How to Make Better Choices (with Barry Schwartz)

Every choice you make shapes your wellbeing - and the bigger the decision, the greater the impact. So when it comes to life-changing questions like where to live, who to marry, or which career to pursue, how can you tell if you’re making the best decision for your long-term happiness? Economists might argue that you should weigh up every single option carefully - like a gambler in a casino figuring out the odds of winning. But psychologist Barry Schwartz says you can't apply a formula to happiness. In this episode, he shares insights from his new book, Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300283990/choose-wisely/(co-authored with philosopher Richard Schuldenfrei), offering a more thoughtful and human approach to making life’s hardest choices. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Laurie Santos?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. You'll learn about tools and strategies

• 0:45Laurie Santos?

  to help improve your decision making and a ton of other fantastic things about the mind. Listen and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast or find it wherever you listen to your shows.

• 0:57Speaker 01

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• 1:31Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:38Laurie Santos?

  We're finally winding down our series on my favorite books of 2025. And today's favorite book choice deals with a problem that I struggle with a lot: how to make better decisions. Our happiness is shaped by the choices we make within the circumstances we're given. Sometimes those choices feel obvious, like whether to open a window when the room you're in is feeling stuffy or whether to grab a glass of water if you're feeling parched. But bigger life decisions, like who to marry, which career path to follow, or where to live, can feel paralyzing. And that kind of makes sense. The bigger the choice, the greater its potential to impact your life and your well-being. So what do you do when you're faced with a big decision? How do you make the most happiness-inducing choice? Do you talk it through with a loved one or therapist?

• 2:23Laurie Santos?

  Do you make a big list of pros and cons? Do you flip a coin? Well, today's guest has some advice.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Hi, my name is Barry Schwartz. I'm a psychologist. I spent 45 years teaching at a place called Swarthmore College outside of Philadelphia, then retired and moved to Oakland. My interests for many, many years have been on the intersection of economics and psychology, focused on how people make decisions and also how they should make decisions.

• 2:55Laurie Santos?

  Barry's been a guest on Happiness Lab a few times because I'm a huge fan of his work. So I was super excited to see that he had a new book out about how to make tough decisions. It's called Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision Making. It's co-authored with Barry's former Swarthmore colleague, the philosopher Richard Sholdenfry. I wanted to start our conversation about choosing wisely with some definitions. So my first question to Barry was, what makes a decision good?

• 3:23Speaker 02

  So a good decision is one that gets you to things that enable you to live a good life, I would say.

• 3:31Laurie Santos?

  Seems like you're pretty good at making decisions that enable you to live a good life. You've been with your wife for a long time, I think you said in your book, since seventh grade. I know you spent half your life at one university. Has this always come easy to you, or are there decisions that you really struggle with, too?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  There are very few decisions that I have struggled with. There are people who, at least some of the time, think their task is to get the best out of whatever situation they're in. We call them maximizers. And there are people who aspire to good enough. And they may have low standards with respect to some things and high standards with respect to other things, but whatever their standards are, as soon as they find something that meets them, they stop looking. I have always been that way. The question in my mind was always, is this good enough? And sometimes, you know, I was pleasantly surprised. I chose good enough and it turned out it was spectacular. But I wasn't looking for perfect. I was looking for good enough.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  And that makes decision making a lot easier. And that is especially true in the modern world. You know, a hundred years ago, there wasn't much difference between looking for the best than looking for good enough, because there just weren't that many options. But now you could spend your whole life looking for the best pair of jeans or, you know, the best restaurant in the New York metropolitan area or what have you. And you'd end up dying naked and starving.

• 5:00Laurie Santos?

