got to
start at the beginning. It was a guerrilla war, or
what has come to be called an asymmetric war. We
had our army and big weapons, and they were fighting
in a jungle. And McNamara, who had been the head
(11:59):
of the Ford Motor Company, had this idea that the
way to make decisions is to rationalize and by rationalize,
he meant we ate a framework where you can do
cost benefit calculations, and then the right strategy is the
one that will produce the highest benefit per unit of cost.
(12:19):
So he was trying to industrialize the war. He imposed
those standards up and down the military hierarchy, and it
was a disaster. Now, the thing about an asymmetric war
is it's really hard to know who's winning. It's not
like you're gaining territory of twenty forty square miles. It's
(12:41):
really hard to know who's winning. So some brilliant person
had the idea that we needed a proxy for winning,
and what's a good proxy for winning casualties. If they're
losing more soldiers than we are, we must be winning.
The strategy changed to maximize enemy casualties, whether or not
(13:04):
they had any strategic advantage, and so now we were
just out for blood, independent of the strategic advantages that
extracting that blood might have caused. And that, it strikes me,
is the danger of taking rational choice theory too seriously.
The press to be able to quantify pushes you in
(13:25):
the direction of measuring what you can and pretending that
what you measure is what you care about.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
But if quantifying costs and benefits isn't the answer to
life's big decisions, then what is. After the break, Barya
will share his method for making tough choices that can
lead to greater well being. The Happiness Lab will be
back in a moment. Psychologist Barry Schwartz is on a
(13:57):
mission to help us make better choices and ultimately to
live better lives. In his new book, Choose Wisely, he
and his co author Richard Schildenfry argue that we need
to forget the notion of quantifif buying happiness, a claim
that's pretty revolutionary in the field of decision science. After all,
even the father of behavioral economics, the Nobel Prize winning
(14:18):
Danny Kahneman, was famous for trying to measure happiness objectively.
I asked Barry to explain the context in which conoman
developed this method and what he and his co author
thought about it.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
The idea is that when you ask people something like
all things considered, how happy are you, what they're likely
to tell you is about what experience they had in
the last fifteen minutes. So it's really very hard to
use a global question like that to get into the
details and so what works better is having people essentially
(14:52):
list the activities that they've engaged in in the course
of the last twenty four hours, forty eight hours, what
have you, and then ask them for each activity, on
a say, a five point scale, how much satisfaction gave them,
how happy it made them, And in this way you
can build up the atoms of happiness. So what he
(15:13):
was looking for was what he called objective happiness, and
the idea was that happiness objectively is simply the collection
of moments. How you feel at every moment, put together
is the sum total of your happiness in that period
of time. So that's what he was trying to do,
(15:35):
was to turn a subjective measure into an objective measure.
And he acknowledged that it was not the final word
on happiness, but he thought, you know, you don't get
molecules without atoms, and what he was trying to do
was develop a way of understanding the atoms of happiness.
(15:57):
And Schulanfry, who was a philosopher, thought this was the
most ludicrous enterprise in the world, although he also had
enormous respect for Kanneman's work. It was like, how could
somebody that's smart have such a dumb idea.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
I mean, I think part of it is that, you know,
Danny came from this tradition thought that they had to
figure out what the rational path was. And I think
Danny was maybe seduced by a different version.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
He wanted to do the physics of happiness. We'll find
the atoms of happiness and put them all together, that's right.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
And ideally, if you find the atoms of happiness, you
can then improve happiness by doing formulating social policies that
increase the atoms of happiness. You know, you can't make
progress unless you know what progress is going to look like.
So he had that standard of rigor and precision, and
what he was trying to do is adapted to a
(16:49):
much fuzzier concept with the understanding that eventually it would
get built out into its full complexity.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And so talk to me about why you and shulden
Frey don't think this approach works kind of atomizing happiness
this way.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
First of all, a lot depends on what you think
happiness means. And if you have what could be called
the smiley face view of happiness, then, for all I know,
Connoman's approach made perfectly good sense there are easy ways
(17:25):
to get that smiley face. Taking drugs is probably the
easiest way to get that smiley face and have it
all the time until you die. So you need to
start by asking what does it mean to be happy?
You know what Aristotle call you diamonia, which is real
(17:45):
happiness has to do with living a good life, with achieving,
with going somewhere, with doing things that are meaningful, and
much of the time what it takes for that to
happen is going to make you unhappy smiley face wise,
you know, if you want to be the best professional
(18:05):
basketball player in the world, you spend twenty hours a
week in the weight room. I'm not one of those people,
but I'm guessing that nobody likes spending twenty hours a
week in the wave room. What they do like is
becoming excellent at something that is significant and meaningful to them,
(18:26):
and they will suffer in the service of something else
that's bigger. So when you molecularize happiness the way Kanaman did,
just as a first step, what you're doing is you're
getting people to focus down on these little and almost
certainly irrelevant details of minute by minute and day to
(18:48):
day experience as if that's what they should be pursuing
rather than these larger objectives. Again, I don't think he
thought it was ever going to be the last word.
He says that explicitly. But the trouble is that what
often happens in science is that you never get very
far past the first word and building this great, big
(19:11):
structure out of these atoms. It doesn't happen. You spend
all your time with the atoms and not with the structure.
And this is especially true when the things you think
matter most are not quantifiable in the way that you
think a science should be quantifiable.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
So trying to measure happiness in terms of these tiny
atoms doesn't seem to work. How do you think we
should be measuring happiness?
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Well, So, when you're applying to college, we spend a
lot of time in the book following this apocryphal young
woman named Mia as she decides should I go to college?
Where should I go to college? Why am I going
to college? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the
question is, when you're trying to decide where to go
to college, what kinds of questions should you be asking yourself?
(20:01):
There are some questions that it is easy to ask
and answer, like what's the average salary of people who
graduate from this or that college? It's accessible, it's quantitative.
What are the average SAT scores of admitted students? The
higher they are, the better the students. The better the students,
(20:22):
the better my education will be. US News and World
Report makes a living quantifying things in this way, so
that basically you can just push a button and outcomes
the answer what school should I go to? What school
should I apply to? Before you do any of that,
you really should be asking why am I going to college?
