Many of us have the privilege of living in a world of abundance. It’s a stark contrast to the world many used to live in in the 1900s when our parents were growing up. A core difference between the two worlds is the abundance provided in today’s world. Abundance comes in many forms: commoditized goods and services, data-ification of everything, endless entertainment, accessible education, etc.
It’s both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because choice invites optimization. Curse because most decisions feel suboptimal. If you’re tasked with getting to a destination as fast as possible on a single road, the obvious choice is to drive as fast as possible. If you’re dropped in London and asked to get to the Big Ben, you’re tasked a problem with more dimensions than simply speeding up, leaving more room for error.
There’s a high level of focus when the there’s a single dimension to work with. That’s because it’s easy to measure progress. When you operate on a single dimension, you know that 10 is greater than -10. But when you’re operating on two or more, how do you know if (10,0) is better than (0,10)?
I feel like anxiety is introduced by the abundance in today’s society. In the analogy of finding the Big Ben, it’s not hard to get lost trying to find the Big Ben without the use of technology. You ask people for directions along the way, only to realize that they too don’t know the remaining 3 mile journey to get to the Big Ben. Google Maps does the optimization for us in practice, but there isn’t a Google Maps for everything.
For example, there’s no Google Maps for optimizing food ordering at a restaurant. I often find it easier when there’s only one option in front of me at a restaurant. It’s the only time I get to ask a binary question: do I want it or not? The moment there’s more than one option, it becomes a question of what do I want, what are the tradeoffs, etc. It’s almost as if decision makers are set up for failure.
What’s counter intuitive is that consumer behavior suggests that we love choice. I prefer oat milk for my mocha, she prefers Claude over ChatGPT, he prefers his Patagonia puffer over his Nike jacket. There’s a tension between the desire for choice and the desire for progress. Like a rope, if the tension on both sides are equal, you’re left in a state of stasis with no momentum towards anything.
The increasing number of choices makes it harder to focus on a single option. In media, many of us went from choosing from a few TV channels to spending more time browsing videos and movies than watching them. In dating, we went from occasionally meeting new people every weekend to swiping through an entire city on the comfort of our couch. In shopping, we went from browsing the same local mall to crawling every flavor of our favorite brands online. We’ve even gone from only having just Facebook to a myriad of social media apps to choose from.
When the path to least friction is to optimize, we optimize. But similar to programming, premature optimization is the root of all evil. It reminds me of my co-op interviews in my freshman year where I was eager to impress the interviewer with an optimized solution within the first 25 minutes, only to have nothing to show within the 30 minutes allocated.
It relates to the framework of the maximizer (or an optimizer) and the satisfier. Maximizers seek to maximize by evaluating all options and satisfiers aim for something that meets their needs. The problem is that there’s never a complete amount of information in life’s important decisions. Decisions need to be made with an incomplete amount of information. Even if a movie is highly rated, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll like it. Most of our favorite movies aren’t the ones with 100% on rotten tomatoes. When an extreme optimizer makes a decision, they’ll often wonder if they made the optimal decision given the incomplete information. When a satisfier makes a decision, they’ll be content with having made progress.
I’ve lived most of my recent life as a maximizer. Part of me thinks I’ve been nurtured by society by being given so many options. Another part of me thinks I hate the idea of “I can do better”. Or maybe I just love respectable numbers. But I’ve also learned that being a satisfier is an important muscle to have.
I spent some time thinking about how to think about how I want to balance of the two and I think it boils down to the type of feedback it provides. I like to optimize for fulfillment, and that comes in different forms. When progress can quickly be measured, I find that a satisfier mentality excels. For example, running, a metrics-heavy sport, has incredibly fast and positive feedback. Writing these blog posts and sharing it also has fast feedback. But I don’t enjoy being overwhelmed by optimized plans like 16 week race training plans. Nothing stings more than the feedback of feeling like you failed to stick to the plan. To me, it goes back to planning is invaluable, but plans are useless.
When feedback is more sparse, maximizing works better for me. Optimizing for progress at the next checkpoint is the best way to guarantee some progress. I dislike reaching a checkpoint and seeing regression. When there’s no fast feedback, it’s not uncommon to regress. Being a competent optimizer guarantees that there’s good progress despite the lack of feedback.
Finding a balance of both types of fulfillment is important. They both scratch an itch—the excitement of hitting a milestone, and the instant feedback of being better than yesterday and hopefully worse than tomorrow. The increasing amount of abundance makes a good balance brittle. Since the world is making optimizing easier, if I enjoy my current balance, then I need to intentionally construct ways to be more of a satisfier. It’s similar to the pick two of three framework (e.g. pick 2/3 options: sleep, work, personal life), except the denominator keeps increasing but not the numerator.
Having been on the other side of the equation and building for consumers, it’s fascinating and scary to observe the world with those lenses. There are thousands of highly intelligent people spending their days finding ways to grab our attention, reactivate us onto their product with promotions, or show us something we don’t need but desperately want. Without an opposing tension, one loses control of where they’re being pulled. In a moment’s notice, without action, one might end up with 30 monthly subscriptions, 20 new credit cards, 10 new hobbies, and no tangible progress in anything. But if incentives align well and the goods are high quality, I do believe that these tactics are net good.
I’d like to balance the tension better by pulling towards being a satisfier. With social media, I’ve been satisfied with missing out on memes and stories. On weekends, I want to feel satisfied with a recharge day. With music, I’m okay with being six months behind on music and only hearing about bangers through friends. With books, I enjoy picking it up when the urge strikes instead of finding the urge. The more satisfaction I can create, the more breathing room I can live with.
It’s important to be able to deprioritize interests without sacrificing the fulfillment the interest provides. I might spend significantly less time, but the satisfier mindset shift helps me derive the fulfillment I need. I’m trying to view leisure interests as a satisfier instead of abandoning my desire to be an optimizer. The hope is that these interests become a reliable source of constant fulfillment.
Not optimizing for everything provides a lot of breathing room to the surviving interests waiting to be optimized. It makes perfect sense when you think about it—you shift time from most things to a select few things. Fulfillment isn’t correlated with time spent, it’s correlated with how you think about it. But maximization is correlated with time spent. More time spent means more information to work with, leading to more optimal decisions. The economy of our time should be handled with care.
In a world of abundance, becoming an intentional satisfier is key to becoming a better maximizer. It’s an inevitable necessity if one wants to preserve or excel in their ability to maximize, especially as consumer capitalism finds more clever ways to drive behavior. So hopefully, with fewer forks in the road and more breathing room for what’s always mattered, we can spend less time debating on the right direction at each intersection, and find more joy on the single road journey to the Big Ben.
Personal notes:
After thinking about this and asking Claude what it thinks, Claude suggested the book “The Paradox of Choice”. I haven’t read it yet, but appreciate the more nuanced takes on the consequences of choice in its summary.
I only have the vantage point of problems I see today and wish I could speak more to the problems scarcity brings back then.
I’m by default an optimizer and then selectively become a satisfier whereas others are the other way around. Picking your battles carefully is important for good usage of time.
This was a really nice read man
Randomly came across your substack but loved this