This is a fairly simple concept: the more things you find acceptable to enjoy or partake in, the more likely you are to find something that pleases you and, thus, the more likely you are to be happy consistently.

For instance, consider two women, Amy and Bonnie, searching for a skirt in the same mall.  Amy is a bit conservative and is only willing to get a skirt that goes past her knees and is either black or brown .  On the other hand, Bonnie will wear any skirt at all, including ones that are shorter than knee-length.  Obviously, if they both go to the same mall, Bonnie has a much greater chance of finding a skirt she wants.  By deciding that she must be conservative, Amy had already excluded a portion of the available skirts in the mall, thus decreasing her chances for finding an acceptable skirt.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with dressing conservatively, but the point is that Amy is making this tradeoff and its not always clear that we understand and carefully contemplate the trade we are making.   Some criteria are indubitably worth limiting our range of acceptability, but other concerns we have can be superflous and only complicate our lives for miniscule benefits.

Obviously, limiting our food intake to only contain non-rotting food is a good standard: it keeps us healthy and ensures happiness in the form of not being sick and/or dying from food poisoning.

However, sometimes we enforce constraints on acceptability only to fuel our egos.  Its not entirely clear to me how boycotting Guitar Hero/Rockband-type games because they’re not “real instruments” improves your life: it only limits the range of acceptable recreational activities you can participate. The benefit of imposing this limitation is a cheap and shallow one, it makes you feel superior to any people who do partake in the activities you reject. That “happiness” has no substance, it is bitter and harmful to your character.  We must tear down as many of these arbitrary boundaries as we possibly can to maximize our happiness.

The Guitar Hero/Rockband standard seems menial, but how many of our  preferences follow the same pattern?

• The border we create between what is and isn’t promiscuous is relatively arbitrary. You can argue that a standard here is necessary for the sake of our health(STDs), but regardless of how many people you have sex with, safe sex is always the assumption.  And the heart of the promiscuity debate with most people focuses on quantity of sexual partners based on morality, not safety.
• On a social level, this manifests itself as discrimination: automatically assuming that persons of a certain gender, race, or other quality are inadequate to fill a certain role in our lives such as employee, friend or lover.  The more people we allow as real candidates to fill the roles in our life is directly proportional to our chances of filling that role.
• In almost every dimension of culture, there is a distinction between fine material and crude/lowbrow/vulgar material. While there are people who feel very adamant about these distinctions in particular fields, by definition they are arbitrary standards.  To exclude lowbrow material, once again, limits our chances of enjoying an entire class of material in the world and, thus, shrinks our chances of finding material we do in fact enjoy.  The benefit is simply to one’s pride and not worth the quantity of material it eliminates for us.

Overall, the concept is this: try to change your preferences to accept as many things as you can without risking your health or any absolutely vital part of your life.