  You had this experience yourself, though, even as a good decision maker, trying to buy jeans one time, I remember.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  It shows you how seductive it is. For somebody like me, you know, I used to buy jeans. I wore jeans every day and I would buy them when the old pair wore out or when my wife was embarrassed to be seen in public with me. You know, because I didn't like shopping for jeans. They were uncomfortable when you first bought them. You had to wash them a million times. So anyway, I went to The Gap, which is where I bought my jeans. And I told them my size. And the clerk said, you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? Button fly, zipper fly, boot cut? And I said, I want the kind that used to be the only kind, which of course, they didn't make anymore. So I ended up trying on all these different styles, thinking, well, if they go to the trouble of making them,

• 5:50Speaker 02

  I should go to the trouble of trying them. And I walked out with the best fitting jeans I had ever had. And I felt worse. And the reason I felt worse is that what happens when there were all these options is that my standards for what counted as a good result went up. You know, when all there were was one kind of jeans, only an idiot would expect perfection, an idiot or a model. But I'm not an idiot and I'm not a model. So, you know, good enough was good enough. But now, when I see them, making them in all these different cuts and styles, I expect better than good enough. So what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I ended up feeling like I had failed.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  And it occurred to me that this is life for people in rich democratic societies. And it is incredibly wasteful of resources and it is incredibly detrimental to people's well-being.

• 6:52Laurie Santos?

  I think another thing that happens in the modern day isn't just that we have this like incredible overwhelm of choice. You know, bootcut, zephrify, all this stuff with genes. We also live in a world where we get lots of information about them, too. I'm experiencing this because I'm trying to buy a new projector. You know, we used to have a projector that we watched movies on. The projector just died. And so I go on the web, there's millions of projectors. But it's not just the choice. It feels to me also like it's the information that's out there. So first I go on, you know, Wirecutter, The New York Times, and then I see a million different reviews that people have. It feels like I'm supposed to be optimizing because otherwise, why would there be so, not just so much choice, but so much information about my choices out there?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  You're exactly right. It's like only an idiot would fail to take advantage of all the variety and all the information. There's enormous pressure. You know, satisficing is good enough. The way people hear that when I give talks about this is satisficing is settling. The word settling is not neutral. When people describe you as settling, they're criticizing you. Why would you settle? And of course, you're right. Nowadays, the information and misinformation is so abundant. You know, it's effortless. When I was applying to college 100 years ago, you'd send off to a college and they'd send you their course catalog,

• 8:17Speaker 02

  which was incomprehensible and a, you know, million pages thick, but that's what you got. So you had to decide where to apply to college as a 17-year-old with this incredibly unwieldy information. And it took weeks for it to come. So how many colleges are you going to apply to, given how effortful it is to get information that is then effortful to make sense of? Is that the world we live in now? Absolutely not. You can get all the information you want about every college in the United States in a half hour. So why not take advantage of it?

• 8:53Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, I think this idea that we need to optimize everything is just the kind of current culture, right? But this is also something economists have been telling us for a long time. There's this idea that we're supposed to optimize our decisions. And so in your book, you review this kind of classic formula that we use to make rational decisions. Tell me what this formula is and explain why you've pushed against it so much.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Sure. So what we've inherited from economics is the idea that a good decision is one that maximizes utility.

• 9:22Laurie Santos?

  And maybe just define for listeners who are totally unfamiliar with this stuff.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Ah, utility is whatever you think it is. So you decide what's worth what. You know, you may be turned on by aesthetics and I may be turned on by the size of my bank account. And somebody else may be turned on by being able to hit 10 aces. Whatever it is, you should be choosing in a way that maximizes that thing for you. And then you go through the world making decisions so that you get the most utility out of every decision that you possibly can. So rational choice theory grows out of economics. It's been around for a very long time and it makes good intuitive sense. If your goal, when you're making a decision,

