Let me ask you a question.

What does it take to satisfy your needs and wants? I mean, How often have you made a purchase, taken a course of action or what not and been truly satisfied with the result?

When was the last time a purchase you made was “good enough”?

If you’re like most people (and certainly like me), there’s a nagging sense of regret in most of the decisions made.  Why? Because I could have had or done something different/better/more.

Opportunity Costs

Advertising and the constant introduction of new and “better” products, lower prices and so forth have implanted within us a basic dissatisfaction with what we have.  We must have the newest, biggest, brightest, strongest, most powerful of whatever it is. Good enough isn’t enough. We need more.

We look to things to fulfill our needs and make us happy and yet we find after we’ve had those things for a few days that we are no more happy than before and, again, may be regretful of having spent money on this when I could have spent the money on that.

These are called opportunity costs. In essence, we pay for one course of action by giving up another. That is, putting our money in one place prevents us from putting it somewhere else, and that is the price of missed opportunity.  And we almost always lament, at some level, our missed opportunities.

High Expectations

While we set high expectations for what a product will do for our happiness, we extend those high expectations into other aspects of our lives, and even onto the people around us.

We expect service people to meet our (unspoken) needs. We expect our children to excel in school. We expect our jobs to be perfect. And we are let down when they are not.

That let down leads to a general unhappiness in life. How many people are working in jobs they don’t like not so much because the job itself is so terrible, but because they’ve set an unrealistic expectation on its ability to fulfill their needs?

I’ve watched many nurses leave the field of nursing because the high and idealistic expectations they brought to the table. The reality doesn’t match their expectations and they become disillusioned. Those who come to the table with more realistic expectations tend to hang around. The difference? The agreement between what is expected and what is experienced.

I’m convinced, having talked to many divorced couples, that part of the problem is the high expectations that either or both brought to the table about what marriage is and how it will impact their lives.

Accepting Good Enough

It is almost anathema in the US to accept “good enough” for anything. We don’t want a product that meets our needs “good enough”. We want the the product that does everything but tie our shoes for us.

We don’t want a job that meets our basic needs. We want a job that fulfills our every need. We become dissatisfied and will move on until we find it. Consequently, we often bounce from job to job, never finding what we’re looking for, because it doesn’t really exist.

We don’t want a spouse or companion who fulfills most of what we want in a spouse, we want one who will make us feel whole, complete, perfect. Yet, here again there is no such thing. Marriage, or any relationship for that matter, is a matter of give and take. Compromise.

What all this adds up to is that no small part of the unhappiness we feel in our lives, and perhaps the anxiety and depression that exists, too, are brought on by our inability to meet our high expectations.

Barry Schwartz , author of the 2004 book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less’, (you’ll be reading more about that in subsequent post) points out that as the number of choices we have available to us increases, our level of expectation increases as well. Given enough choices, our level of expectation rises so high that we are almost unable to make a decision and that leads to anxiety. That anxiety may give way to depression if we either cannot make a decision or regret (which is likely) the decision we made. In short, the higher our expectations, the less capable we are of meeting them.

To be sure, there are times when good enough, isn’t. I don’t want my surgeon stitching me up, “good enough”! But for most of our day-to-day lives, good enough is, well, good enough.

Thus, retraining ourselves to lower our expectations, to accept something less but that is still “good enough”, can help us combat that dissatisfaction we feel.  Recognizing that nothing can fully meet all our needs can help us reconcile the disparity and find a peace with the decisions we make. And that, my friends, can lead to a happier, more satisfying life.

Do you agree? Share your opinion

Luke Wroblewski goes into more detail about Schwartz’s ideas on his website, here.