Barry Schwartz

I believe we make the most of our freedoms by learning to make good choices about the things that matter, while at the same time unburdening ourselves from too much concern about the things that don’t.

Americans go to shopping centers about once a week, more often than they go to houses of worship, and Americans now have more shopping centers than high schools. In a recent survey, 93 percent of teenage girls surveyed said that shopping was their favorite activity.

Increased choice may actually contribute to the recent epidemic of clinical depression affecting much of the Western world.

We can imagine a point at which the options would be so copious that even the world’s most ardent supporters of freedom of choice would begin to say, “enough already.” Unfortunately, that point of revulsion seems to recede endlessly into the future.

The trick is to learn to embrace and appreciate satisficing, to cultivate it in more and more aspects of life, rather than merely being resigned to it.

By some estimates, depression in the year 2000 was about ten times as likely as depression in the year 1900.

The drawbacks of maximizing are so profound and the benefits so tenuous that we may well ask why anyone would pursue such a strategy.

What may be the easiest route to increasing satisfaction with the results of decisions is to remove excessively high expectations about them.

The more social comparison you do, the more likely you are to be affected by it, and the direction of such effects tends to be negative.

On the one hand, you’ve got to defend your limited cognitive resources so that you can attend to what really matters. On the other, you can’t just tune out. You need to find a way to be a part of society as it is without being weighed down by all the claims on your attention it imposes.