• 10:09Speaker 02

  is to maximize utility, then for every option you face, you need to know two things. One, how good will it be? How util will it be? Two, how likely is it that if I choose it, it'll actually be as good as I think? Because the world is uncertain. Very much analogous to the bets we make in a casino. You need to know two things. How much will I win? And how likely am I to win it? You multiply those two things together and you get a quote, "expected utility." And then you simply choose the option that has the highest expected utility. And that's the way you're supposed to go through life.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  The thing to notice is that it assumes that the decisions we make are like decisions we might make in a casino. That there are numbers that can be attached to the value of each outcome. And there are numbers that can be attached to the likelihood of getting that value. So, you know, there's no uncertainty when you're playing roulette or blackjack. You can attach both potential gains and probabilities to all those gambles. That's the way the games are set up. Choosing a college, deciding what to do for the weekend, deciding who to interview on your podcast, don't seem to be like that. But the push from economics is find a way to quantify

• 11:37Speaker 02

  and you will enhance your rationality. So that has been the normative standard for a century. What happens is that your science moves in the wrong direction and then social institutions move in the same direction. And before you know it, it's like fish not knowing they live in water. It's hard to imagine there's another way to organize your life and another set of things to care about. So, you know, rational choice theory is probably not a phrase that is familiar to most people. But I think the way they think you're supposed to make decisions is an embodiment of rational choice theory with some of the rough edges sort of sanded down a little bit. And the point of the new book, which is called Choose Wisely,

• 12:22Speaker 02

  is that rational choice theory is a disastrous standard to use. Because most of the decisions we make, even minor ones and certainly major ones, are nothing like casino gambles.

• 12:37Laurie Santos?

  So in your book, you tell some of these powerful stories of like, how bad this rational choice theory, or maybe like even this cost benefit analysis is. You tell a story about Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Can you share that example and why it illustrates why reducing choice to all these kinds of numbers might be so dangerous?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  So for people in your audience who are not 100 years old. The United States fought a war in Vietnam. Got to start at the beginning. It was a guerrilla war, or what has come to be called an asymmetric war. We had our army and big weapons and they were fighting in a jungle. And McNamara, who had been the head of the Ford Motor Company, had this idea that the way to make decisions is to rationalize. And by rationalize, he meant create a framework where you can do cost benefit calculations. And then the right strategy is the one that will produce the highest benefit per unit of cost.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  So he was trying to industrialize the war. He imposed those standards up and down the military hierarchy, and it was a disaster. Now, the thing about an asymmetric war is it's really hard to know who's winning. It's not like you're gaining territory of 20, 40 square miles. It's really hard to know who's winning. So some brilliant person had the idea that we needed a proxy for winning. And what's a good proxy for winning? Casualties. If they're losing more soldiers than we are, we must be winning. The strategy changed to maximize enemy casualties,

• 14:19Speaker 02

  whether or not they had any strategic advantage. And so now we were just out for blood, independent of the strategic advantages that extracting that blood might have caused. And that, it strikes me, is the danger of taking rational choice theory too seriously. The press, to be able to quantify, pushes you in the direction of measuring what you can and pretending that what you measure is what you care about.

• 14:50Laurie Santos?

  But if quantifying costs and benefits isn't the answer to life's big decisions, then what is? After the break, Barry will share his method for making tough choices that can lead to greater well-being. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.

• 15:08Laurie Santos?

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• 17:18Laurie Santos?

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• 17:58Laurie Santos?

  Psychologist Barry Schwartz is on a mission to help us make better choices and ultimately to live better lives. In his new book, Choose Wisely, he and his co-author Richard Shuldenfry argue that we need to forget the notion of quantifying happiness, a claim that's pretty revolutionary in the field of decision science. After all, even the father of behavioral economics, the Nobel Prize-winning Danny Kahneman, was famous for trying to measure happiness objectively. I asked Barry to explain the context in which Kahneman developed this method and what he and his co-author thought about it.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  The idea is that when you ask people something like, "All things considered, how happy are you?", what they're likely to tell you is about what experience they had in the last 15 minutes. So it's really very hard to use a global question like that to get into the details. And so what works better is having people essentially list the activities that they've engaged in in the course of the last 24 hours, 48 hours, what have you, and then ask them for each activity, on a, say, a five-point scale, how much satisfaction it gave them, how happy it made them. And in this way, you can build up the atoms of happiness.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  So what he was looking for was what he called "objective happiness", and the idea was that happiness objectively is simply the collection of moments. How you feel at every moment, put together, is the sum total of your happiness in that period of time. So that's what he was trying to do, was to turn a subjective measure into an objective measure. And he acknowledged that it was not the final word on happiness. But he thought, you know, you don't get molecules without atoms. And what he was trying to do was develop a way of understanding the atoms of happiness.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  And Schuldenfry, who was a philosopher, thought this was the most ludicrous enterprise in the world. Although he also had enormous respect for Kahneman's work. It was like, how can somebody that smart have such a dumb idea?

