Stop trying to optimize everything; the key to happiness is being average

Travel, she admitted, also feels a little strange. The laws of capitalism dictate that we must be constantly on the move—work hard, play hard, consume a lot, rinse and repeat. We are supposed to want to be the best, the smartest, the richest, and hold those who have achieved such status in high regard. We seek to optimize at every turn, meticulously crafting the perfect Instagram vacation and spending hours debating paint colors that, if we’re honest, we can barely tell apart. Even the rich feel like they don’t have enough. Instead of a race to the finish, modern life is a never-ending race until we get too tired and throw in the towel.

“This is a reflection of mature capitalism, accelerated capitalism, where we have internalized the machine as part of our very identity,” said Thomas Curran, a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics who wrote the book “The Perfection Trap.”

It used to be that external forces, like bosses and politicians, would spur us into action, encouraging us to work harder, buy more, strive for more. Now we’re doing it all ourselves.

“It’s not someone else giving us the whip, it’s ourselves,” Curran said. “We are both the tyrant and the victim in the relationship because we have completely internalized the need to work more, to consume more, as just part and parcel of a normal personality and identity.”

But here’s a thought: What if we all relaxed and instead of focusing on being the best we can be, we tried to be good enough? In a time when you’re supposed to optimize everything, maybe it’s okay to just be… good. Your vacation, your clothes, your house, your kids, your retirement can all be OK, even if none of them are perfect.

I’m not suggesting that we aspire to mediocrity; I’m saying that we should aspire to averageness.

Not everyone in the world is dominated by the maximizer mindset, but even people who lean toward the more relaxed side of things still feel compelled to strive for more and better in at least some part of their lives. Why are we like this?

There is a mix of nature and nurture at play, Avram Alpert, a scholar and writing lecturer who wrote “The Good-Enough Life,” said in an email. Most people want to be recognized as significant members of their communities, but our cultural values ​​dictate what counts as significant. “In societies around the world where wealth, power and social status are so highly valued, we feel incredible pressure to obtain them,” he said.

When there are too many choices, people think that the choice they make is a statement about who they are.

This cultural pressure is reinforced by our economic system, Alpert said, which is set up in such a way that people aren’t wrong to think they need to work nonstop to afford housing, child care, health care, retirement, etc. “You really have to work hard and earn a lot (or inherit a lot) to live in decent material conditions in these contexts,” he said.

This underlying social and economic pressure is compounded by the overwhelming choice that American consumers constantly face. Having too many options can make people feel bad and lead to frustration, regret, and dissatisfaction.

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Swarthmore College who has written several books on psychology and economics, gave the example of buying jeans. Decades ago, consumers had just a few options and would grab whatever was on the rack and go. Now, there are hundreds of designs, and which one someone buys says more than “I’d like to wear pants today.” It says everything from “I’m cool” to “I don’t mind the heat” to “I care about the environment” to “I’m a millennial desperately trying to keep up with the times.”

“Like it or not, you’re not just buying jeans anymore, you’re making a statement about your identity, and I think that’s true across the board,” said Schwartz, who has researched choice overload with Nathan Cheek at Purdue. “When there are too many options, people think that the choice they make is a statement about who they are, and when they think that way, they’re more likely to go for the best.”

Social media exacerbates the problem because so much of our lives are public. We’re constantly comparing ourselves to others and seeing what else is out there. “Keeping up with the Joneses” in the year 2024 doesn’t just mean your neighbors—it means a universe of Instagram influencers, YouTube drug dealers, and high school friends whose lives seem perfectly organized.

This fixation on choosing the best can show up in big ways, like choosing where to live, but also in small ways, like deciding where to eat. You’ve probably had the experience of searching endlessly through Yelp reviews to find the perfect restaurant, only to get there, have a mediocre experience, and wonder if any of the other 15 restaurants you looked at or passed along the way would have been better. Or maybe you realize that just choosing the first place you saw would have saved you time and been a lot easier.

“There’s a time investment, and time is a fixed quantity, and there are a lot of other things you could be doing instead of looking for the best restaurant,” Schwartz said.

The collective hamster wheel many of us find ourselves on isn’t entirely horrible. It’s understandable to want your children to be set up for success and to want to feel well-rewarded in their careers. But the biggest beneficiary of America’s propensity to hustle is the machine itself, not the individuals within it.

“It’s good for the economy. It’s very efficient,” Curran said. “Less good for ourselves because we’re constantly in a state of neurosis about how we’re doing, how hard we’re working.”

