That this belief manifests most acutely in those doing the searching is no surprise. “The one” is the quintessential object of fixation for job recruiters and unattached individuals seeking long-term relationships. Because it is a myth, technology can only be expected to intensify the searching, leading to escalating expenditure and waste in true capitalist fashion without leading to resolution.
In fast-moving technology fields, recruiters seek candidates with precise combinations of skills, expecting them to be abreast of still nascent techniques, discounting all experience outside the narrow scope of their preformed expectations, and possessing that ever-elusive “culture fit”. Technology opens the pool of candidates: corporations need not be restricted to their region of operation or even their own country, they recruit globally. To process the multiplying krill of recruits they press them through finer and finer sieves. Yet it is dubious that the quality of candidates is improved by this process. Companies are founded not by highly qualified strangers from across the globe but by groups of friends with shared experiences. This is not simply a matter of necessity: what is most important among founders is a shared vision and trust, not any specific skills or abilities, those will be learned along the way. While companies search desperately for the unicorns - the diamonds in the rough who can do everything and all at the top ten percent - the truth is that just about anyone will do. Rather than demanding all the skills upfront, companies could benefit greatly by investing in *gasp* training their hires.
Perhaps the most damaging and insidious application of the myth is in the realm of personal relationships, where an internalization of the belief sends people on a futile quest endlessly searching for "the one" while moving through stalled or failed relationships. Here the belief leads less to upfront pickiness and more toward an unwillingness to weather the harder parts of a relationship. A failing relationship is blamed on the natures of those involved - they just weren't right for each other, he was always x, she was always y. Too often a careful examination of what could be done differently is discarded in favour of thinking about with whom things could be done. This is a damaging application of the myth because people are enriched by continuous and growing connection and they suffer when their expectations are not met1.
Consumer culture reinforces the myth: the search for something that cannot be found (because it does not exist) is unending, and thereby serves the limitless cycle of production/accumulation/waste necessitated by capitalism.
Take It To The Max
In The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz identifies two basic types of decision-making behaviour: maximizing and satisficing. Maximizing is the decision-strategy that insists that only the best will do and searches tirelessly to meet this impossible criterion. Satisficing is the decision-strategy whereby the first option encountered that is "good enough" according to a pre-established metric is selected without worrying about whether a better option could have been found through more searching (Schwartz, 2004). Schwartz points out that when the cost in time, money and anguish is factored into the decision, satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy, since the maximizer endures an extremely difficult decision-making process and then is unable to be satisfied with the decision once it is made. Tendencies toward satisficing and maximizing vary between people, and they are likely to be domain-specific: people who may be maximizers in one category are satisficers in another category. But Schwartz also raises the troubling concern that people may be compelled into maximizing behaviour by their environment. An extreme abundance of choice admonishes consumers for not being diligent enough in their decision-making, while interconnectedness on a global scale puts everyone in a never-ending status competition.
Status-seeking is a zero-sum game: not everyone can be high-status: status acquires its meaning only in relation to others. In such a design, satisficing will not do. To improve one's status, you must have "the best". "The best" can no longer refer to a local standard, not in a world where everyone's Instagram feeds are filled with the picturesque lifestyles of professional hedonists. Nor can one simply opt-out of status-seeking: access to human necessities is often gated by status. Friends, sex, the ability to love and be loved are actively denied to low-status individuals. These are such basic prerequisites of living that organisms die without them.
Society at large has pivoted from satisficing behaviour toward maximizing behaviour in the domains of job-seeking and personal relationships. This is part of a larger trajectory toward the commodification of all aspects of the culture that has accelerated under late capitalism with the twin pushes toward globalization and deregulation. Trained on the offerings of the "market", consumers have come to expect and then demand a plethora of choices where few or none once sufficed. However, abundant choice leads not to a life of abundance, but one of destitution. Faced with innumerable options, decisions take more time and mental effort and become increasingly complex. The focus on quantity ensures that bad options that might be easily detected in a sparse decision-tree come to flood the scene, making the cost of a bad decision higher while also increasing its likelihood. And, having chosen, consumers are bombarded with information that they have made the wrong choice, that nothing is ever really decided and that true happiness is just another decision away. Consumers become exhausted and impoverished and are trained by the system to take out their frustration on themselves.
