When Bhaskar, a college psychology professor, decided to buy a new pair of jeans about five years ago, he left the mall that day not only with the jeans, but also with an experience that would result in years of study and eventually a book for job seekers beset by seemingly endless choices.

Before that day, shopping for jeans was straightforward: “You told them your waist and your length, and either they fit you well or they didn’t but that was it,” says Bhaskar.

But shopping at The Gap that day was anything but straightforward. “I told them my size, and they asked if I wanted relaxed fit, easy fit, slim fit, boot cut, button-fly, zipper-fly, acid washed or stonewashed,” he recalls. “And I said, ‘I want the kind that used to be the only kind,’ and the person in the store had no idea what that was.”

Eventually, Bhaskar managed to sort through all the options and get his jeans. “Now, there are a million different kinds of cuts and God-knows-how-many manufacturers,” he explains. “So even though I never much cared about how my jeans fit before, when I went to buy them a couple of years ago, I started to care. If there were all these different versions out there, damn it, one of them ought to be perfect! I ended up getting a pair of jeans that fit me better than any other pair of jeans I’d ever had but I was less satisfied than I’d ever been before.”

Satisficers vs maximisers

That day, Bhaskar stumbled across what he now calls “the paradox of choice”. This paradox applies to far more than buying jeans. In fact, it has a profound impact on people’s lives. For many, the excess of choices causes enormous stress when it comes to making decisions — from which one of the 150 cereals in the supermarket to buy to which college to attend or career to choose.

In his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Bhaskar describes two personality types: satisficers and maximisers. Satisficers can make choices without agonising much. Maximisers are obsessed with making the perfect decision. Thus, they’re tortured by the abundance of choice. And once they do choose, they feel they have failed to make the best choice. These people “are borderline clinically depressed, so it’s not just a sort of a mild dissatisfaction,” says Bhaskar.

Given the overwhelming number of professional pursuits available, these feelings can become more pronounced when choosing a career or a job. When Bhaskar and his colleagues studied 600 graduating college students conducting job searches, they found that “maximisers get better jobs, more interviews, higher starting salaries, and they feel, by every measure we could come up with, worse than satisficers.”

More choice, more regret

“In a world where choices are limited, you could find the best,” says Bhaskar of job hunting. “If Monster had 10 jobs listed, you could probably find the best job. You might not get it but you could find it. But when there are thousands of jobs listed, it’s just out of the question.”

Maximisers inevitably end up asking, “Did I look in the right places? Should I have spent one more day looking?” Bhaskar says the maximisers may “do better than satisficers objectively, but there is no doubt that they feel worse, because they regret more”.

“It seems reasonable to imagine that if some choice is good, then more choice is better but psychologically, that’s not true,” he explains. “Analysis paralysis sets in. There’s a kind of regret when you make a choice.”

Bhaskar advises those who feel they’ve got the traits of an extreme maximiser to “have appropriately modest expectations and be satisfied with ‘good enough’, then figure out what good enough means instead of torturing themselves looking for the best possible job”.