Do you play it safe or spin the wheel? The question is central to the science of well-being

Should I stay with the hand I’m holding or touch the table for another card? The tension between the two impulses creates the texture of our days, the foundation of our very character

from THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Nov 16, 2024.

We were on vacation, scanning the menus at a seaside cafe in Greece, when my daughter took a deep breath, produced from her pocket a green cardboard disc and held it aloft. Her Explore token. “Goin’ for the octopus,” she announced, with frontier courage.

On my side of the table, I was leaning the other way. I fished from my pocket a red disc. An Exploit token. And then I ordered the same mild whitefish I’d enjoyed the night before. I was too hungry to take a chance on anything else.

The token system was something we’d hatched to deal with a conundrum that occurs in even the best-regulated families. All of us have different levels of risk tolerance. And even inside each of us, the bravery/safety matrix can change over the course of a single day. So everyone started with 10 homemade tokens – five green Explores and five red Exploits. If you were itching to try something new, you played your Explore; if you were hankering for a safe sure thing, you played your Exploit.

Explore, exploit: We didn’t make these terms up. They come from computing science. If you’re a programmer, you’re priming the machine to make a decision. In “explore” mode, it’s scouting its options; in “exploit” mode, it’s picking the best from what it already knows. In the real world, we might think of the competing mindsets thus (hat tip to computer scientist Donald Knuth): “Do you want to stay on top of things, or do you want to get to the bottom of them?”

Musician Brian Eno, delighted by this conceit, developed it further. He spun it as two archetypes: the farmer and the cowboy. The farmer settles a piece of land, develops it and is increasingly happy there. The cowboy looks for new places, and is excited by the sheer fact and freedom of discovering them.

Now, if our experiment with the tokens strikes you as mighty geeky (and maybe makes you glad you aren’t part of our weird family), be warned, because I’m about to double down. The story of cowboys and farmers is elemental to the human psyche. It

has profound implications for how we live our lives – from the moment we start to crawl till the moment we pull our loved ones close in our hospice bed. It shapes our political beliefs and our social circles. It is the battle of every artist (a musician wants to play their new stuff while the crowd keeps shouting for the hits) and grist for the mill of every faith. Whatever your dodge, at every turn you are faced with the question: Should I stay with the hand I’m holding or touch the table for another card? The tension between the two impulses creates the texture of our days, the foundation of our very character.

“The pursuit of novelty is the only way to live a truly progressive life.”

So claimed the the ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna. Whether that’s true, or just a Monday-morning insight after a particularly lively acid trip, the directive to cowboy up is a compelling one. Explore is, you could say, the default vibe of homo sapiens. It’s why we set out across the oceans then and go into space now. “The drive for novelty” – neophilia, in the parlance – “is with us at all stages of life,” the psychologist Angela Duckworth explained on the Freakonomics podcast not long ago. (Though that drive, she noted, can change form, as we will learn in a minute.)

In a study done at Emory University in Atlanta, testers put subjects in a scanner and gave them something tasty or something bland. In one condition the guinea pigs didn’t know what they were going to get. For those folks, the unpredictability activated the brain’s pleasure centres even more than if they knew they were getting the tasty thing. The surprise amplified the payoff.

Your brain likes novelty like your garden likes manure. “Learning new things is the most potent cognitive enhancer,” Peter Diamandis, the Silicon Valley Svengali and muse of aging boomers trying to stave off the normal aging process, said recently, from the pulpit of his blog.

Cognitive enhancement how? Well, for one thing, cultivating surprise seems to crank open the doors of perception and actually expand the range of emotions we feel, Tania Luna, social-science researcher and co-host of the podcast Talk Psych to Me, notes in her 2015 book Surprise. Every break we take from routine gooses our creativity a little (the effect only lasts for six minutes, on average, but still). And if, as we age, ennui sets in and the sap starts to fall, eccentric (okay, mid-life-crisis-y) behaviour has some scientific justification. “You can only recover your appetites,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote, “if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself.” Steve Jobs believed that to be a creative person basically requires going full Captain Kirk: You have to boldly, routinely go “outside the realm of your past experience.” That, Mr. Jobs felt, is how we “feed” ourselves, how we “invest in” ourselves. Outside the airlock of our comfort zone is where much of our growth occurs. “It is only in such moments,” the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck noted, “propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

Of course, the real experts here are the folks at the end of the maze. The Cornell gerontologist Karl Pillemer asked 1,200 people over the age of 70 for one piece of advice they most wished they could give young people. The most common answer was a variation of “go for it.” You’ll only regret the crazy-ass things you didn’t try, they said, not the things you tried and botched. Dr. Pillemer’s Cornell colleague, psychologist Tom Gilovich, likewise found people are twice as likely to “regret a failure to act than an act that failed.”