• 20:15Laurie Santos?

  I mean, I think part of it is that, you know, Danny came from this tradition who thought that they had to figure out what the rational path was. And I think Danny was maybe seduced by a different version, right? He wanted to do the physics of happiness. We'll find the atoms of happiness and put them all together.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  That's right. And ideally, if you find the atoms of happiness, you can then improve happiness by doing, formulating social policies that increase the atoms of happiness, you know? You can't make progress unless you know what progress is going to look like. So he had that standard of rigor and precision. And what he was trying to do is adapt it to a much fuzzier concept with the understanding that eventually it would get built out into its full complexity.

• 21:01Laurie Santos?

  And so talk to me about why you and Schuldenfry don't think this approach works, kind of atomizing happiness this way.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  First of all, a lot depends on what you think happiness means. And if you have what could be called the smiley face view of happiness, then for all I know, Kahneman's approach made perfectly good sense. There are easy ways to get that smiley face. Taking drugs is probably the easiest way to get that smiley face and have it all the time until you die. So you need to start by asking, what does it mean to be happy? You know, what Aristotle called eudaimonia, which is real happiness, has to do with living a good life.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  With achieving, with going somewhere, with doing things that are meaningful. And much of the time, what it takes for that to happen is going to make you unhappy, smiley face wise. You know, if you want to be the best professional basketball player in the world, you spend 20 hours a week in the weight room. I'm not one of those people, but I'm guessing that nobody likes spending 20 hours a week in the weight room. What they do like is becoming excellent at something that is significant and meaningful to them. And they will suffer in the service of something else that's bigger.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  So when you molecularize happiness the way Kahneman did, just as a first step, what you're doing is you're getting people to focus down on these little and almost certainly irrelevant details of minute by minute and day to day experience, as if that's what they should be pursuing, rather than these larger objectives. Again, I don't, I don't think he thought it was ever going to be the last word. He says that explicitly. But the trouble is that what often happens in science is that you never get very far past the first word. And building this great big structure out of these atoms, it doesn't happen.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  You spend all your time with the atoms and not with the structure. And this is especially true when the things you think matter most are not quantifiable in the way that you think a science should be quantifiable.

• 23:33Laurie Santos?

  So trying to measure happiness in terms of these tiny atoms doesn't seem to work. How do you think we should be measuring happiness?

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Well, so when you're applying to college, we spend a lot of time in the book. Following this apocryphal young woman named Mia as she decides, should I go to college? Where should I go to college? Why am I going to college? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the question is, when you're trying to decide where to go to college, what kinds of questions should you be asking yourself? There are some questions that it is easy to ask and answer, like, what's the average salary of people who graduate from this or that college? It's accessible, it's quantitative.