(20:44):
What's it for for me? What kind of a person
am I? What kind of a person do I aspire
to become? And you can't really attach value to particular
colleges or particular programs within colleges without first asking yourself
these questions, what do I want to care about? And
(21:06):
what do I care about? And how can I get
to be the person that I aspire to be? Are
you going to get this right? Hell? No, you know,
I mean, you're seventeen years old, you don't know yourself
well and nothing. One of the great things about college
is that it changes people. But that kind of uncertainty
is inevitable you will at least be asking the right questions,
(21:29):
and as you go through college, you will continue to
be asking those questions as a way of evaluating whether
you're being well educated or you know, well educated doesn't
mean they have a three point eight gpa. Being well
educated means that you're moving in the direction that you
think your life should take the trajectory you want your
life to take. No decision is final. So what we're
(21:53):
suggesting is that rational people are thoughtful people, they are
reflective people, and they don't slavishly pursue quantification when quantification
is inappropriate. In other words, quantification has its place, but
pretending that you have solved the problem by putting a
(22:14):
number on it is not going to get you to
the right place.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
I love this idea, but I find it so countercultural,
Like we are so in quantification mindset and we're so
in optimization mindset. I mean, the thing you said that
I found so interesting that I agree with completely, especially
for the college decision, but for lots of decisions is
you're not going to get it right. You're not going
to get it right because you're going to change throughout
the process, and there's no right, it's going to evolve
(22:39):
over time. It's not a decision that's one and done.
It's one that you're going to keep making constantly. And
I think people today hate that idea. They want to,
you know, pick the perfect deeds and it's one and done.
But most of the big important things we need to
do in life to live a good life just don't
work like that, and that I think people find really scary.
I think people love the idea that they could go
(22:59):
on some Yelp review and find the optimal college or
the optimal house and then they're done, But the good
life doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I think that's right. But I also think that this
sort of rational choice model contributes to this attitude totally.
In other words, it tells you there is a right
answer to this question, and if you do enough work,
you'll get to it. And I don't think that's the
way people used to think about their lives. You can
(23:28):
look back after you've made decisions, quite reasonable decisions at
the time, and learn from what went wrong, so that
maybe you'll evaluate things differently the next time. But uncertainty
is simply built into being a human being in a
social environment, and it's never one and done. It's never finished.
(23:51):
You should always be thinking about decisions that you've made,
and I should point out you should be giving it
attention that's proportionate to its importance. You know, I don't
want you to go to a pizza place in New
Haven and then beat yourself up for three weeks because
you you can go to the best pizza place in
New Haven. You know that's crazy, But it's not so
(24:14):
crazy to have those kinds of recriminations when it's about
where you spent four years going to college, or deciding
to get a PhD in psychology instead of a PhD
in economics, or deciding to marry somebody or not marry
that person. You know, you should be reflective about decisions
(24:35):
in some proportion to their importance, but you need to
be reflective to decide how important they are.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
So let's get into the particular process we can use
to become a little bit more reflective. One of the
processes you suggest is this idea of understanding. We really
need to kind of make sure we're understanding things well.
But you don't mean in the kind of quantitative sense.
You don't mean kind of measuring things out. So what
do you mean by understanding here.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
The thing about needing to use judgment is that the
right answer to almost every question is it depends what
you just said a few minutes ago. That people don't
like that, it makes them nervous, it makes them anxious.
I couldn't agree more. You can deny that and attach
numbers to things then it doesn't depend or you can
(25:21):
accept it and try the best you can as an
imperfect person in a complicated world, to understand both yourself
and the environment you're about to enter, and use that
understanding always correctable to make an intelligent guess. So understanding
(25:43):
means a understanding yourself and b understanding the world. I'm
sure that one of the things you teach students is
how hard it is to do either of those things.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Yes, it's much harder than looking on the US News
and World Report for you know what the rank is.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yep, it is much much harder, and sometimes that's a
fine thing to do. You know, you're stopping overnight at
a hotel on your way somewhere and you want to
find a place to eat, looking at Yelp reviews and
picking a restaurant that's got good reviews and not looking back.
That's fine, but you need to be thoughtful to know
(26:25):
how much effort and what kind of effort is required.
What does it mean to say that such and such
is a good school. What you really care about is
is it a good school for me? However, if you've
decided that the only reason you're going to college is
so that you can earn a six figure income right
(26:45):
after you get your diploma, then a good school isn't
necessarily a good school for you. It's a good school
for the world that will reward you with a six
figure salary as soon as you get your diploma. Now,
I think that's the wrong reason to choose a school,
but I wouldn't insist that you use my standards. So
(27:06):
you use your standards. But knowing what standards you have
tells you what to look for and how to evaluate
what you're getting. So there's a fluidity to all of this,
which we try to suggest captures the fluidity to life
as we live it. Good decisions are not error free decisions.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
But they work better if we understand ourselves. And one
of the ways you suggested that we need to understand
ourselves is to pay a little bit more attention to purpose.
What do you mean by purpose in this context?
Speaker 2 (27:38):
What's it for? What's college for? What's this job for?
You know? Is this job just to enable you to
live in a certain lifestyle? Though, then the only thing
you really care about is what's in your pay envelope?
Is this job for making the world a better place? Well,
now you have to scrutinize the possibilities in a different way.
(27:58):
Is this job for developing your own skills? That requires
still a different take. You have to be reflective and
open to changing. Your idea is about what the job
is for. And we don't have a high flute notion
about what purpose is. I mean, we're perfectly happy with
most people's intuitions, and that, it seems to me, is
(28:20):
essentially what's it for.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
This also seems to be another area where your vision
of decision making leads to same anxiety, because when I
reflect on the purpose of different kinds of things, you know,
running this podcast, you know, being kind to my husband,
being a good person in the world, sometimes those parts
of purpose come into conflict. How di shoud we navigate
that wisely?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Yes, that's another thing that rational choice theory essentially ignores.
It treats the various components of a decision as if
they are independent from one another, whereas in fact, often
the different things you desire may come into conflict, and
(29:04):
what it takes to be successful in the best job
and what it takes to be successful and satisfied with
your significant other and family may put you in a
situation of perpetual conflict. And you know, this actually happened
to me. I was an ambitious person when I started
(29:27):
teaching at Swarthmore, and I had aspirations to become one
of the leaders in the field. But you know, then
we had our first kid, and it became obvious that
there was simply no way I could do the things
that I thought were necessary to attain a certain stature
(29:48):
in my field and also be a good parent. So
I immediately reset my sights. I didn't want necessarily to be,
you know, at the top of my field. I wanted
to be a respectable and respected contributor to my field.
