Herbert Simon's Satisficing: Why Good‑Enough Beats Maximizing

Herbert Simon, a Nobel laureate in economics and Turing Award winner, was a man of remarkable simplicity in his personal life. He consistently wore one brand of socks, ate the same breakfast for decades (half grapefruit, oatmeal, and black coffee), owned only one beret at a time, lived in the same house for 46 years, and believed in owning just three sets of clothes. Despite this minimalist approach to daily choices, Simon was one of the most decorated thinkers of the 20th century, a founding father of artificial intelligence, and made breakthrough contributions across six different fields. His primary academic focus was understanding how human beings actually make decisions.

The Cost of Decision-Making and "Satisficing"

Simon viewed the act of making a decision as a cost, consuming time and energy that people often fail to account for. He argued that searching for the absolute "best" option, whether for a dishwasher or a spouse, is often inefficient. His optimal strategy was not optimizing at all, but rather finding something "good enough" and stopping. He coined the term "satisficing," a portmanteau of "satisfy" and "suffice," to describe this approach. When faced with a real decision, Simon would consider a few alternatives, make his pick, and move on without agonizing or second-guessing.

Challenging the Rational Actor Model

For much of the 20th century, economics was built on the "rational actor" model, which posited that individuals carefully weigh every available option and select the best one. Simon fundamentally disagreed, believing it was impossible to be perfectly rational. He argued that to truly find the best option, one would need:

• To understand every alternative available.
• To accurately predict the consequences of each alternative.
• To possess the time and mental capacity to compare them all.

Simon contended that no human can achieve this, as we always operate with incomplete information and limited brainpower. The search itself, therefore, becomes a problem, leading to "decision paralysis" as the cost of comparing options and expanding lists increases.

The Detriments of Maximizing

Psychologists who further explored Simon's work have confirmed the efficiency and wisdom of his personal philosophy. After Simon's death in 2001, researchers developed a "maximization scale" to measure where individuals fall on the spectrum between "maximizer" and "satisficer." Their findings consistently showed that being a maximizer is almost always detrimental:

• Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives.
• They are typically less happy and more prone to regret.
• They are more likely to endlessly compare themselves to others.
• They often opt for reversible decisions, which prevents them from fully committing.

Evidence suggests that maximizing tendencies are on the rise. Satisficers, in contrast, do not necessarily have low standards; their standard is "good enough for me" or "for what I'm trying to do here," rather than "the best out there." This allows them to feel satisfied with their choices instead of being haunted by unmade decisions.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term "flow," articulated this well: "By making the decision to invest in a choice, regardless of better options that may come along later, a great deal of energy gets freed up for living instead of being spent on wondering how to live."

Robert Frost and Fredkin's Paradox

The poet Robert Frost's famous poem, "The Road Not Taken," is often misinterpreted as a celebration of bold individual choice. However, a closer look at the text reveals that the two roads are described as "just as fair" with "no footsteps either way that morning." Frost wrote the poem partly to tease his friend, Edward Thomas, who would habitually dither over path choices and then regret the chosen one. The poem's famous last stanza, often seen as a declaration of a defining choice, is actually the narrator imagining a future self turning a meaningless choice into a significant one. The "difference" the poem speaks of didn't actually exist at the time of the decision.

This phenomenon, where we spend the most time on decisions where the options matter the least, is known as Fredkin's Paradox. When options appear similar, we struggle to differentiate them, leading us to expend significant energy trying to do so. The closer the choices, the harder it becomes to pick.

The Modern Maximizing Culture

In contemporary society, there's a pervasive culture of "maximizing" everything. Gen Z has even coined terms like "life maxing," "looks maxing" (improving appearance to the maximum), "money maxing" (extracting the most money from opportunities), "sleep maxing," and "fiber maxing." These practices involve making every decision optimally to achieve the absolute best.

An Oxford professor's calculations indicate that we now have over 100 million times more options available than our pre-industrial ancestors. Social media exacerbates this problem by acting as an "infinite comparison engine," where curated highlight reels of others' lives make "good enough" feel like settling. This constant pull to search for something better has even spoiled mundane moments. Research shows that offering viewers many videos to choose from actually makes them more bored than focusing on a single one. The mere notion of a potentially better option ruins the present experience.

The advent of artificial intelligence further intensifies the promise of optimizing everything—schedules, diets, wardrobes, dating, and even creative output. However, if Simon was correct, the danger of these tools isn't that they won't work, but that they will expand the menu of options and comparisons even further. This could deepen the disappointment and paralysis they promise to cure, making it easier than ever to do too much.

Haruki Murakami's short story illustrates the maximizer's tragedy: a young man and woman, a perfect match, decide to part ways as a test, believing they will inevitably reunite if truly meant to be. They never meet again, highlighting the cost of overthinking and failing to commit to a good-enough choice.