Burden of choice: why more options make us less happy

Schwartz offers several ways of dealing with the paradox of choice, and unlike some would-be Jeremiahs he does not drag the reader through an endlessly bleak landscape before finishing on a note of half-hearted hope or apocalyptic despair. Early on, he introduces the contrast between maximizing and satisficing, and he salts the book with hints on to how to move from the one mind-set to the other. Beware of the "new and improved." Make it a rule to visit only two stores before buying clothing. Continue to read advertisements for the car you just bought, ignoring what the competition has to say. Decide on the kinds of choices you're willing to think through--areas in which it is fun to choose (for me, movies and wine), in contrast to those in which deciding is burdensome and a good-enough outcome will do. Allow other people to be the innovators, trying things out for you. "Remember that "he who dies with the most toys wins' is a bumper sticker, not wisdom." Well-chosen New Yorker cartoons are used in the hook to temper the argument with wry and gentle wit.

Schwartz mostly offers wisdom of a worldly sort, but he approaches things of the spirit when he suggests keeping an ongoing list of the good things that happen each day, big and small, in order to inculcate an "attitude of gratitude." "With practice, we can learn to reflect on how much better things are than they might be, which will in turn make the good things in life feel even better." Chicago philosopher-comic Aaron Freeman made the same point in a recent National Public Radio commentary: "Gratitude ameliorates the worst aspect of American life, which is that the consumer culture makes us constantly aware of what we do not have, without counterbalancing rituals of gratitude to the mind-boggling bounty that is the U.S.A.... As you are grateful, to that precise extent you are happy."

Schwartz comes closest to a classically religious attitude when he enjoins the love of constraint and the power of nonreversible decisions, especially with respect to life's most important decisions. He relates the story of a minister who, in a sermon on marriage, shocked his congregation with the frank acknowledgment that, yes, the grass is greener on the other side. No matter whom you marry, inevitably there will be someone younger, funnier, smarter, wealthier or more empathetic than he or she is. But marriage is not a matter of comparison shopping. "'The only way to find happiness and stability in the presence of seemingly attractive and tempting options is to say, Tin simply not going there. I've made my decision. I'm not in the market--period.'... Wondering whether you could have done better is a prescription for misery." Considering your decision irreversible allows you to pour your energy into making your marriage better.

Research shows that people with strong social bonds--those who are married or enjoy close family and church ties--tend to be happier and healthier than those lacking such bonds. But Schwartz thinks it's important to realize that social ties 'also limit freedom, choice and autonomy. In Emile Durkheim's study of suicide over a century ago, he argued that marriage, family and religion not only guard against the loneliness or "egoism" endemic to modern life, but also provide a salutary constraint of the imagination against the lack of rules, or "anomie," that accompanies capitalism. Observing that the rates of clinical depression in the U.S. have tripled in the past quarter century of increased choice, Schwartz echoes Durkheim's proposition that suicide rates are directly proportional to rates of egoism mid anomie.