The medium chill involves what economists call satisficing: abandoning the quest for the ideal in favor of the good-enough. It means stepping off the aspirational treadmill, foregoing some material opportunities and accepting some material constraints in exchange for more time to spend on relationships and experiences.
It turns out, though, that satisficing doesn't come easy to us human beings. We have an extremely hard time saying, "okay, this is good enough." Why?
Part of the reason is that we hate closing off opportunities, and that's what satisficing feels like. We like to keep our options open in case something better comes along.
But will a better thing make us happier? We're inclined to think, "of course it would!" But that's because, as social psychologists have come to understand quite well, we're not very good at predicting what will make us happy. In fact, we suck at it.
Most of all, we radically overestimate the impact of external events, both positive and negative. We think winning the lottery would vault us into bliss and losing a limb in an accident would leave us permanently depressed, but neither is true. Experiments and surveys show that within a year, a lottery winner and an amputee will be roughly as happy as they were before events struck. We drift back to our natural equilibrium fairly quickly. This is counterintuitive and difficult to accept at first, but the implications are profound.
via www.grist.org
Today's word is "satisficing."
Comments