The Costs of Searching
Beyond a very low threshold of complexity, decisions simply make us miserable. When forced to confront tradeoffs in decisions people become unhappy and indecisive (Schwartz, 2004). Tradeoffs exact a psychological penalty, as both options suffer from the comparison. We register the unchosen option as a loss (even though it was never really "ours" to lose), and human psychology as detailed in Prospect Theory registers losses more acutely than gains2 (Kahneman, 2011). What pleasure we manage to extract from our "happy" decisions is often marred by post-decision regret.
The adverse consequences of excess decision-making and rising expectations are not without measures. Feelings of anguish, inertia, self-doubt and anxiety have gone from being "increasingly common among youth" to a cultural default, leading to a burgeoning self-meditation/medication industry3.
Every year people take longer to settle into stable relationships, cycling through partners like fashion accessories, falling for the myth of "the one". Jobs take longer to be filled and interview procedures become increasingly drawn-out and complex, consisting of multiple stages of screening and testing and feeding the human resources industry. The myth tells us that when you consider all the benefits of "the one" - the ideal significant other or the right job candidate, it's worth it to pay a little more upfront. Every month, a little more becomes that much more, and the expectations for the mythologized "one" rise in concert with the investment in time, money, and effort. The myth distracts us from questioning its underlying premise and deters us from considering what the cost and consequences are of failing to choose.
Disconnection: An Unhappy Strategy
Economist Albert Hirschman suggested that there are two general responses when people are unhappy: voice and exit (Schwartz, 2004). In the marketplace, people express their displeasure through exit - they choose a competing product or none at all. In the web of social relations, exit is taken to be an option of last resort, with voice - talking through one's problems - as the preferred method for problem resolution. Yet this is less true now than when Hirschman expressed it. With social relations increasingly commodified, exit has become a much more common response to social displeasure. What else is the common practice of ghosting - abruptly ceasing communication with someone, typically a sexual partner - except the use of exit as a response to displeasure? Exit is the preferred strategy when there is an overabundance of choice, with options constantly competing for one's attention.
In the marketplace of antiquity, voice was the only response to displeasure: you didn't leave the fig stand without any figs, instead, you haggled with the seller until you reached an agreeable price. Exit became a strategy when the sellers became hidden and corporate and the options proliferated. Within the context of manufactured sameness and the unsettling anonymity of packaged goods brought about by the machine age, a personal connection between consumers and producers was severed (Klein, 2000)4. Consumers lost their voice, they could no longer negotiate over the prices or the quality of the goods; they became flooded with an abundance of goods from which to "choose". You ceased telling the carpenter what you wanted in the dining room furniture and just picked up the table and chairs that were to your liking. A failure to find suitable goods at reasonable prices is blamed on the consumer: you must not have looked hard enough at all the options to have failed so spectacularly. Now, in social relations, voice is losing its dominance as exit enters the field. That people feel exit is acceptable (routinely, rather than in extreme cases) is due to the seemingly frictionless nature with which social relations are now formed. Why should you tolerate a less-than-ideal relationship when Tinder beckons with dozens of smiling faces and potential matches? True HappinessTM is only a swipe away!
Drowning in Expectations
Unchecked and escalating expectations lead to us coveting and seeking out what we don't deserve. In a consumer culture obsessed with self-gratification and preoccupied with validating the artificial needs generated by the system, the idea that there are things that we don't deserve may seem alien. Nonetheless, it is true.
The woman who finally lands her much-coveted alpha male - tall, dark and handsome with drive and ambition and plenty of material success to show for it - is later incensed to find him having an affair with a mistress. The scrappy tech company, having spent months scouring the terrain for the ideal candidate - finally nabbing a superstar engineer with a perfect track record and an impeccably groomed professional brand - is dismayed when he nonchalantly accepts a more lucrative offer after only a month at the company - less time than they spent looking for a candidate.
While it is tempting to pin blame on the cheating alpha and the flighty engineer, it is important to recognize that their respective infidelity and disloyalty are driven by market conditions. In the case of the woman, we may wonder what she has to offer the alpha that could secure him for herself. Keeping him might entail having to make compromises with which she is uncomfortable - maybe his having a mistress is allowed and built into the contract. She could also entertain the notion of seeking out somewhat lower-status men who would see a committed relationship as more beneficial than burdensome. Maybe the man for her doesn't have to drive a BMW / earn at least $250k / be over 6'3" tall or bust5. For the company, they would do well to ask themselves how it is that the star engineer has such a spotless track record, or why he has invested so much into his professional brand. Could it be that he is ruthlessly selective in what companies he chooses to join, but that for him the selection process comes after signing on?
