satisficing

— The end of the poem ["The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost] does not actually depict the narrator looking back at a bold decision with pride. Rather, the narrator is projecting to a future in which they will tell the story of this choice as if it mattered, when really it made no difference. The poem is about agonizing over meaningless decisions. Frost wrote it for a friend of his, Edward Thomas, who dithered over which path to take when they went on walks together, and then would later regret that they hadn’t gone a different way. Thomas was falling prey to Fredkin’s paradox: the more similar our options, the less choosing between them matters, but the harder choosing between them is. Thus, we’re liable to spend the most energy on the least important decisions. Frost's poem dovetails with the work of the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, who coined the term "satisficing" — a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice — to describe how, in real decision making, we can't actually optimize. We are not equipped to accurately evaluate all our options. We must settle for good enough. And, Simon, thought, we should be eager to settle for good enough. Simon referred to himself as an ‘incorrigible satisficer.’

— A ‘satisficing’ path, a path that will permit satisfaction at some specified level of all its needs.