• 24:16Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  What are the average SAT scores of admitted students? The higher they are, the better the students, the better the students, the better my education will be. U S News and World Report makes a living quantifying things in this way so that basically you can just push a button and out comes the answer, what school should I go to? What school should I apply to? Before you do any of that, you really should be asking, why am I going to college? What's it for for me? What kind of a person am I? What kind of a person do I aspire to become? And you can't really attach value to particular colleges

• 24:59Speaker 02

  or particular programs within colleges without first asking yourself these questions. What do I want to care about? And what do I care about? And how can I get to be the person that I aspire to be? Are you gonna get this right? Hell no. You know, I mean, you're 17 years old. You don't know yourself well enough. And one of the great things about college is that it changes people. But that kind of uncertainty is inevitable. You will at least be asking the right questions. And as you go through college, you will continue to be asking those questions as a way of evaluating whether you're being well educated. You know, well educated doesn't mean that you have a 3.8 GPA.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Being well educated means that you're moving in the direction that you think your life should take, the trajectory you want your life to take. No decision is final. So what we're suggesting is that rational people are thoughtful people. They are reflective people. And they don't slavishly pursue quantification when quantification's inappropriate. In other words, quantification has its place. But pretending that you have solved a problem by putting a number on it is not going to get you to the right place.

• 26:21Laurie Santos?

  I love this idea, but I find it so countercultural. Like, we are so in quantification mindset and we're so in optimization mindset. I mean, the thing you said that I found so interesting, that I agree with completely, especially for the college decision, but for lots of decisions, is you're not going to get it right. You're not going to get it right because you're going to change throughout the process and there's no right. It's going to evolve over time. It's not a decision that's one and done. It's one that you're going to keep making constantly. And I think people today hate that idea. They want to, you know, pick the perfect genes and it's one and done. But most of the big, important things we need to do in life to live a good life just don't work like that. And that, I think people find really scary. I think people love the idea that they could go on some Yelp review and find the optimal college or the optimal house and then they're done.

• 27:06Laurie Santos?

  But the good life doesn't work that way.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  I think that's right, but I also think that this sort of rational choice model contributes to this attitude.

• 27:14Laurie Santos?

  Totally.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  In other words, it tells you there is a right answer to this question. And if you do enough work, you'll get to it. And I don't think that's the way people used to think about their lives. You can look back after you've made decisions, quite reasonable decisions at the time, and learn from what went wrong so that maybe you'll evaluate things differently the next time. But uncertainty is simply built into being a human being in a social environment. And it's never one and done. It's never finished. You should always be thinking about decisions that you've made.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  And I should point out, you should be giving it attention that's proportionate to its importance. You know, I don't want you to go to a pizza place in New Haven and then beat yourself up for three weeks because you didn't go to the best pizza place in New Haven. You know, that's crazy. But it's not so crazy to have those kinds of recriminations when it's about where you spent four years going to college, or deciding to get a PhD in psychology instead of a PhD in economics, or deciding to marry somebody or not marry that person, you know? You should be reflective about decisions in some proportion to their importance, but

• 28:40Speaker 02

  you need to be reflective to decide how important they are.

• 28:44Laurie Santos?

  So let's get into the particular process we can use to become a little bit more reflective. One of the processes you suggest is this idea of understanding. We really need to kind of make sure we're understanding things well. But you don't mean in the kind of quantitative sense. You don't mean kind of measuring things out. So what do you mean by understanding here?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  The thing about needing to use judgment is that the right answer to almost every question is, it depends. What you just said a few minutes ago, that people don't like that, it makes them nervous, it makes them anxious, I couldn't agree more. You can deny that and attach numbers to things, then it doesn't depend. Or you can accept it and try the best you can, as an imperfect person in a complicated world, to understand both yourself and the environment you're about to enter, and use that understanding, always

• 29:39Speaker 02

  correctable, to make an intelligent guess. So understanding means, A, understanding yourself, and B, understanding the world. I'm sure that one of the things you teach students is how hard it is to do either of those things.

• 30:01Laurie Santos?

