Resources

Worth your time on this question

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

Four things on this subject: one TAIU exercise and three things to read. It opens with The Paradox of Choice by 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.

This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.

What does not need fixing?: talk it through

TRY · 8 MIN

Leave It Alone List

TAIU

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

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

Try it →

Was this useful?

READ · BOOK

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.

Recommended by the TAIU community

What helped you?

If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.

We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.