But I was only going to do work that did
(30:10):
not get in the way of being a good parent,
and that was going to limit the amount of time
I spent on the job. So the conflict was obvious.
I think people who have demanding jobs and want families.
Everybody experiences this conflict. You can buy your way out
(30:30):
of it by getting childcare of various kinds. You can
buy your way out of it by being unfair to
your partner. And so you need to negotiate with yourself
and have your eyes open. And if this matters to you,
you've got to pay attention to aspects of the job
that probably seem fairly trivial when you're deciding what career
(30:53):
path to follow. So absolutely there are conflicts, and so
you're always going to end up a little disappointed with outcomes.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So to make better decisions, we need to be reflective,
open minded, self aware and accepting of ourselves. But is
Barry able to follow his advice in his own life
after the break? Well, hear how Barry applied these lessons
to a recent life altering decision, And I'll ask him
for some guidance on a big decision I'm facing myself
the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
So let's talk about how we put these kinds of
decision making strategies into practice in a real world decision.
I know you've made some big decisions recently, recently retired
and moved across the country, explain how this kind of
take on the good life that's different from rational choice theory,
entered into your decision to do that.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
So there was no spreadsheet calculating the costs and benefits
of staying in Philadelphia and teaching at Swarthmore and the
costs and benefits of moving to the West Coast to
be closer to my kids and my grandkids. And there
wasn't an accident that there was no spreadsheet. I, for
the life of me, can't understand I could have quantitatively
(32:11):
compared what was good about coming west and what was
bad about leaving the East. I loved my job as Warthmore,
I love my kids and my grandkids. I did not
know how to calculate the right decision. And so, with
(32:32):
the help of my moral guide, who is my wife,
we thought about it. We talked about it. We looked
at it from various different angles. What would we be
giving up, what would we be gaining? Without directly comparing them,
we sat with a potential decision. See how it felt
to imagine ourselves as mostly retired people on the West Coast,
(32:56):
And after a lot of uncertainty and a lot of
on the one hand, and on the other hand, we
decided that this was a point where it made sense
to make the move because the truth was is that
we could keep doing what we were doing and get
satisfaction out of it, but we really missed seeing the family.
(33:18):
That said. What turned out to make the decision for
us easier is that I had a temporary but serious
illness that required surgery, and both of our daughters said,
you cannot live three thousand miles away. They were right.
You know, the thing about aging is it only goes
(33:38):
in one direction. It was anomalous for me to have
had this problem when I did, but there was no
question that the future was going to be full of
such things, and it was going to be torture for
them to be trying to be involved in our care
at a distance of three thousand miles. And that made
(33:58):
what seemed a really hard decision into a much easier one.
And we're both adaptable. That's the other thing. You know.
You make a decision and it's not perfect, and then
you find kind ways to change how you live and
change what you value so that you make the decision
you made in to a better one. So I don't
want to pat myself on the back. You know, it's
(34:20):
not exactly like fighting in Vietnam to move to the
incredibly harsh and unpleasant Bay Area. You know, thank god
my kids don't live in Nebraska. I got nothing against Nebraska.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
But harder decision, a harder decision.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yet that would have made it a harder decision.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
So it seems like what you did in that case
is to not go to the spreadsheet, to try to
go more towards what do you feel what are the
purposes in your life? You know your purpose in your work,
but maybe you're getting less. There's much more purpose in
being connected to your family. You can enhance your kid's
purpose of taking care of you. It also seemed like
you came with a lot of radical acceptance. Right, there's
not going to be a perfect decision. There's always going
(35:02):
to be pluses and minuses, and you kind of accepted
the uncertainty. I think this is what we don't do
in the modern age. It's always called decision uncertainty. But
we hate the uncertainty. We really want it to go away,
and we like to believe there's a way to do that.
Whereas you kind of came in with the acceptance of
like well, it's always going to be uncertain. We will
never know if it was the perfect decision.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, I think you can know in advance that it
isn't a perfect decision. Yeah, any decision worth thinking about
for more than five minutes, you can virtually guarantee will
not be a perfect decision. It may be the right decision,
but it's not a perfect decision. You give things up.
Economists have a useful idea of opportunity cost. Any time
(35:42):
you do one thing, there are a million other things
that you will not be doing that you could be doing.
And if you think there's a way to devote time, effort,
and resources to one thing without paying a price with
respect to other things, you're just kidding yourself. So thinking
about things in that way, knowing that there will be
(36:04):
aspects of the life you're leaving that you will miss,
just has to be part of the drill. And the
thing I would say about spreadsheets, I think spreadsheets are
extremely useful as long as you don't fill in the cells.
It is important to identify the aspects of a decision
(36:24):
that matter to you and the options that are available,
and now you've done all the work that a spreadsheet
is good for because now at least you can be
reasonably sure that you are not ignoring something important. But
you can't fill the spreadsheet in with numbers and think
(36:44):
that this is other than a fantasy. So I'm a
fan of spreadsheets, but the notion that somehow doing a
spreadsheet makes your decision sort of automatic, that's just fantasy.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
It was funny reading your book because my husband and
I are trying to make a big decision about whether
or not we should buy a house, and buy a
house in the Boston area even though we live in
the New Haven area, And when you're buying a house,
a lot of the spreadsheet choices right surprise, and the
text is and all the stuff. But reading your book
has caused me to think, maybe those aren't the things
I'm supposed to be paying attention to. So very Schwartz's
(37:19):
advice whether or not to buy a house, what should
I be thinking of?
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Well, those things are things you should be paying attention to.
They're not the only things that you should be paying
attention to. And you shouldn't feel like you should be
able to trade off quantitative things against qualitative things. You know,
the basic question is can we afford it? Is it
financially reckless to turn liquid assets into illiquid assets. There
(37:45):
are all kinds of very quantifiable questions that should be
asked and answered. Then there are quality of life questions,
none of which are quantitative, and then somehow those things
have to get put together into a decision, since you
can't both buy a house and not buy a hoss.
But the notion that you know, if you do all
(38:08):
of your homework carefully, the decision will make itself. That's
the notion that this book is designed to wipe out
of people's minds. Decisions don't make themselves if they're being
done right.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
This decision is definitely not making. There's a lot of conversation.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Giving up on good pizza if you buy a hous.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
And it's true, it's true, it's true. No, it's been.