  Yes. Yeah, it's much harder than looking on the US News and World Report for, you know, what the rank is. Yep.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  It is much, much harder, and sometimes that's a fine thing to do. You know, you're stopping overnight at a hotel on your way somewhere, and you want to find a place to eat, looking at Yelp reviews and picking a restaurant that's got good reviews and not looking back. That's fine. But you need to be thoughtful, to know how much effort and what kind of effort is required. What does it mean to say that such and such is a good school? What you really care about is, is it a good school for me? However, if you've decided that the only reason you're going to college is so that you can earn a six-figure income right after you get your diploma,

• 30:49Speaker 02

  then a good school isn't necessarily a good school for you. It's a good school for the world that will reward you with a six-figure salary as soon as you get your diploma. Now, I think that's the wrong reason to choose a school, but I wouldn't insist that you use my standards, so you use your standards. But knowing what standards you have tells you what to look for and how to evaluate what you're getting. So there's a fluidity to all of this, which we try to suggest captures the fluidity to life as we live it. Good decisions are not error-free decisions.

• 31:29Laurie Santos?

  But they work better if we understand ourselves. And one of the ways you suggested that we need to understand ourselves is to pay a little bit more attention to purpose. What do you mean by purpose in this context?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  What's it for? What's college for? What's this job for? You know, is this job just to enable you to live in a certain lifestyle? Well, then the only thing you really care about is what's in your pay envelope. Is this job for making the world a better place? Well, now you have to scrutinize the possibilities in a different way. Is this job for developing your own skills? That requires still a different take. You have to be reflective and open to changing your ideas about what the job is for. And we don't have a highfalutin notion about what purpose is. I mean, we're perfectly happy with most people's intuitions and that it seems to me is essentially what's it for.

• 32:25Laurie Santos?

  This also seems to be another area where your vision of decision-making leads to same anxiety, because when I reflect on the purpose of different kinds of things, you know, running this podcast, you know, being kind to my husband, being a good person in the world, sometimes those parts of purpose come into conflict. How should we navigate that?

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Wisely.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Yes, that's another thing that rational choice theory essentially ignores. It treats the various components of a decision as if they are independent from one another. Whereas in fact, often, the different things you desire may come into conflict. And what it takes to be successful in the best job, and what it takes to be successful and satisfied with your significant other and family, may put you in a situation of perpetual conflict. And you know, this actually happened to me. I was an ambitious person when I started teaching at Swarthmore,

• 33:30Speaker 02

  and I had aspirations to become one of the leaders in the field. But you know, then we had our first kid. And it became obvious that there was simply no way I could do the things that I thought were necessary to attain a certain stature in my field and also be a good parent. So I immediately reset my sights. I didn't want necessarily to be, you know, at the top of my field. I wanted to be a respectable and respected contributor to my field,

• 34:08Speaker 02

  but I was only going to do work that did not get in the way of being a good parent. And that was going to limit the amount of time I spent on the job. So the conflict was obvious. I think people who have demanding jobs and want families, everybody experiences this conflict. You can buy your way out of it by getting childcare of various kinds. You can buy your way out of it by being unfair to your partner. And so you need to negotiate with yourself and have your eyes open. And if this matters to you, you've got to pay attention to aspects of the job

• 34:51Speaker 02

  that probably seem fairly trivial when you're deciding what career path to follow. So absolutely, there are conflicts. And so you're always going to end up a little disappointed with outcomes.

• 35:05Laurie Santos?

  So to make better decisions, we need to be reflective, open-minded, self-aware, and accepting of ourselves. But is Barry able to follow his advice in his own life? After the break, we'll hear how Barry applied these lessons to a recent life-altering decision. And I'll ask him for some guidance on a big decision I'm facing myself. The Happiness Lab, we'll be right back.

• 35:29Laurie Santos?

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• 36:14Laurie Santos?

  and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14-karat gold jewelry. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was The Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. You know what they say. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So go with Amica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, one that looks after what's important to you together.

• 36:59Laurie Santos?

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• 37:44Laurie Santos?

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• 38:05Laurie Santos?

