Recently, I got food poisoning on holiday. I guzzled a glass of water from the hotel bathroom tap, after missing a sign saying it wasn’t drinkable. I regretted that decision, but what nagged at me more was something else: my choice of hotel in the first place.

Before a holiday, I often agonise over where to stay, weighing up every hotel I can find, with the goal of finding the very best option. Psychologists would call me a ‘maximiser’. Other people (like my partner, for one) are ‘satisficers’ who evaluate fewer options and choose one that’s ‘good enough’. Since the 2000s, maximisers have become of interest to psychologists because they often report greater regret and dissatisfaction with their choices afterwards. It seems their forensic searching for the ‘best’ reveals more options, but also inflates expectations of perfection and, once they’re locked in, they are painfully aware of all the rejected alternatives. One paper from 2024 suggested such habits can spoil a holiday.

In my nausea, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, in a parallel universe, I was enjoying another hotel sickness-free. So, since then, I’ve tried not to maximise so much, especially for semi-arbitrary choices. I might not find perfection but, according to the research, I’ll feel better about it.

My tactical satisficing has felt even more justified since I learnt recently about the work of the historian Sophia Rosenfeld. In an essay for Psyche’s sister site Aeon, she traces how and why choice became a fundamental right in Western societies – and why that right has created many problems. Choice, she argues, is not the same thing as freedom.

Clearly, it’s a luxury to have choices in life: many people don’t. But what I take from all this is that I could decide to be more mindful about how I choose.

For most of my 20s, I couldn’t brush my teeth, ride public transit, or take a walk without listening to a podcast or audiobook. Silence, I thought, was a waste of time.

But since reading All the Beauty in the World (2023), I’ve been reconsidering my relationship to dull, seemingly empty moments. In the book, Patrick Bringley recounts his decade among the watchful guards of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Standing in the Met’s echoic halls for hours on end, day after predictable day, he found that, over time, his relationship to the work slowly changed. Initial enchantment with the art gave way to boredom – and then, enlightenment. He surrendered to the ‘turtleish movement of a watchman’s time’, stopped thinking about how much of his shift was left, and let the hours drift.

I think about Bringley’s experience when I have to engage in any long, monotonous task. It might be waiting in line or on hold, vacuuming, folding laundry, or chopping vegetables for dinner. I resist the urge to fill the time with music or podcasts and strive instead for what Bringley calls a ‘princely detachment’ from time, finding the luxury and nuance in the moment.

Bringley noticed patterns in the different kinds of Met visitors. Hanging up my laundry, I notice patterns in how different articles of clothing tend to wrinkle in the wash. Bringley developed an appreciation for artworks that he initially ignored. I pay finer attention to the unique composition of facial features on the faces of people I stand in line with. I am learning, I think, to appreciate the little things.

Of course, it requires constant practice to find the peace and richness in these stretches of time. But your reward comes, Bringley says, when an hour no longer feels an hour long, and you ‘hardly remember how to be bored’.

Often, forgetfulness is a mere inconvenience: that name, date or task that simply slipped through the cracks. But, sometimes, it’s downright unsettling to forget something. A friend asked me the other day: ‘Remember that hilarious dinner we had there a few years ago?’ And when for the life of me I couldn’t, I felt as if a slice of my existence had been cast into oblivion.

The ancient Greeks harbored a similar, if more pronounced, terror of forgetting. Plato associates forgetting with ‘non-being’, nothingness. Homer’s heroes do heroic things in order to achieve kleos (fame), and thereby defeat the destruction that comes with being forgotten. (As one of the Seven Wise Men said: ‘You will obtain memory through deed.’) Perhaps as a kind of buttress against the fear of forgetting, they anointed Mnemosyne, memory, the mother of the nine muses.

But I enjoyed learning the other day that this negative view of forgetting wasn’t shared by all ancient peoples. Daoism positively celebrates forgetting, indeed raises it to the status of an art. Zhuangzi, a founder of the tradition, urges people to master this art in order to gain a glimpse of Dao (the way), the eternal substratum of our passing world. As the philosopher Xia Chen writes, Zhuangzi’s idea is that the more of the world we’re able to forget – be it morality, history, the arts – the more we’re able to discover our true self, shaving off all that’s inessential to get down to the pith that we ultimately are.

Now, I don’t know if that will be of help when I inevitably confront the next lost memory, but it’s good to remember, if possible, that there’s a certain, subtle benefit in forgetting. ‘Only by forgetting,’ wrote the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘does the mind have the possibility of total renewal.’