I mean, I think it's it's funny making this decision
as we read this book, because I watch how quickly
our brains want to go into the numbers.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
It's a way of relieving yourself of responsibility. You know,
I'm doing what the numbers tell me to do.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
I mean, it's so much harder to ask the question
of like, well, what do we get out of having
a yard or not having a yard, and the social
connection we get and what does it mean to get
older and have a third floor, And like those are
hard questions.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
You're very very hard questions. So yeah, how's buying is up?
It's a nightmare. I wish you the best of luck.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
But thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Well.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Now I have a really lovely book that I can
use to help out. That's helpful. So Barry as usual,
this is such a treat. Thank you so much for
coming back on the happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
I feel exactly the same way, and I thank you
for being interested enough in it to have me back.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
In a world where dating apps assign us compatibility percentages,
and social media defines relevance by follower accounts, and performance
metrics dictate promotions at work, it's easy to fall into
the trap of seeing everything as quantifiable, but it's important
to remember that you can't always assign numbers to life's
most important decisions. So the next time you catch yourself
(39:44):
ranking pros and cons or trying to calculate the best
possible choice for some complicated situation, take a pause and
just remind yourself that there's no perfect choice. Then ask
what you know about yourself, your values, and your situation,
and remember that good enough can sometimes be totally great.
That's it for our special season on my favorite new
(40:05):
books of twenty twenty five. But if you want even
more tips on newer books to check out, then be
sure to sign up for my newsletter, which you can
do on my website, Doctor Laurisantos dot com. That's doctor
Lauri Santos dot com. And if you like what you
hear on the show, be sure to follow me on
social media. You'll get even more evidence based happiness tips
as well as behind the scenes moments from the show.
(40:27):
And don't forget to drop a review of the show
wherever you listen. It really does help me spread the
science of happiness with even more people. The Happiness Lab
will be back in two weeks to celebrate the start
of basketball season. We'll meet a player who's trying to
normalize conversations about mental health and who has some great
advice for how all of us can redefine happiness and
success all that. Next time on the Happiness Lab with me,
(40:50):
Doctor Laurie Santos,
Pushkin. We're finally winding down our series on My favorite
books of twenty twenty five, and today's favorite book. Choice
deals with the problem that I struggle with a lot,
how to make better decisions. Our happiness is shaped by
the choices we make within the circumstances we're given. Sometimes
(00:37):
those choices feel obvious, like whether to open a window
when the room you're in is feeling stuffy, or whether
to grab a glass of water if you're feeling parched.
But bigger life decisions like who to marry, which career
path to follow, or where to live, can feel paralyzing.
And that kind of makes sense. The bigger the choice,
the greater it's potential to impact your life and your
(00:58):
well being. So what do you do when you're faced
with a big decision? How do you make the most
happiness inducing choice? Do you talk it through with a
loved one or therapist. Do you make a big list
of pros and con do you flip a coin? Well,
today's guest has some advice.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Hi. My name is Barry Schwartz. I'm a psychologist. I
spent forty five years teaching at a place called Swarthmore
College outside of Philadelphia. Then retired and moved to Oakland.
My interests for many, many years have been on the
intersection of economics and psychology, focused on how people make
(01:36):
decisions and also how they should make decisions.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Berry's been a guest on the Happiness Lab a few
times because I'm a huge fan of his work, so
I was super excited to see that he had a
new book out about how to make tough decisions. It's
called Choose Wisely, Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision Making.
It's co authored with Barry's former Swarthmore colleague, the philosopher
Richard Schuldenfry. I wanted to start a conversation about choosing
(02:01):
Wisely with some definitions. So my first question to Barry
was what makes a decision good?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
So a good decision is one that gets you to
things that enable you to live a good life.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
I would say, seems like you're pretty good at making
decisions that enable you to live a good life. You've
been with your wife for a long time, I think
you said in your book since seventh grade, and you
spent half your life at one university. Has this always
come easy to you? Or are there decisions that you
really struggle with?
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Too. There are very few decisions that I have struggled with.
There are people who, at least some of the time,
think their task is to get the best out of
whatever situation they're in. We call them maximizers. And there
are people who aspire to good enough. And they may
have low standards with respect to some things and high
(02:51):
standards with respect to other things. But whatever their standards are,
as soon as they find something that meets them, they
stop looking. I have always been that way. The question
in my mind was always is this good enough? And sometimes,
you know, I was pleasantly surprised. I chose good enough
and it turned out it was spectacular. But I wasn't
(03:12):
looking for perfect. I was looking for good enough. And
that makes decision making a lot easier. And that is
especially true in the modern world. You know, one hundred
years ago, there wasn't much difference between looking for the
best and looking for good enough because it just weren't
that many options. But now you could spend your whole
(03:33):
life looking for the best pair of jeans, or you know,
the best restaurant in the New York metropolitan area, or
what have you, and you'd end up dying naked and starving.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
You had this experience yourself, though, even as a good
decision maker, trying to buy jeans one time, I remember.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
It shows you how seductive it is for somebody like me.
You know, I used to buy jeans. I wore jeans
every day, and I would buy them when the old
pair wore out, when my life was embarrassed to be
seen in public with me, you know, because I didn't
like shopping for jeans. They were uncomfortable when you first
bought them, they had to wash them a million times.
So anyway, I went to the gap, which is where
(04:10):
I bought my jeans, and I told them my size,
and the clerk said, you want slim fit, easy fit,
relax fit, buttonflies, zip or fly boot cut, and I said,
I want the kind that used to be the only kind,
which of course they didn't make anymore. So I ended
up trying on all these different styles, thinking well, if
(04:32):
they go to the trouble of making them, I should
go to the trouble of trying them. And I walked
out with the best fitting jeans I had ever had,
and I felt worse. And the reason I felt worse
is that what happened when there were all these options.
Is that my standards for what counted as a good
result went up. You know, when all there was one
(04:55):
kind of genes, only an idiot would expect perfection, an
idiot or model. But I'm not an idiot and I'm
not a model, So you know, good enough was good enough.
But now when I see them making them in all
these different cuts styles, I expect better than good enough.
So what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect,
(05:15):
and so I ended up feeling like I had failed.
And it occurred to me that this is life for
people in rich, democratic societies, and it is incredibly wasteful
of resources, and it is incredibly detrimental to people's well being.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
I think another thing that happens in the modern day
isn't just that we have this like incredible overwhelm of choice,
you know, BOOKA and super Fly, all this stuff with jeans.