  So let's talk about how we put these kinds of decision-making strategies into practice in a real-world decision. I know you've made some big decisions recently. You recently retired and moved across the country. Explain how this kind of take on the good life that's different from rational choice theory entered into your decision to do that.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  So there was no spreadsheet calculating the costs and benefits of staying in Philadelphia and teaching at Swarthmore and the costs and benefits of moving to the West Coast to be closer to my kids and my grandkids. And it wasn't an accident that there was no spreadsheet. I, for the life of me, can't understand how I could have quantitatively compared what was good about coming west and what was bad about leaving the east. I loved my job at Swarthmore. I love my kids and my grandkids. I did not know how to calculate the right decision.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  And so with the help of my moral guide, who is my wife, we thought about it. We talked about it. We looked at it from various different angles. What would we be giving up? What would we be gaining? Without directly comparing them, we sat with a potential decision.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  See how it felt to imagine ourselves as mostly retired people on the West Coast. And after a lot of uncertainty and a lot of, on the one hand, and on the other hand, we decided that this was a point where it made sense to make the move because the truth was that we could keep doing what we were doing and get satisfaction out of it, but we really missed seeing the family. That said, what turned out to make the decision for us easier is that I had a temporary but serious illness that required surgery. And both of our daughters said, you cannot live 3,000 miles away.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  They were right. You know, the thing about aging, it is it only goes in one direction. It was anomalous for me to have had this problem when I did, but there was no question that the future was going to be full of such things and it was going to be torture for them to be trying to be involved in our care at a distance of 3,000 miles. And that made what seemed a really hard decision into a much easier one. And we're both adaptable. That's the other thing, you know, you make a decision and it's not perfect and then you find ways to change how you live and change what you value so that you make the decision you made into a better one.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  So I don't want to pat myself on the back, you know, it's not exactly like fighting in Vietnam to move to the incredibly harsh and unpleasant Bay Area. You know, thank God my kids don't live in Nebraska. And I got nothing against Nebraska, but.

• 41:11Laurie Santos?

  Harder decision, harder decision, yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  That would have made it a harder decision.

• 41:15Laurie Santos?

  So it seems like what you did in that case is to not go to the spreadsheet, to try to go more towards what do you feel? What are the purposes in your life? You know, you have purpose in your work, but maybe you're getting less. There's much more purpose in being connected to your family. You can enhance your kid's purpose of taking care of you. It also seemed like you came with a lot of radical acceptance. Right? There's not going to be a perfect decision. There's always going to be pluses and minuses. And you kind of accepted the uncertainty. I think this is what we don't do in the modern age. It's always called decision under uncertainty, but we hate the uncertainty. We really want it to go away. And we like to believe there's a way to do that. Whereas you kind of came in with the acceptance of like, well, it's always going to be uncertain. We will never know if it was the perfect decision.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you can know in advance that it isn't a perfect decision.

• 41:57Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Any decision worth thinking about for more than five minutes, you can virtually guarantee will not be a perfect decision. It may be the right decision, but it's not a perfect decision. You give things up. Economists have a useful idea, opportunity cost. Anytime you do one thing, there are a million other things that you will not be doing, that you could be doing. And if you think there's a way to devote time, effort and resources to one thing without paying a price with respect to other things, you're just kidding yourself. So thinking about things in that way, knowing that there will be aspects of the life

• 42:39Speaker 02

  you're leaving that you will miss, just has to be part of the drill. And the thing I would say about spreadsheets, I think spreadsheets are extremely useful as long as you don't fill in the cells. It is important to identify the aspects of a decision that matter to you and the options that are available. And now you've done all the work that a spreadsheet is good for. Because now at least you can be reasonably sure that you are not ignoring something important. But you can't fill the spreadsheet in with numbers and think that this is other than a fantasy.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  So I'm a fan of spreadsheets, but the notion that somehow doing a spreadsheet makes your decision.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Sort of automatic, that's just fantasy.

• 43:31Laurie Santos?

