Modern Wisdom

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Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it) - David Epstein - #1121

Explore episode Jul 9, 2026
Business
Maximizers vs. Satisficers: Why Optimising Everything Makes You Miserable

Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it) -… · Jul 9, 2026 Business

People who try to maximise every decision are less happy, more regret-prone, and no better at actually choosing well. Herbert Simon — who coined 'satisficing,' won the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Turing Award, and the top prize in psychology — proved the point by wearing one beret, eating the same breakfast, and living in the same house for 46 years.

4m 18s

Where this was said

Why We Avoid Constraints (and Why That's a Mistake)

At 10:22 · chapter starts 3:30

Chris asks why talking about constraints is so unsexy, and Epstein offers an evolutionary explanation that reframes the entire episode's premise: our brains are miscalibrated for modern abundance. We evolved to want more of everything because, in our ancestral environment, excess was nearly impossible — just as with sugar, the craving made sense when the resource was scarce and has become pathological now that it's ubiquitous. This mismatch surfaces clearly in psychological surveys: in an international study cataloguing creativity myths, the number-one false belief held by respondents was that people are most creative when they have maximum freedom. Epstein pairs this with the 100-million-fold increase in consumer options since pre-industrial times — far outpacing the roughly 400-fold rise in wealth — and the counterintuitive finding that since infinite scrolling was introduced, people have become progressively more bored. Experiments bear this out: participants randomly assigned a single video to watch report feeling less bored than those given a free choice of 20 from the same pool. The explanation is that the brain is a comparison engine, and simply knowing other options exist undermines your enjoyment of the present one — a direct conflict with every economic model of rational consumer behaviour.

Society & Culture
More Choice, More Boredom: The Paradox of Infinite Scrolling

Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it) -… · Jul 9, 2026 Society & Culture

We evolved to want more, but we're now drowning in abundance. Since infinite scrolling arrived, boredom has increased, not decreased — and experiments show people enjoy a single randomly assigned video more than one they chose from twenty options. The brain as comparison engine is its own worst enemy.

2m 33s

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