We also live in a world where we get lots
of information about them too. I'm experiencing this because I'm
trying to buy a new projector. You know, we used
to have a projector that we watch movies on the
projector just died, and so I go on the web.
(05:57):
There's millions of projectors. But it's not just the choice.
It feels to me also like it's the information that's
out there. So first I go on you know, Wirecutter,
the New York Times, and then I see a million
different views that people have. It feels like I'm supposed
to be optimizing, because otherwise, why would there be not
just so much choice, but so much information about my
choices out there?
Speaker 2 (06:17):
You're exactly right. It's like only an idiot would fail
to take advantage of all the variety and all the information.
There's enormous pressure. You know, satisficing is good enough. The
way people hear that when I give talks about this
is satisficing is settling. The word settling is not neutral.
(06:40):
When people describe you as settling, they're criticizing. Why would
you set? And of course you're right. Nowadays, the information
and misinformation is so abundant, you know, it's effortless. When
I was applying to college one hundred years ago, you'd
send off to a college and they'd send you their
(07:00):
course catalog which was incomprehensible, and you know, a million
pages thick, but that's what you got. So you had
to do decide where to apply to college as a
seventeen year old with this incredibly unwieldy information and it
took weeks for it to come. So how many colleges
you're going to apply to given how effortful it is
(07:22):
to get information that is then effortful to make sense of.
Is that the world we live in now? Absolutely not.
You can get all the information you want about every
college in the United States in a half hour, So
why not take advantage?
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Yeah, I think this idea that we need to optimize
everything is just the kind of current culture, right, But
this is also something that economists have been telling us
for a long time. There's this idea that we're supposed
to optimize our decisions. And so in your book you
review this kind of classic formula that we use to
make rational decisions. Tell me what this formula is and
explain why you've pushed against it so much.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Sure, so, what we've inherited from economics is the idea
that a good decision is one that maximizes utility.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
And maybe just define for listeners who are totally unfamiliar
with this stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah, utility is whatever you think it is. So you
decide what's worth what you know you may be turned
on by esthetics, and I may be turned on by
the size of my bank account, and somebody else may
be turned on by being able to hit tennis. Ass
whatever it is, you should be choosing in a way
(08:30):
that maximizes that thing for you, and then you go
through the world making decisions so that you get the
most utility out of every decision that you possibly can.
So rational choice theory grows out of economics. It's been
around for a very long time, and it makes good
intuitive sense. If your goal when you're making a decision
(08:53):
is to maximize utility, then for every option you face,
you need to know two things. One how good will
it be? How util will it be? Two? How likely
is it that if I choose it, it'll actually be
as good as I think? Because the world is uncertain,
(09:13):
very much analogous to the bets we make in a casino,
you need to know two things, how much will I
win and how likely am I to win it. You
multiply those two things together and you get a quote
expected utility, and then you simply choose the option that
has the highest expected utility. And that's the way you're
(09:36):
supposed to go through life. The thing to notice is
that it assumes that the decisions we make are like
decisions we might make in a casino, that there are
numbers that can be attached to the value of each outcome,
and there are numbers that can be attached to the
likelihood of getting that value, so you know there's no
(09:57):
uncertainty when you're playing roulette or blackjack. You can attach
both potential gains and probabilities to all those gamps. That's
the way the games are set up. Using your college,
deciding what to do for the weekend, deciding who to
interview on your podcast don't seem to be like that,
but the push from economics is find a way to
(10:20):
quantify and you will enhance your rationality. So that has
been the normative standard for a century. What happens is
that your science moves in the wrong direction, and then
social institutions move in the same direction, and before you
know it, it got like fish not knowing they live
in water. It's hard to imagine there's another way to
(10:40):
organize your life and another set of things to care about.
So you know, rational choice theory is probably not a
phrase that is familiar to most people, but I think
the way they think you're supposed to make decisions is
an embodiment of rational choice theory with some of the
rough edges sort of sanded down a little bit. And
(11:03):
the point of the new book, which is called Choose Wisely,
is that rational choice theory is a disastrous standard to
use because most of the decisions we make, even minor
ones and certainly major ones, are nothing like casino gambles.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
So in your book, you tell some of these powerful
stories of like how bad this rational choice theory, or
maybe like even this cost benefit analysis. Is you tell
a story about Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Can
you share that example and why it illustrates why reducing
choice to all these kinds of numbers might be so dangerous,
So for people.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
In your audience who are not one hundred years old,
the United States fought a war in Vietnam. Got to
start at the beginning. It was a guerrilla war, or
what has come to be called an asymmetric war. We
had our army and big weapons, and they were fighting
in a jungle. And McNamara, who had been the head
(11:59):
of the Ford Motor Company, had this idea that the
way to make decisions is to rationalize and by rationalize,
he meant we ate a framework where you can do
cost benefit calculations, and then the right strategy is the
one that will produce the highest benefit per unit of cost.
(12:19):
So he was trying to industrialize the war. He imposed
those standards up and down the military hierarchy, and it
was a disaster. Now, the thing about an asymmetric war
is it's really hard to know who's winning. It's not
like you're gaining territory of twenty forty square miles. It's
(12:41):
really hard to know who's winning. So some brilliant person
had the idea that we needed a proxy for winning,
and what's a good proxy for winning casualties. If they're
losing more soldiers than we are, we must be winning.
The strategy changed to maximize enemy casualties, whether or not
(13:04):
they had any strategic advantage, and so now we were
just out for blood, independent of the strategic advantages that
extracting that blood might have caused. And that, it strikes me,
is the danger of taking rational choice theory too seriously.
The press to be able to quantify pushes you in
(13:25):
the direction of measuring what you can and pretending that
what you measure is what you care about.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
But if quantifying costs and benefits isn't the answer to
life's big decisions, then what is. After the break, Barya
will share his method for making tough choices that can
lead to greater well being. The Happiness Lab will be
back in a moment. Psychologist Barry Schwartz is on a
(13:57):
mission to help us make better choices and ultimately to
live better lives. In his new book, Choose Wisely, he
and his co author Richard Schildenfry argue that we need
to forget the notion of quantifif buying happiness, a claim
that's pretty revolutionary in the field of decision science. After all,
even the father of behavioral economics, the Nobel Prize winning
(14:18):
Danny Kahneman, was famous for trying to measure happiness objectively.
