The best doesn’t exist. A psychologist explains why we can’t stop searching.

Given that we live in a consumer culture where you can get anything — a T-shirt, fancy whiskey, blood pressure medication — delivered to your door within hours, it is surprisingly difficult to buy things.

Do you want jeans? What type of jeans do you want? Will those jeans look good on you? Why didn’t you buy jeans that look better? Also, isn’t $148 a lot to pay for jeans? Maybe they’ll go on sale later. Maybe you’ll find better jeans if you try harder. All you want is the best jeans, and is that so wrong?

Yes, psychologist Barry Schwartz famously argued in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, his 2004 opus exploring why, if we love choices so much, an ever-growing number of them seems to be making us miserable.

According to him, the world is, very roughly, divided into two types of people: satisficers, who can be content with a good-enough thing — they’re perfectly fine pants, let’s move on with our brief lives — and maximizers, who can’t call off the search until they’re certain they’re getting not just a good thing but the best.

I reached out to Schwartz, currently a visiting professor at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, to try to understand what drives our collective hopeless quest for the best.

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