{"id":64419,"date":"2022-04-04T17:10:58","date_gmt":"2022-04-04T21:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=64419"},"modified":"2022-04-15T17:18:20","modified_gmt":"2022-04-15T21:18:20","slug":"variety-in-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/variety-in-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Variety in Life: You Need Less Than You Think"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>When you think about your future, do you assume that you&#8217;ll want lots of variety in life? Does variety make you happier?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, variety is actually the opposite of what most people want. But many people fail to recognize that fact and end up forcing variety into their lives, ultimately making themselves unhappy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s why you need less variety in life than you think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-you-think-you-crave-variety\"><strong>You Think You Crave Variety<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>You also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/make-bad-choices\/\">make poor choices<\/a> about the future because <strong>you mispredict the amount of variety in life you\u2019ll want across long stretches of time in the future, <\/strong>writes Gilbert. You do this because, as with the first poor choice, you transpose your feelings about the present onto your <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/vision-for-the-future\/\">vision of the future<\/a>. You know that variety makes you happy in the short term, so you incorrectly think variety will make you happier over long periods of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let\u2019s break this down further: Most of us recognize that our enjoyment of something\u2014playing ping-pong, for instance\u2014decreases the more we do it. It therefore makes sense to vary what you do each day, by swapping ping-pong for tennis every other night, for example. You don\u2019t enjoy tennis as much, but at least by regularly taking a break from ping-pong, your enjoyment of that sport remains high.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, according to Gilbert, we mistakenly think we\u2019ll also want variety <em>across long stretches of time<\/em>. In reality, when there are long gaps between occurrences\u2014if you only play ping-pong once a week, for instance\u2014your enjoyment of the activity remains high. But you mistakenly think it won\u2019t, so you begrudgingly swap ping-pong for tennis every other week, even though you don\u2019t really need to. This makes you less happy than sticking with ping-pong each week.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><strong>Happiness by the Hour and by the Day<\/strong><br><br>Gilbert claims we make poor choices about the future because we incorrectly think high variety over a long stretch of time will make us happy. Researchers have drilled down even further into the connection between time, variety, and happiness. They\u2019ve looked at happiness and variety in the specific time frames of days and hours to answer the question: What degree of variety makes you happiest over the span of an hour or a day?<br><br>It turns out that <a href=\"https:\/\/anderson-review.ucla.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Etkin-Mogilner-JCR-2016-Variety-and-Happiness.pdf\">over the course of a full day, variety helps sustain happiness<\/a> because you feel excited by performing multiple tasks. However, over the shorter period of an hour, variety decreases happiness because your sense of productivity declines: You don\u2019t feel you\u2019ve accomplished much in the hour due to constantly flitting between tasks, and you waste additional time transitioning from one task to another.<br><br>What\u2019s more, the type of activity you\u2019re performing doesn\u2019t matter when it comes to variety decreasing happiness in short timeframes. You\u2019ll have the same negative experience whether you\u2019re introducing too much variety when working for an hour or when enjoying an hour\u2019s free time.&nbsp;<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you think about your future, do you assume that you&#8217;ll want lots of variety in life? Does variety make you happier? According to social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, variety is actually the opposite of what most people want. But many people fail to recognize that fact and end up forcing variety into their lives, ultimately making themselves unhappy. Here&#8217;s why you need less variety in life than you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":64689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,43],"tags":[605],"class_list":["post-64419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","category-psychology","category-self-improvement","tag-stumbling-on-happiness","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Variety in Life: You Need Less Than You Think - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"People need less variety in life than they think. Here&#039;s why you should stop forcing variety upon yourself to become happier. Read more.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/variety-in-life\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Variety in Life: You Need Less Than You Think\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"People need less variety in life than they think. Here&#039;s why you should stop forcing variety upon yourself to become happier. 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