I asked Barry to explain the context in which conoman
developed this method and what he and his co author
thought about it.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
The idea is that when you ask people something like
all things considered, how happy are you, what they're likely
to tell you is about what experience they had in
the last fifteen minutes. So it's really very hard to
use a global question like that to get into the
details and so what works better is having people essentially
(14:52):
list the activities that they've engaged in in the course
of the last twenty four hours, forty eight hours, what
have you, and then ask them for each activity, on
a say, a five point scale, how much satisfaction gave them,
how happy it made them, And in this way you
can build up the atoms of happiness. So what he
(15:13):
was looking for was what he called objective happiness, and
the idea was that happiness objectively is simply the collection
of moments. How you feel at every moment, put together
is the sum total of your happiness in that period
of time. So that's what he was trying to do,
(15:35):
was to turn a subjective measure into an objective measure.
And he acknowledged that it was not the final word
on happiness, but he thought, you know, you don't get
molecules without atoms, and what he was trying to do
was develop a way of understanding the atoms of happiness.
(15:57):
And Schulanfry, who was a philosopher, thought this was the
most ludicrous enterprise in the world, although he also had
enormous respect for Kanneman's work. It was like, how could
somebody that's smart have such a dumb idea.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
I mean, I think part of it is that, you know,
Danny came from this tradition thought that they had to
figure out what the rational path was. And I think
Danny was maybe seduced by a different version.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
He wanted to do the physics of happiness. We'll find
the atoms of happiness and put them all together, that's right.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
And ideally, if you find the atoms of happiness, you
can then improve happiness by doing formulating social policies that
increase the atoms of happiness. You know, you can't make
progress unless you know what progress is going to look like.
So he had that standard of rigor and precision, and
what he was trying to do is adapted to a
(16:49):
much fuzzier concept with the understanding that eventually it would
get built out into its full complexity.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And so talk to me about why you and shulden
Frey don't think this approach works kind of atomizing happiness
this way.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
First of all, a lot depends on what you think
happiness means. And if you have what could be called
the smiley face view of happiness, then, for all I know,
Connoman's approach made perfectly good sense there are easy ways
(17:25):
to get that smiley face. Taking drugs is probably the
easiest way to get that smiley face and have it
all the time until you die. So you need to
start by asking what does it mean to be happy?
You know what Aristotle call you diamonia, which is real
(17:45):
happiness has to do with living a good life, with achieving,
with going somewhere, with doing things that are meaningful, and
much of the time what it takes for that to
happen is going to make you unhappy smiley face wise,
you know, if you want to be the best professional
(18:05):
basketball player in the world, you spend twenty hours a
week in the weight room. I'm not one of those people,
but I'm guessing that nobody likes spending twenty hours a
week in the wave room. What they do like is
becoming excellent at something that is significant and meaningful to them,
(18:26):
and they will suffer in the service of something else
that's bigger. So when you molecularize happiness the way Kanaman did,
just as a first step, what you're doing is you're
getting people to focus down on these little and almost
certainly irrelevant details of minute by minute and day to
(18:48):
day experience as if that's what they should be pursuing
rather than these larger objectives. Again, I don't think he
thought it was ever going to be the last word.
He says that explicitly. But the trouble is that what
often happens in science is that you never get very
far past the first word and building this great, big
(19:11):
structure out of these atoms. It doesn't happen. You spend
all your time with the atoms and not with the structure.
And this is especially true when the things you think
matter most are not quantifiable in the way that you
think a science should be quantifiable.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
So trying to measure happiness in terms of these tiny
atoms doesn't seem to work. How do you think we
should be measuring happiness?
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Well, So, when you're applying to college, we spend a
lot of time in the book following this apocryphal young
woman named Mia as she decides should I go to college?
Where should I go to college? Why am I going
to college? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the
question is, when you're trying to decide where to go
to college, what kinds of questions should you be asking yourself?
(20:01):
There are some questions that it is easy to ask
and answer, like what's the average salary of people who
graduate from this or that college? It's accessible, it's quantitative.
What are the average SAT scores of admitted students? The
higher they are, the better the students. The better the students,
(20:22):
the better my education will be. US News and World
Report makes a living quantifying things in this way, so
that basically you can just push a button and outcomes
the answer what school should I go to? What school
should I apply to? Before you do any of that,
you really should be asking why am I going to college?
(20:44):
What's it for for me? What kind of a person
am I? What kind of a person do I aspire
to become? And you can't really attach value to particular
colleges or particular programs within colleges without first asking yourself
these questions, what do I want to care about? And
(21:06):
what do I care about? And how can I get
to be the person that I aspire to be? Are
you going to get this right? Hell? No, you know,
I mean, you're seventeen years old, you don't know yourself
well and nothing. One of the great things about college
is that it changes people. But that kind of uncertainty
is inevitable you will at least be asking the right questions,
(21:29):
and as you go through college, you will continue to
be asking those questions as a way of evaluating whether
you're being well educated or you know, well educated doesn't
mean they have a three point eight gpa. Being well
educated means that you're moving in the direction that you
think your life should take the trajectory you want your
life to take. No decision is final. So what we're
(21:53):
suggesting is that rational people are thoughtful people, they are
reflective people, and they don't slavishly pursue quantification when quantification
is inappropriate. In other words, quantification has its place, but
pretending that you have solved the problem by putting a
(22:14):
number on it is not going to get you to
the right place.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
I love this idea, but I find it so countercultural,
Like we are so in quantification mindset and we're so
in optimization mindset. I mean, the thing you said that
I found so interesting that I agree with completely, especially
for the college decision, but for lots of decisions is
you're not going to get it right. You're not going
to get it right because you're going to change throughout
the process, and there's no right, it's going to evolve
(22:39):
over time. It's not a decision that's one and done.
It's one that you're going to keep making constantly. And
I think people today hate that idea. They want to,
you know, pick the perfect deeds and it's one and done.
But most of the big important things we need to
do in life to live a good life just don't
work like that, and that I think people find really scary.
I think people love the idea that they could go
(22:59):
on some Yelp review and find the optimal college or
the optimal house and then they're done, But the good
life doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I think that's right. But I also think that this
sort of rational choice model contributes to this attitude totally.
In other words, it tells you there is a right
answer to this question, and if you do enough work,
you'll get to it. And I don't think that's the
way people used to think about their lives. You can
(23:28):
look back after you've made decisions, quite reasonable decisions at
the time, and learn from what went wrong, so that
maybe you'll evaluate things differently the next time. But uncertainty
is simply built into being a human being in a
social environment, and it's never one and done. It's never finished.
