Image by firesam! via flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Human civilization is at its peak. The longest average life expectancy in the world was 84 years old in 2015. According to Our World in Data, a project by economist Max Rosen that documents the progress in our society, there were more cellular phone subscriptions than people in the US in 2015 — 117.59 subscriptions per 100 people when aggregated; 424 million people escaped extreme poverty between 2010 and 2015; and 1.24 billion people were travelling internationally in 2016, the highest recorded. We can even purchase bewildering things on the Internet, from pocket-sized suture pads to live Madagascar hissing cockroaches, a convenience we never got to enjoy before the era of online shopping. (Indeed, some of these privileges are confined to the context of developed economies, and there is still room for improvement in the developing ones.) Our world is in a better state than ever.

But we also demand more than ever. As we witness these health, socio-economical, and technological developments, our expectations on how we should lead the “ideal” life have evolved in parallel. Specifically, we now expect multiple benefits from the important components in our lives, such as our education, careers, and marriages. Economists call these expected benefits “utilities.”

Take college education, for example. Colonial colleges in the US were first established to educate young ministers for the clergy. That was the main utility. But what we expect from higher education today— both in its form and content — is drastically different from the historical and religious beginnings of college education. Not only do we expect our college education to ready us for the professional world now, we also expect internship opportunities, strong alumni networks, abundant academic resources, and more. So much so that there are up to 33 factors to consider when choosing your college.

We face the same trajectory when choosing our jobs. Years ago, the main utility of a job was to provide financial security. Now, we expect our job to be a career, or even a calling. Psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski defined a job as one that provides financial rewards, a career as one that allows someone to advance, and a calling — the highest level —as one that allows you to contribute to the society. As part of our modern day career expectations, monetary gains are certainly still an important consideration, but we also increasingly emphasize on job satisfaction, opportunities for continuous personal growth, sense of collegiality, chances for overseas assignments, and the likes.

As it turns out, marriages are also getting harder as our society progresses. It used to be Game of Thrones style —people got married to create alliances between families and consolidate resources with contracts fostered by familial and blood ties, which are arguably more irrevocable. In modern love, familial alliances play a diminished role. Instead, we expect our partner to satisfy us sexually, emotionally, intellectually, socially, and/or financially… we kind of expect a romantic, human version of the Swiss Army Knife.

I get it. As someone obsessed with smart personal hacks to make my life more organized and productive (Daniel Levitin’s An Organized Mind was such a wonderful read for me), choosing a degree program, a job, and a partner that check many of our boxes is intuitive. In fact, such multi-utility thinking to optimize our life probably contributed to our societal progress to begin with. Besides, given the importance that education, career, and romance play in our lives, why settle? Most would aspire to maximize, not satisfice, when it comes to these significant aspects. This is especially relevant to education and marriages (because there is lower inertia to switch jobs, and we typically have multiple jobs over our lifetime). If you decide to earn an MBA, chances are you will only want one in your life. On the path to marriages, we speak about meeting “the one.” Higher education incurs significant time, costs, and energy. So does a marriage. We therefore aspire our educational experiences and spouses to be our “best option” in the multiple ways iterated above. We want to avoid regret. After all, our educational attainment, career progression, and romantic lives are what we perceive as the building blocks of our happiness.

But, are we asking for too many things from one entity? Yes, our modern, multi-utility expectations are beneficial to a certain extent — they help us make better decisions. When comparing between two or more educational programs, jobs, or even people to get married to (!), comparing a list of pros and cons is helpful. If an academic program offers a scholarship, internship opportunities, and access to well established alumni network, we perceive it as better than other programs that offer less. If a particular job offers flexible working hours, gym membership and childcare perks, colleagues that are motivated and inspiring, and continuous professional training, we might be inclined to choose it over another that only provides a higher remuneration. Granted, all of us have criteria that are unique to our personal and professional needs, but this illustrates the multi-utility expectations that are now the new, silent norm in our societies and lives. Most importantly, these expectations can set us up for anxiety as there is pressure, whether self-imposed or external, to find that degree program, job, or person that fulfills as many of our expectations as possible.

But the benefit of multi-utility expectations for a better life diminishes at some point. It is important for us to realize that anxiety creeps in after due to two reasons: one scientific in nature, and the other, by taking a realist perspective.

The scientific explanation is the fact that humans have limited cognitive processing power — our analytical performance peaks with a certain amount of information, and anything more can inundate us. Psychologist George Miller identified that the “chunks” of information we can hold on our mind is between 5 to 9 at a time. In other words, if we had to think about all the utilities we expect from our educational, professional, or romantic prospects among the sea of choices, it can literally be too much for our brains to process. We get fatigued from having too many decisions to make. We may also feel less satisfied with our eventual choice(s), because we had too many to begin with. Instead of helping us make good decisions, we become paralyzed by our multi-utility expectations. And when we feel the gap between what is being offered out there and what we get, feelings of anxiety arise.

The realist perspective: While we are certainly entitled to expect multiple benefits from the important components in our lives, materializing them may be harder than what our expectations have accustomed us to. First, even if we managed to identify them, they may not be available due to various reasons (life happens). Second, we are unable to completely comprehend at the point of decision-making if an educational program, career, or marriage really fulfils all of our expected utilities until we actually immerse ourselves in it. For example, Ada Calhoun wrote in The New York Times that one of the most important factors to have a long-lasting and fulfilling marriage is to embrace change. By doing so, Calhoun described having three marriages with the same person in each life decade: her “partying 20s, child-centric 30s and home-owning 40s.” The changes in their marriage were unexpected, and they had to adapt to them. If the aim of formulating multi-utility expectations of our spouses is to nurture long-lasting and fulfilling marriages, we should therefore know that our expected utilities are limited to begin with, because our present expectations only paint part of the picture of what our spouses, and marriages, will be like in the future.

To complicate things, there is also cognitive dissonance — the fact that we adjust our thinking retrospectively to align two or more conflicting thoughts to maintain a feeling of being consistent. For example, you may choose to accept a job offer that objectively fulfills 7 out of 10 of your expected utilities. A few months later, because you are already in your job, you may revise your initial evaluation to think that your job fulfills more than the 7 to justify your decision in accepting the job, even though it may not be objectively true.

In short, due to multiple psychological processes at play (the scientitic explanation), and the fact that many things in our lives are beyond our control (the realist perspective), not only are our modern multi-utility expectations less beneficial than we think, they also make us feel anxious.

So what can we do to reduce this pressure of maximizing, and the potential anxiety from our modern expectations of academic, professional, and romantic success? We can go back to the scientist and realist for possible hints. Cognitive science has helped us understand that our brain performs best while working with 5-9 chunks of information; therefore we can work with this capability, not overwhelm it. Prioritize a handful of the most important criteria you care most about. Let go of the other factors/choices that do not qualify in this “most important” category. Then, let realism set in: acknowledge that even if we managed to identify the “ideal” educational program, job, or marriage prospects with your top criteria, things do not always happen in our favor. And if they do (lucky you!), there is no guarantee that our chosen education, career, or spouse will remain ideal in the long run. For our multi-utility expectations are bounded to the present; they are not foolproof against the unpredictable future.

Perhaps thinking like a scientific realist is the modern way of dealing with our modern life expectations.