On a beautiful day in early summer, four friends and I decided to picnic and paint in the park. We brought along small squares of watercolour paper split into quadrants, sat in a circle, and took turns painting how we saw each other. These depictions could be abstract or literal: one person did colour swatches of how they interpreted your aura, another person painted objects representing your hobbies and passions. At the end, I got my paper back with four painted interpretations of myself, each done by a different friend.

As I looked at these artistic renderings and considered the close attention my friends had paid me to complete them, I felt a warm swell of emotion and got a little choked up. In that moment, I couldn’t quite define the feeling. It wasn’t exactly joy, nor was it appreciation or pride, but something else. Later, I found the answer in a psychology research paper: it was kama muta.

About a decade ago, the anthropologist Alan Fiske saw a gap in the English language. There was no general term for the emotion of being moved or touched by moments of sharing and connection – such as when you hold a baby for the first time, listen to a loved one’s eulogy, or feel profoundly linked to others at a religious or social gathering. Moments like these can produce a warm and fuzzy feeling, sometimes accompanied by tearing up, getting choked up, or the urge to go ‘aww’. Fiske and his colleagues labelled it kama muta, derived from a Sanskrit term that means ‘moved by love’. Experiencing this positive emotional response, they argue, helps to motivate continued engagement in the relationships that spark it.

For me, knowing about the power of kama muta is a useful nudge toward greater bonding in my relationships. Now I look for opportunities to cultivate it where I can, as my friends and I did that day in the park – sharing care and attention so freely that it moved us.

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.