(23:51):
You should always be thinking about decisions that you've made,
and I should point out you should be giving it
attention that's proportionate to its importance. You know, I don't
want you to go to a pizza place in New
Haven and then beat yourself up for three weeks because
you you can go to the best pizza place in
New Haven. You know that's crazy, But it's not so
(24:14):
crazy to have those kinds of recriminations when it's about
where you spent four years going to college, or deciding
to get a PhD in psychology instead of a PhD
in economics, or deciding to marry somebody or not marry
that person. You know, you should be reflective about decisions
(24:35):
in some proportion to their importance, but you need to
be reflective to decide how important they are.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
So let's get into the particular process we can use
to become a little bit more reflective. One of the
processes you suggest is this idea of understanding. We really
need to kind of make sure we're understanding things well.
But you don't mean in the kind of quantitative sense.
You don't mean kind of measuring things out. So what
do you mean by understanding here.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
The thing about needing to use judgment is that the
right answer to almost every question is it depends what
you just said a few minutes ago. That people don't
like that, it makes them nervous, it makes them anxious.
I couldn't agree more. You can deny that and attach
numbers to things then it doesn't depend or you can
(25:21):
accept it and try the best you can as an
imperfect person in a complicated world, to understand both yourself
and the environment you're about to enter, and use that
understanding always correctable to make an intelligent guess. So understanding
(25:43):
means a understanding yourself and b understanding the world. I'm
sure that one of the things you teach students is
how hard it is to do either of those things.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
Yes, it's much harder than looking on the US News
and World Report for you know what the rank is.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yep, it is much much harder, and sometimes that's a
fine thing to do. You know, you're stopping overnight at
a hotel on your way somewhere and you want to
find a place to eat, looking at Yelp reviews and
picking a restaurant that's got good reviews and not looking back.
That's fine, but you need to be thoughtful to know
(26:25):
how much effort and what kind of effort is required.
What does it mean to say that such and such
is a good school. What you really care about is
is it a good school for me? However, if you've
decided that the only reason you're going to college is
so that you can earn a six figure income right
(26:45):
after you get your diploma, then a good school isn't
necessarily a good school for you. It's a good school
for the world that will reward you with a six
figure salary as soon as you get your diploma. Now,
I think that's the wrong reason to choose a school,
but I wouldn't insist that you use my standards. So
(27:06):
you use your standards. But knowing what standards you have
tells you what to look for and how to evaluate
what you're getting. So there's a fluidity to all of this,
which we try to suggest captures the fluidity to life
as we live it. Good decisions are not error free decisions.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
But they work better if we understand ourselves. And one
of the ways you suggested that we need to understand
ourselves is to pay a little bit more attention to purpose.
What do you mean by purpose in this context?
Speaker 2 (27:38):
What's it for? What's college for? What's this job for?
You know? Is this job just to enable you to
live in a certain lifestyle? Though, then the only thing
you really care about is what's in your pay envelope?
Is this job for making the world a better place? Well,
now you have to scrutinize the possibilities in a different way.
(27:58):
Is this job for developing your own skills? That requires
still a different take. You have to be reflective and
open to changing. Your idea is about what the job
is for. And we don't have a high flute notion
about what purpose is. I mean, we're perfectly happy with
most people's intuitions, and that, it seems to me, is
(28:20):
essentially what's it for.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
This also seems to be another area where your vision
of decision making leads to same anxiety, because when I
reflect on the purpose of different kinds of things, you know,
running this podcast, you know, being kind to my husband,
being a good person in the world, sometimes those parts
of purpose come into conflict. How di shoud we navigate
that wisely?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Yes, that's another thing that rational choice theory essentially ignores.
It treats the various components of a decision as if
they are independent from one another, whereas in fact, often
the different things you desire may come into conflict, and
(29:04):
what it takes to be successful in the best job
and what it takes to be successful and satisfied with
your significant other and family may put you in a
situation of perpetual conflict. And you know, this actually happened
to me. I was an ambitious person when I started
(29:27):
teaching at Swarthmore, and I had aspirations to become one
of the leaders in the field. But you know, then
we had our first kid, and it became obvious that
there was simply no way I could do the things
that I thought were necessary to attain a certain stature
(29:48):
in my field and also be a good parent. So
I immediately reset my sights. I didn't want necessarily to be,
you know, at the top of my field. I wanted
to be a respectable and respected contributor to my field.
But I was only going to do work that did
(30:10):
not get in the way of being a good parent,
and that was going to limit the amount of time
I spent on the job. So the conflict was obvious.
I think people who have demanding jobs and want families.
Everybody experiences this conflict. You can buy your way out
(30:30):
of it by getting childcare of various kinds. You can
buy your way out of it by being unfair to
your partner. And so you need to negotiate with yourself
and have your eyes open. And if this matters to you,
you've got to pay attention to aspects of the job
that probably seem fairly trivial when you're deciding what career
(30:53):
path to follow. So absolutely there are conflicts, and so
you're always going to end up a little disappointed with outcomes.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
So to make better decisions, we need to be reflective,
open minded, self aware and accepting of ourselves. But is
Barry able to follow his advice in his own life
after the break? Well, hear how Barry applied these lessons
to a recent life altering decision, And I'll ask him
for some guidance on a big decision I'm facing myself
the Happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
So let's talk about how we put these kinds of
decision making strategies into practice in a real world decision.
I know you've made some big decisions recently, recently retired
and moved across the country, explain how this kind of
take on the good life that's different from rational choice theory,
entered into your decision to do that.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
So there was no spreadsheet calculating the costs and benefits
of staying in Philadelphia and teaching at Swarthmore and the
costs and benefits of moving to the West Coast to
be closer to my kids and my grandkids. And there
wasn't an accident that there was no spreadsheet. I, for
the life of me, can't understand I could have quantitatively
(32:11):
compared what was good about coming west and what was
bad about leaving the East. I loved my job as Warthmore,
I love my kids and my grandkids. I did not
know how to calculate the right decision. And so, with
(32:32):
the help of my moral guide, who is my wife,
we thought about it. We talked about it. We looked
at it from various different angles. What would we be
giving up, what would we be gaining? Without directly comparing them,
we sat with a potential decision. See how it felt
to imagine ourselves as mostly retired people on the West Coast,
(32:56):
And after a lot of uncertainty and a lot of
on the one hand, and on the other hand, we
decided that this was a point where it made sense
to make the move because the truth was is that
we could keep doing what we were doing and get
satisfaction out of it, but we really missed seeing the family.
