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Why do we cling to optionality?

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Why does optionality just seem to be this drug that we can't say no to?

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Well, okay.

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I can give you the nerdy perspective.

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That's why I'm asking.

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Okay.

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We'll start with that.

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That's why you're here.

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We'll start with that and I might throw something back at you here, okay?

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We've kind of been dancing around this a little bit.

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There's kind of an evolutionary mismatch going on.

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Right.

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This world of abundance is not the world that our ancestors grew up in, not the world that our species evolved in.

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Right.

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The world that our species came to came of age in was one of scarcity.

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Right.

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Right.

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You didn't have optionality in those.

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And so in any situation in which you found yourself with multiple options, you better maximize that situation as much as possible, purely out of survival needs.

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Right.

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Right.

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We grew up in these like small kin-based relationship groups for the most part.

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That's our evolutionary adaptive period.

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That's when we as a species came about.

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Yeah.

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And so there weren't mega cities.

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We're in the middle of a city that's 12 to 14 million people, whatever it is, right?

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Right now.

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That is not... Our brains just aren't ready for that at all.

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I can't even fathom the number 12 to 14 million, right?

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Yeah.

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In my own mind.

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Modern stimuli, especially a lot of things that are in mass media, they'll hijack this machinery that we have, this old paleolithic brain machinery that we have.

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One small example showed men a brief exposure to 10 attractive faces, 10 women, and then immediately gave them a questionnaire after that of like, how satisfied are you with your relationship?

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These were men who are all in committed relationships.

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And they had a measurable decrease after just seeing 10 attractive women's faces, right?

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That's like 30 seconds on the internet.

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True.

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this.

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Now throw in internet porn into that, right?

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Like, my God, of course you're going to be

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thinking about other options when you have this level of access.

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Dating apps, like you just mentioned too, swipe, swipe, swipe, right?

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There's just that evolutionary mismatch between the way our species evolved and the environment that we live in now.

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They're so divergent that our brains just can't even keep up.

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This is what a lot of mass media and big tech will exploit.

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And again, we sign up for it, right?

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Yeah, I mean- We sign up for it.

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Yeah, they are hijacking very primitive psychological functions within our minds that evolve there for extremely good reasons.

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And the fucked up thing is that we enjoy the hijacking.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Like, it wouldn't really be hijacking if we didn't enjoy it.

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So it's hard for us to be too upset.

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It is interesting, like, I do think of, I mean, Elon buying Twitter is a whole mess of a conversation, but...

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I do think one of the more interesting things that he pointed out after he took over Twitter is that he wanted to optimize it for, I think it was non-regret inducing minutes spent.

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Most social media platforms or most apps in general measure success based on how many minutes you spent on the app.

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He said that he wanted to optimize for non-regret inducing minutes, which is interesting because I think all of us have some degree of experience of engaging in apps or media or entertainment that like...

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the next day we're like why did i do that yes yeah like why did i why did i stay up till 3 a.m playing video games like i didn't even like the game yeah it's the same reason why you binged on sugar on candy here right the night before it's not because like your your your brain evolved to seek out candy by any means it was because like fruit in our environment was very scarce and so whenever you came across fruit you would you would gorge on it yeah right and so now you

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that machinery is being hijacked.

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And so you regret it the next day, right?

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Because it's been hijacked to such a degree.

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That's just, it's, it's super, super natural, right?

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It's, it's above and beyond what you would have encountered in any other, uh, environment prior to, you know, a hundred years ago or even.

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Yeah.

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So that's, that's one reason.

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Okay.

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It's this environmental mismatch that we have.

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Um, optionality wasn't a big thing in our evolutionary past.

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And now that it is, we're like just,

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And we're stepping on the gas for it.

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There's this other idea, though, too.

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And this list is not exhaustive.

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But I found this interesting explanation for it called the additive bias.

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Okay.

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Okay.