Working your way up the social ladder and achieving the best can cultivate creativity and innovation. That’s why athletes are constantly breaking records, medical and technological innovations are emerging all the time, and Taylor Swift is killing it on The Eras Tour. But there are plenty of downsides.

“This race to the top also creates extremely unequal societies — not just in terms of wealthy tech company owners, but also in terms of social recognition,” Alpert said. “If Taylor Swift is omnipresent, there is less room for other artists to gain prominence. We start to live in a world of those who have made it and those who have lost, and there is no necessary link between virtue and achievement.”

A maximizing mindset can make us act in less-than-ideal ways. A 2017 paper suggests that it activates our sense of scarcity and triggers a competitive orientation in which people want to improve their well-being and well-being, which in turn increases the likelihood that they will engage in immoral behaviors to benefit themselves. This doesn’t mean committing a crime; it might mean cheating on a test or taking a shortcut to get to the front of the line.

“You can think about those people who always have to get into the best college, who always have to get into the best job — are they more likely to round out their resumes to describe what they’ve done in the past?” said Kelly Goldsmith, a marketing professor at Vanderbilt University who focuses on consumer psychology and who authored the paper. “That makes you more likely to act in your own best interest.”

The rat race also makes us feel worse. A 2023 survey of work in America from the American Psychological Association found that 77% of workers reported experiencing work-related stress in the past month. Even when we get what we thought we wanted, the high doesn’t last long—the hedonic treadmill tells us that our happiness levels return to baseline very quickly. The whole thing is exhausting.

As the old saying goes, money does not equal happiness (though I have a hard time believing that it doesn’t help). As Jamie Ducharme pointed out in Time, a study that began in 1922 and followed 1,500 people over several decades found that while people who described themselves as more ambitious achieved more lucrative careers, they weren’t much happier or healthier than those who set more modest goals.

“As we’ve seen with anxiety, with depression, when you set that bar too high, it’s almost like you’re always fighting to get to what we call the benchmark,” Goldsmith said. “You’re always fighting to get to that high level. And from there, all you can do is go down.”

If living at an average level and lowering expectations were easy, more people would do it. People are right to believe that they need to work hard to save for retirement or enroll their kids in a measly number of extracurricular activities in order to have a shot at getting into the Ivy League. Low-income people and racial and ethnic minorities, in particular, feel as if society demands that they go above and beyond. The idea of ​​downsizing comes from a place of privilege. And we don’t want people to simply opt out of society altogether—having no goals or ambitions isn’t great for anyone’s financial or emotional health. Still, many of us could benefit from relaxing a little more, or at least trying, even if it’s hard.

Alpert said the goal shouldn’t be to ignore our strengths, but rather to stop thinking about them in terms of getting to the top of the pyramid. “Focusing on profit and power denies our talents because it makes very few of them matter,” he said. “A good enough life is about letting all of our talents — for compassion, caring and creativity — flourish.”

It’s important to acknowledge the cultural message about achieving more and reflect on where that shows up in our lives and whether it’s—to use some therapeutic language—serving us. Sacrificing nights and weekends won’t necessarily make you more successful or fulfilled. Imperfection is inevitable. Even Beyoncé has some bad days.

There are many people who will actually be normal or average, ordinary.

Schwartz suggested practicing accommodation. You don’t have to research everyone in the city you’re visiting to figure out which museum to visit, or spend 10 minutes in the grocery aisle agonizing over which dish soap is the best value. It might be uncomfortable, but it’s also not that profound.

“Nobody on Earth needs the best in every decision,” Schwartz said. “We’ve all had experience settling for good enough. We know how to do that.”

There are areas where perfectionism and maximization are good if you want to indulge them—it’s not the end of the world if you spend a Sunday finishing a work project or going down a YouTube rabbit hole to squeeze the most out of your credit card rewards. But there are areas where they can do real harm. If you’re so obsessed with having the perfect marriage or buying the biggest house on the block that you end up in debt, that’s a problem.

Overall, though, it might be nice to have some comfort in embracing the middle, to borrow a Gen Z term. That perfectly choreographed vacation to Greece can be improvised, and everyone will survive. Maybe they won’t even need to be on Instagram.

“Most of us are average — like 70 percent of us are going to be within one standard deviation of the mean,” Curran said. “There are a lot of people who are going to be really normal or average, average. And as much as we celebrate and laud the outliers, I think there’s something really comforting about recognizing that we’re actually where most people are, and that’s OK.”

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent for Business Insider, writing about business and economics.