Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [42]
I’m not advocating a return to arranged marriages. I’m still a fan, albeit a critical one, of romantic love. But I do think that arranged marriages have a valuable lesson to teach all of us consumers. In Schwartz’s terms, we need to learn to be “satisficers,” rather than “maximizers.” What does that mean? Maximizers are the tireless shoppers of the consumer world. They search out every option, try every product, and work very hard to get the best there is. Satisficers search only until they find something good enough, and then they stop looking. Living in a consumer society has a strong tendency to make us into maximizers. And while maximizers may find a better deal, studies show that they are less happy, less optimistic, and more depressed. In looking for love, the time has come for us to learn to be satisficers, not maximizers. That does not necessarily mean settling, but it does mean giving up on the idea of “the one.” When you find someone you think will make you happy, you stop looking, even though there might be someone better out there. Don’t feel that you have to sample every flavor, to chase every opportunity. As the students who sampled all those jams discovered, there is such a thing as too much jam—and too much choice. And there can also be too much dating. If you follow that path, you’re likely to feel less satisfied, no matter whom you choose.
KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES
Of course, any consideration of consumer society comes with its own neatly prepackaged moral problem, consumerism’s evil henchman—envy. Call it what you will—keeping up with the Joneses, the rat race, status anxiety—the simple fact is that our culture generates a lot of envy and that envy has crept into our judgments about our relationships as well. I live in New York, which is an envy engine if ever there was one. The city not only has greater concentrations of wealth than ever before—it also has created a greater scope to display that wealth than ever before with everything from restaurants that cost one thousand dollars a person to apartments that cost tens of millions of dollars. Imagine Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption on steroids, and you have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about.
Unfortunately, all of our struggles to get ahead have put a kink in our souls. Being rich is great, but it turns out that being richer than other people is what really gets our juices flowing. Most of us can accept the fact that in the big scheme of things we are not going to be the wealthiest person in the country or the state or even the city we live in, but we damn well want to make sure that we are the richest on the block. There are plenty of studies to back this up. For instance, a group of students were presented with a simple choice: would you rather live in a world where you made $50,000 a year, while other people made $25,000, or a world in which you made $100,000 while other people made $200,000? The majority said that they would prefer to live in the first world. In other words, what was most important to the students was not their absolute wealth but their relative wealth compared to other people. Researchers have asked similar questions about IQ and education. Time after time, a majority chose the option that improved their relative position. Not only that, but we always assume the grass is greener. When we compare ourselves to other people, studies show that we overestimate how great things are for our neighbors.
In many ways, we are mired once again in the problem of comparison shopping but with a twist—more important than finding the best car or the nicest house is finding one that is better than those of the people around you. And relationships do not escape the pernicious effect of this desire. Just think of how saturated our world is with advertisements filled with beautiful people, and imagine the effect this has on the