In both cases, unchecked expectations, fed by the system and supported by unrealistic self-evaluations, lead to disappointment. For most, it would be wise to completely ignore the top-tier of candidates. At the very least, one should ask themselves what their upper limit is.
The Illusion of Fit
But with so many options, surely it is only a matter of time until you find "the one"? The one person with whom you can be completely yourself and completely happy, with whom you are fully trusting and who, as a matter-of-course, ticks all the requisite checkboxes of attractiveness, material success, social status, trendiness, etc. The one who is great with you and your friends and whose friends you would hang out with anyway.
Surely it is only a matter of time until you land that "dream job"? The one where you give one hundred and ten percent and it gives you two hundred percent back, where you will be able to be innovative, disruptive, and socially-conscious, with wide responsibilities, continually challenged (but not too much), while still able to kick back and have fun. Where you get an actual work-life balance and your coworkers are like family. And, and.... where you are appropriately financially compensated so that you can afford rent in the trendy neighbourhood, stay on top of your Prime/Spotify/Netflix subscriptions, use the latest phone and requisite firehose data-plan, frequent all the happening spots, maintain your wardrobe and your diet/fitness/lifestyle regimen so that you can maintain your attractiveness and thereby market value so that you can find "the one". Surely. Surely?
There is a standard line (one among many in fact) used to console those who have endured a string of failed personal relationships. You’re still discovering yourself, you have so much to learn. Don’t worry, when you’re ready, you’ll find the one6. Similar rhetoric is often spouted by organizations that deal with a frightful level of personnel churn and struggle to find suitable candidates. We’re in a growing, dynamic industry, what we need is constantly changing, it's important that we not get locked in, we have to remain versatile to be competitive. But both of these premises, if followed to their logical conclusions, imply that there is not and cannot be a “one”.
Under the right material conditions, organisms do a remarkable thing: they grow. It is this potential for growth and indeed its inevitability that negates both the need and the possibility for the myth of the one.
If personal growth exists, it stands to reason that other organisms grow as well. The entire project of finding the right pairing, of two puzzle pieces exactly matching up is exposed as artifice. How can organisms interlock? They must grow toward one another and then they must grow together. This is the truth of relationships: there is no “one”, anyone who satisfies the set of minimum conditions necessary for the two to grow together will do and then what is needed is a continual commitment from both organisms to grow together. It isn’t about “fit”; it’s about investment: fit is simply a consequence.
Of course, there are still criteria to be met: the set of conditions needed for organisms to grow toward one another. Yet attempts to build relationships full of investment are continually under threat from the caprices of capital. Dating apps in the vein of Tinder (itself modelled after the hook-up app Grindr) are sustained by user engagement, and engaged users are users who are looking, not investing. They do everything in their power to make the looking feel frictionless and to dangle the carrot enticingly over the treadmill7.
In the job market, much the same is true. If the landscape is truly so dynamic and fast-moving, then specific skills and trending keywords can hardly be so valuable as recruiters would have companies believe. What is needed are candidates of a sufficient aptitude and attitude and a commitment from both the company and the candidate to invest in the position. In the late capitalist cybernetic frame, organizations are allergic to any hint of investment: employees are increasingly expected to self-learn, self-train and self-equip (supply your own computer and software, pay for your own coworking space), so it should be of little surprise that employees have returned the favour, showing zero desire to invest in the company or position.
Restless by Design
High-value goods tend to circulate. In dating, high-status individuals cycle through partners while setting the expectations for everyone else. Capitalism feeds off this circulation and aims to put everyone in circulation so as to liquify all relations. The whole apparatus of the dating and recruiting economies are geared toward increasing circulation. Most organisms do not want to circulate, they want to settle, so they are coerced and compelled by forces outside their control to act against their self-interest.