(33:18):
That said. What turned out to make the decision for
us easier is that I had a temporary but serious
illness that required surgery, and both of our daughters said,
you cannot live three thousand miles away. They were right.
You know, the thing about aging is it only goes
(33:38):
in one direction. It was anomalous for me to have
had this problem when I did, but there was no
question that the future was going to be full of
such things, and it was going to be torture for
them to be trying to be involved in our care
at a distance of three thousand miles. And that made
(33:58):
what seemed a really hard decision into a much easier one.
And we're both adaptable. That's the other thing. You know.
You make a decision and it's not perfect, and then
you find kind ways to change how you live and
change what you value so that you make the decision
you made in to a better one. So I don't
want to pat myself on the back. You know, it's
(34:20):
not exactly like fighting in Vietnam to move to the
incredibly harsh and unpleasant Bay Area. You know, thank god
my kids don't live in Nebraska. I got nothing against Nebraska.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
But harder decision, a harder decision.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yet that would have made it a harder decision.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
So it seems like what you did in that case
is to not go to the spreadsheet, to try to
go more towards what do you feel what are the
purposes in your life? You know your purpose in your work,
but maybe you're getting less. There's much more purpose in
being connected to your family. You can enhance your kid's
purpose of taking care of you. It also seemed like
you came with a lot of radical acceptance. Right, there's
not going to be a perfect decision. There's always going
(35:02):
to be pluses and minuses, and you kind of accepted
the uncertainty. I think this is what we don't do
in the modern age. It's always called decision uncertainty. But
we hate the uncertainty. We really want it to go away,
and we like to believe there's a way to do that.
Whereas you kind of came in with the acceptance of
like well, it's always going to be uncertain. We will
never know if it was the perfect decision.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, I think you can know in advance that it
isn't a perfect decision. Yeah, any decision worth thinking about
for more than five minutes, you can virtually guarantee will
not be a perfect decision. It may be the right decision,
but it's not a perfect decision. You give things up.
Economists have a useful idea of opportunity cost. Any time
(35:42):
you do one thing, there are a million other things
that you will not be doing that you could be doing.
And if you think there's a way to devote time, effort,
and resources to one thing without paying a price with
respect to other things, you're just kidding yourself. So thinking
about things in that way, knowing that there will be
(36:04):
aspects of the life you're leaving that you will miss,
just has to be part of the drill. And the
thing I would say about spreadsheets, I think spreadsheets are
extremely useful as long as you don't fill in the cells.
It is important to identify the aspects of a decision
(36:24):
that matter to you and the options that are available,
and now you've done all the work that a spreadsheet
is good for because now at least you can be
reasonably sure that you are not ignoring something important. But
you can't fill the spreadsheet in with numbers and think
(36:44):
that this is other than a fantasy. So I'm a
fan of spreadsheets, but the notion that somehow doing a
spreadsheet makes your decision sort of automatic, that's just fantasy.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
It was funny reading your book because my husband and
I are trying to make a big decision about whether
or not we should buy a house, and buy a
house in the Boston area even though we live in
the New Haven area, And when you're buying a house,
a lot of the spreadsheet choices right surprise, and the
text is and all the stuff. But reading your book
has caused me to think, maybe those aren't the things
I'm supposed to be paying attention to. So very Schwartz's
(37:19):
advice whether or not to buy a house, what should
I be thinking of?
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Well, those things are things you should be paying attention to.
They're not the only things that you should be paying
attention to. And you shouldn't feel like you should be
able to trade off quantitative things against qualitative things. You know,
the basic question is can we afford it? Is it
financially reckless to turn liquid assets into illiquid assets. There
(37:45):
are all kinds of very quantifiable questions that should be
asked and answered. Then there are quality of life questions,
none of which are quantitative, and then somehow those things
have to get put together into a decision, since you
can't both buy a house and not buy a hoss.
But the notion that you know, if you do all
(38:08):
of your homework carefully, the decision will make itself. That's
the notion that this book is designed to wipe out
of people's minds. Decisions don't make themselves if they're being
done right.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
This decision is definitely not making. There's a lot of conversation.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Giving up on good pizza if you buy a hous.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
And it's true, it's true, it's true. No, it's been.
I mean, I think it's it's funny making this decision
as we read this book, because I watch how quickly
our brains want to go into the numbers.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
It's a way of relieving yourself of responsibility. You know,
I'm doing what the numbers tell me to do.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
I mean, it's so much harder to ask the question
of like, well, what do we get out of having
a yard or not having a yard, and the social
connection we get and what does it mean to get
older and have a third floor, And like those are
hard questions.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
You're very very hard questions. So yeah, how's buying is up?
It's a nightmare. I wish you the best of luck.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
But thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Well.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Now I have a really lovely book that I can
use to help out. That's helpful. So Barry as usual,
this is such a treat. Thank you so much for
coming back on the happiness Lab.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
I feel exactly the same way, and I thank you
for being interested enough in it to have me back.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
In a world where dating apps assign us compatibility percentages,
and social media defines relevance by follower accounts, and performance
metrics dictate promotions at work, it's easy to fall into
the trap of seeing everything as quantifiable, but it's important
to remember that you can't always assign numbers to life's
most important decisions. So the next time you catch yourself
(39:44):
ranking pros and cons or trying to calculate the best
possible choice for some complicated situation, take a pause and
just remind yourself that there's no perfect choice. Then ask
what you know about yourself, your values, and your situation,
and remember that good enough can sometimes be totally great.
That's it for our special season on my favorite new
(40:05):
books of twenty twenty five. But if you want even
more tips on newer books to check out, then be
sure to sign up for my newsletter, which you can
do on my website, Doctor Laurisantos dot com. That's doctor
Lauri Santos dot com. And if you like what you
hear on the show, be sure to follow me on
social media. You'll get even more evidence based happiness tips
as well as behind the scenes moments from the show.
(40:27):
And don't forget to drop a review of the show
wherever you listen. It really does help me spread the
science of happiness with even more people. The Happiness Lab
will be back in two weeks to celebrate the start
of basketball season. We'll meet a player who's trying to
normalize conversations about mental health and who has some great
advice for how all of us can redefine happiness and
success all that. Next time on the Happiness Lab with me,
(40:50):
Doctor Laurie Santos,
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