#attacked.

So many high-achieving people get trapped into obsessing about the external world and neglecting their internal world. When you’ve been suppressing things for so long, you can’t just decide to stop all at once. Learning to listen to yourself takes a long time. I used to think that I always had to justify everything to myself—that I needed to be completely rational. Then I slowly started to realize that my emotional reaction to any situation was often way more accurate than any of my thoughts. And it’s kind of annoying, because often my feelings are telling me things I don’t really want to hear. So it’s easy to ignore them and freeze them out. Historically, instead of listening to myself I prefer to control my environment. I plan, I anticipate, I analyze. I get mad at myself when fuck up. And it works pretty well most of the time, for a lot of things in my life. But when it comes to feelings it just doesn’t work. You can’t fake feelings. You can’t perform your way into the truest, most beautiful version of your life, because you need to be connected to yourself to even know what that looks like. I’ve known that for a long time, but I’m finally starting to live it.

Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror, as you seem to like mirrors so much.

This future-focused attitude often takes the form of what I once heard described as the “‘when-I-finally’ mind,” as in: “When I finally get my workload under control/get my candidate elected/find the right romantic partner/sort out my psychological issues, then I can relax, and the life I was always meant to be living can begin.” The person mired in this mentality believes that the reason she doesn’t feel fulfilled and happy is that she hasn’t yet managed to accomplish certain specific things; when she does so, she imagines, she’ll feel in charge of her life and be the master of her time. Yet in fact the way she’s attempting to achieve that sense of security means she’ll never feel fulfilled, because she’s treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state — and so the present moment won’t ever feel satisfying in itself. Even if she does get her workload under control, or meet her soulmate, she’ll just find some other reason to postpone her fulfilment until later on.

Luckily, there is a remedy for choice overload. One can employ a decision-making strategy in which one accepts the first satisfactory option, rather than continuing to look for a superior one. Psychologists call those who do the former “satisficers,” as opposed to “maximisers,” who always try to choose the best. The term comes from a combination of the words satisfy and suffice. It was coined by Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon in 1956 to explain the behaviour of decision-makers who don’t have enough information or computational power to make the optimal choice and, rather than struggle to remedy the limitations, decide to save time and effort by making a choice despite them. But it’s a concept that is just as powerful in psychology as it is in economics. When you are choosing a video, television program, or film, do you shop around, scanning many options, instead of settling quickly on something to watch? When you’re shopping for clothes, do you search forever, experiencing difficulty in finding garments you really love? When you’re researching appliances, do you scour Consumer Reports, Amazon.com reviews, and numerous other websites to gather a mountain of information before you buy? If so, psychologists would say you tend to maximise. We all want to make good choices, but research shows that making exhaustive analyses, paradoxically, doesn’t lead to more satisfaction. It tends to lead instead to regret and second-guessing. Letting go of the idea that a choice must be optimal, on the other hand, preserves mental energy and allows you to feel better if you later learn that a better choice existed. What works when choosing shoes or a new car or a vacation plan may not suffice when choosing a doctor or a partner for what you hope will be a lifetime relationship. But for most situations, those who accept options that are good enough, rather than feeling compelled to find the optimal one, tend to be more satisfied with their choices and, in general, happier and less stressed individuals.