So. Becoming a novelty junkie starts to look like a powerful prescription for a life well lived. Case closed?

Not so fast.

One day in August I watched a highlight reel from the Paris Olympics: the mixed 4×400 relay final, which ended in a thrilling come-from-behind victory for the Dutch. I found myself replaying it again and again. Four, five, six times. By this point there were obviously no surprises. Just my new favourite athlete, Femke Bol, bringing it home, over and over. The pleasure of the ending somehow stood up, dose on dose. It almost got better. You could more deeply appreciate that tremendous kick. On display was something darn close to perfection. Femke Bol is a farmer. You don’t get to the Olympics without being a serious Exploiter – the brute repetition leading to vanishingly small refinements of the craft, until you display what humans are capable of in this niche area if they go all in. (We can debate whether chasing perfection is a healthy thing to do, but you don’t set the high-water mark any other way.) Bruce Lee said: “Do not fear the man who knows 10,000 punches; fear the man who has practised one punch 10,000 times.” I fear Bruce Lee.

Have you read Don Quixote? If so, that’s probably because it was assigned in school, and all you remember is that it was about a brave, crazy knight in Spain. But there are English professors who believe we should re-up on Don Quixote every decade because we will draw something different from it at each stage of life. That’s true of any classic. “I would rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them rather than try to read all the books,” said Naval Ravikant, a Silicon Valley tech pundit who seems to be single-handedly opposing the “move fast and break things” ethos of radical neophilia that has rewired the modern attention span. When you go deeper and deeper in one place, you are practising discernment. In a sense, on the other side of exploiting is exploring again, only this time you’re going inward. Your farmer’s attention is rewarded with the discovery of new riches there. You are discovering hidden layers of nuance. This, too, is growth. Only this kind of growth is a renewable resource. “The more you know, the more you notice,” Dr. Duckworth, the psychologist, said. “And so you can essentially enjoy a life of never being bored.”

Some cowboy battles just aren’t worth fighting, as any parent who’s tried to get their kid to re-engage with a Brussels sprout can attest. There’s actually a kind of lovely peace in repetition of the old comfortables. The chef and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi was trying to spice up an asparagus dish when he came to the same conclusion recently. “What are Taco Tuesdays, Meatless Mondays or Friday-night dinners if not simple routines,” he wrote earlier this year. “Routines become traditions, and traditions become who we are.”

This may be what author Charles Duhigg meant when, in June, he told an interviewer that “the truest expression of our character is what we do habitually.” The psychotherapist and former monk Thomas Moore believed the feeling of longing, the ache of desire for a familiar place or thing, the urgency to visit old friends and places, are expressions of the deepest impulses that are in us. “The soul wants these things fiercely, as though its well-being requires them.” At the heart of this, somehow, is … commitment. You plant something, and you tend it, and you hang around long enough to see the fruit of it.

In this light, pursuing nuance is the path to something like enlightenment. Whereas lily-dipping into constant novelty: That feels like the very definition of shallowness.

Many years ago, for a lifestyle magazine, I interviewed a recently retired host of a TV travel show. He’d visited more than 100 countries, mostly by cruise ship, and as he dropped the names of those ports of call, one by one, I interrupted to press for details.

“Valparaiso! Tell me about that one.” “Amazing place,” he said.
“Dar es Salaam.”
“Unforgettable.”

It became clear that it was forgettable – definitively. All those places were. His mental files had degraded beyond retrieval. All those adventures had run together in his mind to become soup. He couldn’t recall much of anything about any of them.

“Which place would you go back to first?” I asked.
“Why would I want to go back?” the mighty explorer said. “I’ve already seen them.”

Squaring the circle

By now you’ve guessed that this whole thing is a setup. Cowboy or farmer? It’s an oversimplification to suggest we are only one or the other.

While it’s true that some people are naturally more inclined to explore (scientists may have identified a “novelty-seeking gene” on Chromosome 11), the more truthful answer is that we are both. Explorer and exploiter, cowboy and farmer, sojourner and perfectionist. So the better way to frame the question is: Which mode are you in right now? Is it “boldly go” or “stay and savour”? The answer usually depends on your circumstances.

