The Conical Glass: Maximizer

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Maximizer

Do you ever come across something that is so insightful that it makes you say yes, that is my life? I've had the good fortune of reading two such things in the past two days. First of all, Nick Hornby's new novel Juliet, Naked is just breathtakingly good -- it's going in the pantheon along with Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, Roxy Music's album Siren, the movie "Sideways" and the TV show "Slings & Arrows" as one of Sue's Favorite Things Ever. I will warn you, however, that unless you've spent years participating in an Internet chat group devoted to the music of an obscure artist, it may not resonate with you to the degree it did with me, but I can say that I adored every page, every word of this book.

The second thing did not provide the hours of entertainment that Juliet, Naked did -- if there's anything more wonderful than spending two chilly evenings snuggled cozily under flannel sheets with a great book and a warm dog, I don't know what it could be -- but it was one of those things that put so much of my life into perspective. Rob Baedeker is a columnist for SFGate.com, and his latest article was about his feelings about possibly "breaking up" with the Bay Area -- i.e., moving to a more affordable area. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere. Unlike Baedeker, I have managed to buy a home here. But he interviewed a couple of people who have moved from big cities to small ones, and the comments of Penelope Trunk, who relocated from New York to Madison, WI, really resonated with me.

Trunk talked to Baedeker about a category of people called "maximizers" -- "someone who is always seeking, and frequently attaining, something better... When Trunk talks about maximizers and their opposite, 'satisficers' (those satisfied with choices that 'suffice'), she's referring to a behavioral theory developed by psychologist Herbert Simon. Building on Simon's work, the social scientist Barry Schwartz argued that maximizers, faced with an increasingly vast array of choices, tend to be unhappy."

Baedeker linked to this New Yorker article, Christopher Caldwell's review of Schwartz's book The Paradox of Choice. Maximizers, writes Schwartz, "are prone to misery and depression." You may have heard of the study where "shoppers who were offered free samples of six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of twenty-four. This result seems irrational—surely you’re more apt to find something you like from a range four times as large—but it can be replicated in a variety of contexts." Writes Caldwell:

A maximizer is someone who “can’t be certain that she has found the best sweater unless she’s looked at all the sweaters,” Schwartz writes. “She can’t know that she is getting the best price until she’s checked out all the prices.” Instead, he says, one should become a satisficer, “content with the merely excellent as opposed to the absolute best.” It’s not obvious that you can simply decide to convert from maximizing to satisficing. But Schwartz, though he distrusts American abundance, has a deeply American faith in our ability to refashion ourselves.

When I read about the maximizer who needs to look at all the sweaters, I realized, that's me. Right there is the source of so much of my unhappiness -- I'm paralyzed by choice. I grew up believing that I could be anything, do anything, and it just made me flail around until I sort of stumbled into my current situation. Today, if you turn me loose in a Hallmark store with 500 birthday cards and ask me to choose one to send to a friend, it'll take me half an hour, because I need to look at all the cards until I find the perfect card. If I decide to buy my mom a sweater for Christmas, I'll walk the aisles of Talbot's or Macy's until I have looked at every single sweater in her size. If I buy one, I'll probably be asking myself, should I have gone to Nordstrom's and looked there, too?

I remember when I was a kid, there was one kind of Colgate toothpaste. Now, there's Colgate Max Fresh, Colgate Total Whitening, Colgate Total Advanced Fresh, Colgate Total Advanced Clean, and a couple dozen more. What's the difference between Colgate Cavity Protection and Colgate Tartar Protection? I don't even want to know! For years, I was devoted to Tom's of Maine Cinnamint with Fluoride, and then the company discontinued it, sending me into a personal hell of facing a drugstore display with seemingly hundreds of different brands, flavors and functions.