For many, the experience in relationships is one of gradual breakdown owing to lack of investment. Here the failing is not so much a belief in the myth of the one as it is general negligence. It may be that long-term monogamous relationships are inherently unstable in humans in the absence of powerful social forces to act as reinforcement. Here, individuals are largely powerless. Organisms who have managed to carve out a small livable niche in an otherwise hostile environment must constantly combat the forces of capitalism which will seek to pull what they have into circulation on the market.
MythBusting Tools
Considering the forces conspiring to promote the suffering of organisms it would seem there is little that can be done to combat the myth of the one. However, simply recognizing the myth is a start. What is next needed is a satisficing mindset: choose the first option that meets the basic criteria. In the job market, this could lead to significant savings in the recruitment process. Rather than looking for the “best”, recruiters would simply place the first candidate who met the minimum preconditions (minimum, not nice-to-haves) and was found to be a culture fit. No countless rounds of interviews, no playing of candidates against one another, just a commitment to train and develop and an expectation for reciprocity. I’m willing to bet employers would be astonished at how capable many of these minimum-criteria candidates turn out to be. In personal relationships, the same mindset could well be applied. Already people generally follow a sequential model, trying out partners to assess initial suitability. What is perhaps lacking is an upfront commitment from both parties to invest in the relationship, to treat it as a non-reversible decision. Breakdowns in communication and “open-ended” contracts are a common pain point, as partners avoid open communication in favour of extracting what they desire from the other. As in the job market, there needs to be a lowering of expectations. People will be astonished at how well their partners “grow” with them and will find that they are capable of making compromises on a lot of nice-to-haves.
Some tools can be used to ease the cognitive burden of decision-making. Among these are rules or rubrics which give a prescribed action for a given choice. For complex decisions, we are tempted to defer to judgment, but there are few circumstances in which it is a good idea to substitute judgment for a formula8. An example in the field of interviewing would be to identify a handful of attributes (no more than six) that are necessary to do well in the position and to come up with a series of questions intended to gauge ability in each of those attributes. Each attribute is assessed (e.g. on a 1 to 5 scale from "very weak" to "very strong") and at the end, the highest-scoring candidate is selected. That's it. Applying the "choose-the-first" rule to the above would entail setting a threshold score and then selecting the first candidate to score at or above the threshold. An excess of criteria significantly diminishes the value of the procedure, while leaving all criteria as equally important has been found to have just as much predictive accuracy as weighted criteria (Kahneman, 2011).
When it comes to relationships, one could similarly apply a simple rule. First, identify the small handful of criteria important to you in a relationship (again, no more than six). Because you are dealing with so few attributes, this exercise alone forces you to focus on what are your true "must-haves" in a relationship9. The next part is more difficult, which is coming up with how you are going to assess each of those attributes. Chances are you already have a set of "go-to" behaviours that you use as proxies for other things such as "Does he have a good relationship with his mother?" It's good to consider whether these proxy behaviours are truly good indicators for what you are looking for or just as likely to provide misdirection. Then use a simple scoring system to choose the highest-scoring candidate. People who find themselves dating multiple partners at the same time early on might find such a system helpful if a little cumbersome at first.
Some may scoff at the idea of turning over their relationship decisions to an algorithm. The key to remember is that the choice you make, the person you choose, isn't that important, what's important is the relationship and the continual investment in that relationship. The algorithm is simply there to help you sort out those who wouldn't work out with you; anyone else will do. The other side of things is that many people already have surrendered their relationship decisions to algorithms - trusting in the matching features of apps like OkCupid. These algorithms are opaque and generally in support of business models that depend on user engagement rather than successful long-term couplings. But the most important function of such an algorithm is simply to give you confidence in your decision so that you will continue investing in the relationship rather than seriously considering exit as a strategy.
Another simple strategy for relationships and connections made through apps is to have a rule where if you have met someone, feel things are going well, and have met some arbitrary minimal condition (e.g. gone on three dates) that you delete your dating app and insist the person you are seeing do the same10. This isn't about "locking-in" before you've had a chance to get to know someone, it's simply about putting in some minimal effort into building a relationship. You can always re-download the app later if things don't work out, but there's no reason to have multiple threads always on the go just to see what might turn out well (spoiler: none of them will). Eliminating exit early on as a strategy will let you know if the difficulties you encounter are something you can work through or if you do need to take the exit.