  It was funny reading your book because my husband and I are trying to make a big decision about whether or not we should buy a house and buy a house in the Boston area, even though we live in the New Haven area. And when you're buying a house, you have a lot of the spreadsheet choices, right?

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:44Laurie Santos?

  The price and the taxes and all the stuff. But reading your book has caused me to think, maybe those aren't the things I'm supposed to be paying attention to. So Barry Schwartz's advice, whether or not to buy a house, what should I be thinking of?

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Well, those things are things you should be paying attention to. They're not the only things that you should be paying attention to. And you shouldn't feel like you should be able to trade off quantitative things against qualitative things. You know, the basic question is, can we afford it? Is it financially reckless to turn liquid assets into illiquid assets? There are all kinds of very quantifiable questions that should be asked and answered. Then there are quality of life questions, none of which are quantitative. And then somehow those things have to get put together into a decision since you can't both buy a house and not buy a house.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  But the notion that, you know, if you do all of your homework carefully, the decision will make itself. That's the notion that this book is designed to wipe out of people's minds. Decisions don't make themselves if they're being done right.

• 44:56Laurie Santos?

  This decision is definitely not making.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  No.

• 44:58Laurie Santos?

  There's a lot of conversation.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  You're giving up on good pizza if you buy a house in Boston.

• 45:03Laurie Santos?

  It's true. It's true. It's true. No, it's been, I mean, I think it's funny making this decision as we read this book because I watch how quickly our brains want to go into the numbers.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  It's a way of relieving yourself of responsibility, you know? I'm doing what the numbers tell me to do.

• 45:19Laurie Santos?

  I mean, it's so much harder to ask the question of like, well, what do we get out of having a yard or not having a yard and the social connection we get? And what does it mean to get older and have a third floor?

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:29Laurie Santos?

  Like, those are hard questions.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  They are very, very hard questions. So, yeah, house buying is a, it's a nightmare.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  I wish you the best of luck.

• 45:40Laurie Santos?

  Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, now I have a really lovely book that I can use to help out. That's helpful. So Barry, as usual, this is such a treat. Thank you so much for coming back on the Happiness Lab.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  I feel exactly the same way. And I thank you for being interested enough in it to have me back.

• 45:57Laurie Santos?

  In a world where dating apps assign us compatibility percentages and social media defines relevance by follower counts and performance metrics dictate promotions at work, it's easy to fall into the trap of seeing everything as quantifiable. But it's important to remember that you can't always assign numbers to life's most important decisions. So the next time you catch yourself ranking pros and cons or trying to calculate the best possible choice for some complicated situation, take a pause and just remind yourself that there's no perfect choice. Then ask what you know about yourself, your values and your situation. And remember that good enough can sometimes be totally great.

• 46:37Laurie Santos?

  That's it for our special season on my favorite new books of 2025. But if you want even more tips on newer books to check out, then be sure to sign up for my newsletter, which you can do on my website, drlorisantos.com. That's drlorisantos.com. And if you like what you hear on the show, be sure to follow me on social media. You'll get even more evidence-based happiness tips as well as behind the scenes moments from the show. And don't forget to drop a review of the show wherever you listen. It really does help me spread the science of happiness with even more people. The Happiness Lab will be back in two weeks to celebrate the start of basketball season. We'll meet a player who's trying to normalize conversations about mental health and who has some great advice for how all of us can redefine happiness and success.

• 47:21Laurie Santos?

  All that next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 47:30Laurie Santos?

  The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. You know what they say, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." So go with Amica and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, one that looks after what's important to you together. Auto, home, life, and more. Amica helps you protect what matters most. Visit amica.com and get a quote today. A business gift should do more than check a box. It should reflect your brand and show someone they're appreciated, recognized, and truly seen. That's why teams trust Forimprint. With thousands of high-quality, customizable products like premium apparel, drinkware,

• 48:13Laurie Santos?

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• 48:33Speaker 03

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• 49:18Speaker 03

  That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop.

• 49:22Laurie Santos?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.