In Praise of Settling: A Selection from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (2021)

“The received wisdom, articulated in a thousand magazine articles and inspirational Instagram memes, is that it’s always a crime to settle. But the received wisdom is wrong. You should definitely settle.

Or to be more precise, you don’t have a choice. You will settle—and this fact ought to please you. The American political theorist Robert Goodin wrote a whole treatise on this topic, On Settling, in which he demonstrates, to start with, that we’re inconsistent when it comes to what we define as ‘settling.’ Everyone seems to agree that if you embark on a relationship when you secretly suspect you could find someone better, you’re guilty of settling, because you’re opting to use up a portion of your life with a less-than-ideal partner. But since time is finite, the decision to refuse to settle—to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect person—is also a case of settling, because you’re opting to use up a decade of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation. Moreover, Goodin observes, we tend to contrast a life of settling with a life of what he labels ‘striving,’ or living life to the fullest. But this is a mistake, too, and not just because settling is unavoidable but also because living life to the fullest requires settling. ‘You must settle, in a relatively enduring way, upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving,’ he writes: you can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first ‘settling’ on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them. Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.

Of course, we rarely approach relationships with such wisdom. Instead, we spend years failing to fully commit to any one relationship—either by finding a reason to call things off as soon as a serious liaison starts to look likely or by only halfheartedly showing up for whatever relationship we’re in. Or, alternatively, in a pattern that every experienced psychotherapist has encountered a hundred times, we do commit—but then, after three or four years, start thinking about breaking things off, convinced that our partner’s psychological issues are making things impossible, or that we’re not as compatible as we’d believed. Either of these might conceivably be true in certain cases; people are sometimes guilty of spectacularly bad choices in love, and in other domains as well. But more often, the real problem is just that the other person is one other person. In other words, the cause of your difficulties isn’t that your partner is especially flawed, or that the two of you are especially incompatible, but that you’re finally noticing all the ways in which your partner is (inevitably) finite, and thus deeply disappointing by comparison with the world of your fantasy, where the limiting rules of reality don’t apply.

The point that Bergson made about the future—that it’s more appealing than the present because you get to indulge in all your hopes for it, even if they contradict each other—is no less true of fantasy romantic partners, who can easily exhibit a range of characteristics that simply couldn’t coexist in one person in the real world. It’s common, for example, to enter a relationship unconsciously hoping that your partner will provide both an unlimited sense of stability and an unlimited sense of excitement—and then, when that’s not what transpires, to assume that the problem is your partner and that these qualities might coexist in someone else, whom you should therefore set off to find. The reality is that the demands are contradictory. The qualities that make someone a dependable source of excitement are generally the opposite of those that make him or her a dependable source of stability. Seeking both in one real human isn’t much less absurd than dreaming of a partner who’s both six and five feet tall.

And not only should you settle; ideally, you should settle in a way that makes it harder to back out, such as moving in together, or getting married, or having a child. The great irony of all our efforts to avoid facing finitude—to carry on believing that it might be possible not to have to choose between mutually exclusive options—is that when people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result. We’ll do almost anything to avoid burning our bridges, to keep alive the fantasy of a future unconstrained by limitation, yet having burned them, we’re generally pleased that we did so. Once, in an experiment, the Harvard University social psychologist Daniel Gilbert and a colleague gave hundreds of people the opportunity to pick a free poster from a selection of art prints. Then he divided the participants into two groups. The first group was told that they had a month in which they could exchange their poster for any other one; the second group was told that the decision they’d already made had been final. In follow-up surveys, it was the latter group—those who were stuck with their decision, and who thus weren’t distracted by the thought that it might still be possible to make a better choice—who showed by far the greater appreciation for the work of art they’d selected.

Not that we necessarily need psychologists to prove the point. Gilbert’s study reflects an insight that’s deeply embedded in numerous cultural traditions, most obviously that of marriage. When two spouses agree to stay together ‘for better or worse,’ rather than bolting as soon as the going gets tough, they’re making an agreement that not only will help them weather the rough patches, but that also promises to make the good times more fulfilling, too—because having committed themselves to one finite course of action, they’ll be much less likely to spend that time pining after fantastical alternatives. In consciously making a commitment, they’re closing off their fantasies of infinite possibility in favor of what I described, in the previous chapter, as the ‘joy of missing out’: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place. This is also why it can be so unexpectedly calming to take actions you’d been fearing or delaying—to finally hand in your notice at work, become a parent, address a festering family issue, or close on a house purchase. When you can no longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.”—Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021)