If, right now, you're thinking I'm a little nuts, you're probably a "satisficer," and you're lucky. The San Francisco area, where every night brings a multitude of choices (do you want to check out "Saint Joan" at the PFA, Jon Lovitz at Cobb's or Beethoven's Fifth at the symphony?), is a potential nightmare for maximizers. I sometimes think back to my simpler teenage years in Grand Rapids, where I'd happily go see whichever semi-famous band rolled through town, because there just weren't that many choices -- any band that was played on top-40 radio was cause for excitement. And I consider the ways I've structured my life to avoid being overwhelmed -- using TiVo Season Pass to record a handful of select shows so I don't need to flip through 150 channels every evening, or joining a book group because it means someone else is deciding what I should read next. As a vegetarian, when I eat out, I scan the menu for the one or two choices that are meat-free. (When I go to a veggie restaurant, like Herbivore or Greens, it blows my mind.)

I'm not sure if I can refashion myself into a "satisficer," but I will strive to remember Voltaire's famous quote: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

posted by 125records @ 4:06 PM

5 Comments:

At 6:30 PM, jfruh said…

The thing that got me curious is: why not be a satsifacter in the Bay Area? You don't have to live in a huge apartment. You don't have to live in the trendiest neighborhood. Your kids don't have to go to the fanciest school. And yet you'll still get a lot of what you love about the area.

I guess I'm not the perfect person to say this -- I did move away, after all, and cost had something to do with that. But still, I'm not convinced that you *must* be a Maximizer if you live in the Bay Area.
At 6:47 PM, 125records said…

What I got out of the SFGate article was that maximizers are more likely to be drawn to large cities. I don't think you necessarily need to be a maximizer if you live here.

Even in this economic climate, a lot of people are priced out of the Bay Area housing market, and if your goal (like Baedeker) is to be a homeowner, you may have to move away. I know that for what Joe & I paid for our modest under-2000-sq-ft home here, we could buy a veritable mansion in Grand Rapids, and we've come to terms with that.
At 6:50 AM, Amy said…

Great post. I think part of my lack of new-music acumen can be attributed to feeling overwhelmed by all the stuff that's out there -- and even when Doug feeds my iTunes with new stuff, I'm paralyzed by indecision and usually just listen to an NPR podcast instead. (It doesn't help that my favorite indie-music show on college radio happens while I'm commuting and at work, so I really don't get exposed to much.)

Or maybe I'm making excuses for being old and boring!
At 10:50 AM, vallerose said…

Excellent post. Slings and Arrows - definitely one of the all time great productions and I wouldn't have known about it if Tim Goodman hadn't reviewed it. Love Michael Chabon and someday want to meet him.
About choice: When I was in my teens and shopping for fabric, I would go to the large fabric stores in SF and become paralyzed with choice. So when studies recently have come out saying people can't deal with more than 6 choices I knew that 40 years ago.

My mother and mother-in-law were perfectionists and I saw how that can make one crazy. When I shop I buy if not the first thing that fits, than the second thing. If it's on sale fine, if not, also fine. I have had too many occurrences when I buy something on sale and then proceed to get a parking ticket which negates the money I saved on the object. And since I keep things forever the money is amortized over the years anyway.
At 2:03 PM, Michael Krueger said…

It's good to know that I am not the only one paralyzed by the monstrosity that is the toothpaste section in today's mainstream grocery store. That mind-boggling combinatorial explosion makes me long for the days when the big choice was between Colgate and Crest. Of course, one can combat this by shopping in one of those New Age groceries, where the challenge then becomes finding a dentifrice that actually contains Demon Fluoride.

I also believe that living in the Bay Area can be a good thing for us "satisficers" (though I'm not particularly satisfied with that ugly portmanteau). For example, I don't like to drive, and that often narrows my choices considerably; however, I still have many, many more choices available to me than I would in any city in, say, South Dakota, where I was born. I don't expend the mental energy required to hunt down the absolute best of everything, and I don't fret about the fact that I could save a few dollars if I drove to some warehouse store instead of shopping in my neighborhood. The sheer density of choices available means that one doesn't have to work as hard to find something satisfactory, and there are many more viable paths to that satisfaction.