Some years ago I called up a friend and asked if he’d be up for seeing a play that night. “Don’t know much about it,” I said. “Could be great, could be a duck.” This friend is a thoroughgoing cowboy. But at the time he had two small kids. He passed. For him, any night out was so precious he couldn’t afford to roll the dice, he told me. “It’s pretty much gotta be a sure thing.”

I understood. So would the Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen, who has concluded that whether we explore or exploit comes down to how much runway we think we have to play with.

In one study she conducted, she quizzed returning sophomores and graduating seniors about their social preferences. Turned out the sophomores were much more interested in meeting new people. The graduating seniors knew their college days would soon be over. So they made more conservative social choices: They chose to just hang out with their very good friends.

For Dr. Carstensen’s students, college is a proxy for life itself. “As our time horizons shorten, we start to focus,” she said recently on the podcast Hidden Brain. “We’re better able to see what’s important to us.”

My sisters, who are in their late 60s and early 70s now, get together for what we’ve taken to calling their “stick with what we know” weekends. It’s always just the three of them, and they go out to dinner and a movie. I’ve ribbed them over the years about the rigidity of the routine. But the wisdom of it becomes more and more apparent to me. It’s not so much that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks; as Dr.

Carstensen says, “The old dog’s old tricks are pretty good. The old dog’s happy with them. You may have a smaller cadre of friends, but they’re friends who reliably make you happy. You can have a smaller repertoire of activities, but you know what works for you now.”

When I was researching my last book, about a really great old dog, Olga Kotelko, who took up track and field in her 70s and was still shattering world records in her 90s, I noticed that she wasn’t really interested in spinning the wheel any more. After a life of exploring, she had become a big-time exploiter. “I don’t have time to futz around,” she’d say. Besides – and here’s a line that has stuck with me: “You can find a lot of what you’re looking for in what you already have.”

Olga was sui generis in a lot of ways, but in this particular way she was just like the rest of us. Studies show adults increasingly tip away from explore and toward exploit as we get older. We become: less curious about new music. Less open to trying new foods. Just generally less open to new experiences. In a wonderful double-down on her earlier work, Dr. Carstensen found that by monkeying with people’s time horizons, you can change their inclination to make adventurous decisions or conservative ones.

“Imagine you just received a phone call from your physician informing you of a new medical advance that virtually ensures you’ll live about 20 years longer than you expected, in relatively good health,” Dr. Carstensen said. “Suddenly, older people were no longer expressing preferences for these well-known friends and loved ones. They were now interested in exploration and novelty too.”

When you think about it, to make a decision – any decision – is to switch from cowboy mode to farmer mode. You’re saying, I’m ready to stop scouting now. Something I already know is good enough. Here I plant my flag. Recently, the writer Derek Thompson investigated “performance” across multiple disciplines – from science to business to the arts. He found that the most successful among them all followed the same recipe: a period of promiscuous experimentation followed by a bearing down on the most promising strategy. The winning formula, then, seems to be to use both modes in a kind of one-two punch: explore, then exploit.

But how do people know when it’s time to pivot? The computer scientist Brian Christian is here for us. He has quanted it out. The answer is … 37.

That is, whatever little quest it is you’re undertaking – looking for an apartment, scanning the food menu, circling the block looking for a parking spot – you should explore like a bandit for the first 37 per cent of your allotted time. And then you should put the hammer down and commit to something. Sign the lease. Order the BLT. Park at that decent-ish spot back there. Because now you’re getting diminishing returns. You’ve probably already seen your best option. In their book Algorithms to Live By, Dr. Christian and co-author Tom Griffiths distilled the takeaway in a nutshell:

“Explore when you will have time to use the resulting knowledge, exploit when you’re ready to cash in.”

On our last vacation day in Thessaloniki, just before the turn for home, our Explore/Exploit token experiment came to its natural end. The tokens were gone. (As Laura Carstensen would have predicted, the Explore tokens disappeared first.) We’d learned some things about ourselves – in my case, that I’m not quite the cowboy I thought I was. Or maybe not quite the cowboy I used to be.

We split into three groups. My wife headed off to a museum to see the oldest book in Europe. The girls investigated the market. And me? I found a coin laundromat and sat reading a book in a little chair while the clothes revolved.

And with that we closed the exercise out, cowboys and farmers playing our roles, each in our private heaven.