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Everything worth your time on the question: What if this part of my life is already good?

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Leave It Alone List

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Improvement has a habit of damaging things that were already working.

Records what is already working, so it survives the next round of improvement.

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The Paradox of Choice

Barry Schwartz

Read this if you cannot leave a decision alone once it has been made, or if good enough has never felt like a real answer.

Schwartz separates maximisers, who need to be sure they have the best available option, from satisficers, who stop once something is good enough. The uncomfortable finding is that maximisers tend to end up with objectively better outcomes and feel worse about them, because every choice carries the shadow of the one they did not take.

It's a Wonderful Life: Mentally Subtracting Positive Events

Minkyung Koo, Sara Algoe, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert

A neat piece of research with a practical finding: imagining how something good might never have happened does more for how you see it than describing why you appreciate it. Listing what is good confirms what you already think. Removing it tells you something you did not know.

The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model

Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky

Why the best parts of a life stop registering. Adaptation is efficient and it is also why people trade away arrangements that were working, having quietly stopped noticing them. The prevention research is more useful than the treadmill headline: variety and continued attention slow it, and pure acquisition does not.

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