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And this came, I think the original study was like a, I think it was like a Lego study or something like that where people were trying to improve a design that they were given by these researchers.

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And the vast, vast majority of people always tried to add.

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Yeah.

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something to this design when really they thought that the most optimal thing to do was to take away part of the contraption that they gave them.

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Right.

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And they've replicated this in other domains as well.

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But if you take that and you think about it, well, when you're dissatisfied with your life, Mark...

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What's the first thing you usually think of?

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I need to go.

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I need to go do something.

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I need to find something to do.

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You need to find something to add in my life.

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Something I'm not doing today that I should do.

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I need a new job.

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I need a new city.

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I need a new group friend.

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I need a new partner.

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I need, it's this additive bias that we have.

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And again, I think that does come a little bit from our evolutionary past where you probably did need to go get something because the immediate environment was scarce, but still, you know,

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So often, especially in an environment of abundance, what you probably need to do is subtract.

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You know, remember the huge trend of minimalism for a long time.

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I mean, I was all in on it for a while even too, right?

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And I don't know, there's something to it.

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There really is something to it.

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It's funny, because I actually told you this morning before we got on the mics, we did an episode on friendship last year and I talked quite a bit in that episode about my struggles with finding, making friends and how I think part of it is

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my age, part of it's my personality, part of it is Los Angeles.

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And my wife has been having a pretty hard time of it as well.

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And I was telling you this morning, because we were catching up, I mean, it's been a month.

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So, you know, kind of the new thing for us this last month is that we were saying yes to all these things that we didn't really want to do.

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We were...

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And there was like a bunch of people that we had been hanging out with and we're like, well, maybe we just need to see him a little bit more.

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Maybe we just need to put time in.

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Maybe we just need more frequency of exposure and all this stuff.

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And she and I just kind of hit a breaking point this past month.

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We're like, you know, fuck this shit.

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Like, we're just not going to do things we don't want to do.

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And it's funny because for the last month, we've really only hung out with like three or four people.

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But it's the three or four people we really like.

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And it's so funny.

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We're so much happier.

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It's really amazing, actually.

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How much like expending resources on people that like you're kind of lukewarm about is actually just like detracts quite a bit.

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There's a lot of the research too that bears that out.

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You need somewhere between like two and maybe 10 people at the most who you regularly interact with and have a good connection with.

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Yeah.

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Beyond that.

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Yeah, no.

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It's hard to know like when you are just arbitrarily enforcing like a standard expectation on yourself or when you actually do need something.

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It's it's there's a fine line.

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There's another thing I found too, though, which is kind of interesting about anticipated regret.

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Okay, so when we actually, if you're given a number of options, okay, and you expect to, and you're forced to make a decision, but you expect to find out how those other options would have turned out in some way, you're actually just really less likely to either be satisfied with the thing that you chose or even choose in the first place.

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I think part of this is definitely like modern society.

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It's a lot easier to find out

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I didn't go to that party.

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Oh, but I'm going to find out what it was like.

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And now I'm going to regret not going or going or whatever it is.

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Or at the other party I didn't go to, I'm going to find out what happened there.

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We can anticipate our regrets probably a lot more accurately now because everything's recorded or everything's documented in some way.

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Or somebody's going to tell you you're going to find out somehow about how some option you didn't choose how that went.

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Yeah.

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That makes us kind of just withdraw altogether because we don't want to choose.

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Yeah.

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Well, this is FOMO, right?

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Like it's, you don't really want to go to the party, but I don't want to feel what it's going to feel like to not have gone to the party.

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And it was really cool.

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So I'm going to go, even though I don't want to go.

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Right.

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Like it's, it's the condition of our age for sure.

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Hey, everybody.

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Hope you enjoyed this video.

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It was just one clip from a much larger, more thorough episode.

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If you want to watch or listen to the full episode, click on the link in the description.

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And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide with all the resources, citations, and exercises at SolvePodcast.com slash commitment.

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See you in the next one.