You have twenty minutes to pick a restaurant, a birthday present, or a hotel for next weekend, and you can feel the tabs multiplying. Somewhere in there is a better option than the one currently in front of you, and the search for it is quietly eating the time you were trying to save. The counterintuitive move, and often the correct one, is to stop looking and take the first option that is clearly good enough.
This is not laziness dressed up as wisdom. It has a name in decision science, and a reasonable amount of evidence behind it, and, as it happens, a Swedish word that gestures at the same idea, though that last part deserves more scepticism than it usually gets.
The economist who made peace with good enough
The idea goes back to Herbert Simon, the economist and cognitive scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1978. Simon argued that real people do not, and cannot, optimise. We lack the time, information and mental capacity to weigh every option and find the single best one, a limitation he called bounded rationality. Instead, he said, we satisfice, a word he built from satisfy and suffice.
To satisfice is to set a threshold for what would be acceptable and then take the first option that clears it, rather than searching for the maximum. Under time pressure this is not a poor substitute for careful analysis. It is frequently the more rational approach, because the cost of continued searching, in hours and in mental effort, can easily outweigh the small improvement a longer search might deliver.
Why chasing the best can backfire
There is also a psychological cost to always reaching for the best, and it has been studied directly.
In a 2002 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Barry Schwartz and colleagues distinguished maximisers from satisficers. Maximisers are people who feel compelled to consider every possibility and settle only for the best. Across seven samples, the researchers found that a stronger tendency to maximise was associated with lower happiness, optimism, self-esteem and life satisfaction, and with more depression, perfectionism and regret. Maximisers were also less satisfied with the consumer choices they made and more prone to comparing themselves with others.
It is worth being careful about what this shows. Maximising here is measured as a personal disposition, much of the evidence comes from consumer and laboratory settings, and correlation is not proof that one causes the other. But the pattern is suggestive and has held up reasonably well: the person still refreshing the reviews is often less content with whatever they finally choose than the person who booked something decent and moved on.
The Swedish word, and its limits
Sweden has a word that circles this territory: lagom. It is usually translated as “not too much, not too little,” an everyday adverb for the right amount, the appropriate degree, enough. You can have a lagom amount of coffee in your cup or arrive at a lagom time.
In 2017 lagom was exported as a lifestyle concept, arriving in British and American bookshops as the successor to the Danish hygge that had sold so well the year before. Writers such as Linnea Dunne published handsome books presenting it as a philosophy of balance and restrained, sustainable contentment. Cafés and product lines followed.
Here a note of caution is in order, and Scandinavia Standard has made it before. Lagom is a genuine and useful word, but it is a word, not a national character or a secret method, and reaching for it to explain Swedes tends to flatten a country of ten million people into a mood board. Swedes are not collectively better at settling for good enough than anyone else, and the marketed version of lagom, with its muted palette and tasteful ceramics, is closer to an export product than to a description of daily life. What the word offers this discussion is smaller and more honest: a reminder that some cultures have found it worth naming the idea of enough, while English tends to treat enough as a synonym for not quite enough.
Matching the effort to the stakes
None of this argues for carelessness. Satisficing is a tool, not a virtue, and the skill lies in matching the search to the stakes.
Some decisions genuinely reward maximising. A house, a career move, a medical choice, anything expensive, lasting or hard to reverse, can justify a long and thorough search. The trouble is that many people apply that same intensity to a weeknight dinner or a pair of headphones, spending a maximiser’s effort on a satisficer’s problem, and then feeling the maximiser’s regret about a decision that barely mattered.
The practical version is unglamorous. When time is short and the choice is small or reversible, decide what good enough looks like before you start, take the first option that meets it, and stop. The better option you did not find is usually worth less than the twenty minutes you would have spent finding it, and the contentment of the person who simply chose is worth more than either.