There are too many environmental conditions to expect that these simple adjustments alone will make everything go smoothly. Capitalism produces churn, restlessness and waste, so any stable relation is constantly under threat of collapse. If enough people were able to change their behaviour and expectations to significantly affect the dating and job markets, it would only be a matter of time before capitalism produced new “needs” to disrupt the stability and throw more organisms into suffering and depression. This is at best meagre advice for a lucky few.
Footnotes
1 For some people, it may be a conscious decision to decouple their sexual partners from their fixed and stable relations. In this case, friends and family provide enriching relations. Because there is no expectation of the fulfillment of the role of significant other, there is also no disappointment.↩
2 According to Prospect Theory, increasing gains are of diminishing value (the first $100 feels better than the second) and losses are more painful than gains are pleasurable. By some measures, a loss is felt in the range of 1.5 to 2.5 X as acutely as a gain of the same numerical value (Kahneman, 2011). This is known as the loss-aversion ratio. So, you might need to win $200 this week to feel better about losing $100 last week. Regardless of the exact amount (it varies with individuals), a win of only $100 simply won't do, it certainly doesn't compensate you for the stress and grief of having lost the initial $100.↩
3 So, you protest, choosing is hard, but it doesn't matter because people are better off. They live materially richer lives with more comforts and their jobs and significant others come closer to their ideals than ever before. Are they better off though? Listing material gains is of no use in assessing human happiness or well-being because these factors have very little to do with what makes for a healthy organism. We are nearly infinitely adaptable but have a finite capacity for pleasure (and pain). This registers as our "hedonic zero-point", which describes our rising expectations as our circumstances improve (Schwartz, 2004). A 10X increase in pay cannot make us 10X more satisfied with life since we cannot even biologically register such a drastic change, so our hedonic zero-point shifts to the "new normal". What this means is that as far as pleasure and material comfort are concerned, short of hacking our biology, we are on a "hedonic treadmill" where massive improvements in conditions will only be perceived as at best modest increases in well-being. Further, our subjective experience is largely ruled by comparison gaps: between what we have and what we want, between what we have now and had in the past, and between what we have and what others have (or what we think others have) (Schwartz, 2004). Capitalism is constantly producing new things and thereby new wants, widening the gap between what we have and what we want. It also brings to us images of what others have, whether we want to see them or not so that the gap between ourselves and our perception of others widens. And, under late capitalism, the gap between what we have and had in the past widens, as the material gains of past generations are lost and converted into further accumulation for the ever-rising ceiling at the top of the social-status stack. Material gains are of little guidance in telling us how people are doing, but rising rates of depression should certainly clue us in.↩
4 Competitive branding stepped in to fill the void, attempting to offer some of the familiarity and folksiness of the old shopkeep (Klein, 2000), but tellingly, against what corporations may say, conversations with brands are one-sided. Brands may have insinuated themselves into the cultural lexicon, but trademark and copyright laws prevent any genuine dialogue (Klein, 2000).↩
5 While our own expectations are likely to appear far more reasonable and less shallow by comparison, the point of the example is to illustrate that they are not and are just as arbitrary. Nor are shallow criteria any worse than supposedly "deeper" ones. What is important is that the criteria are meaningful to you and that you recognize where you need to compromise on them.↩
6 Self-discovery is a myth; we don’t discover ourselves so much as we invent them. There is very little if anything, there to discover, but there is limitless potential to be explored through different environments and relationships. Because there is no core, no true self, no essential ‘you’, there is no benefit to postponing the benefits of companionship while you try to find the illusory prize.↩
7 I suspect that a large percentage of Tinder matches would work as fairly stable, fairly long-term relationships if more effort was invested early on by both parties in the relationship. But those who meet through such apps are compelled by powerful forces to keep searching and made to feel the slightest difficulty need not be endured.↩
8 Research suggests that to maximize predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas (Kahneman, 2011). Judgment and intuition can then play a role after a formulaic assessment has been followed.↩
9 Serial daters, to their dismay, will likely realize that they have already been through several partners who met all of their criteria.↩
10 Of course, this changed behaviour assumes that there is a desire for change. Here self-honesty is required. For those only seeking sex, it is simply advised to not misrepresent your aims.↩
References
Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Klein, N. (2000) No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Great Britain: Flamingo.
Schwartz, B. (2004) The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. HarperCollins e-books.
