What Do You Optimize For?
A great technique for building a wonderful life is to define exactly what that life looks like, and then make a plan for how to get there. You might find that you're closer than you think. You might find that your goals and your habits--which are your actual life--are hardly aligned at all.
I can't tell you how much time I spent thinking about what to do with my life. How do I best spend my time? What's the point of life? Why are we here? (A scary one.) And if we are here for a reason, then what's my role?
I think that question is so hard to answer because it assumes an inversion of the truth. We are not the means to an end. We are an end in ourselves, but that question assumes the opposite. We are the end, truly the tip, in this very moment, of the spear of reality. We get to live it. We get to nudge where it goes, and create the future that carries forward for the people after us. Our existence is good in and of itself.
I think it's a very noble, selfless, and virtuous thing to dedicate your life to trying to fix the world's biggest problems so that our children and their children can reap the rewards. I think a lot of people in the past have lived in such a way--maybe not trying to balance the ecosystem or terraform Mars, but trying to "make the world a better place for future people". And here we are, those future people, trying to do the same thing. We just kick the golden can down the road for someone else to pick up, but if we all tell the children to keep kicking it, no one ever picks it up.
We just keep composting the fruit so the soil improves for the next year, but we never teach anyone to really pluck it off the tree and enjoy it.
I'm building an argument for why you should enjoy your life. For why I think I should enjoy mine. The Earth already has everything we need, and (if you're reading this, probably) we live in a world of extras. Extra food, extra space, extra comfy. What's not easy is extra. Seneca pointed that out 2000 years ago, and he didn't even have a phone, or Door Dash.
My main goal for my everyday life is peace of mind, and I optimize for that. Not "happiness", per se--not the pure joy I get from hitting a new submission or playing Warzone with Amanda at 8pm with a pint of Ben and Jerry's next to me, or winning that battle royale with a 3v1 with a pint of Ben and Jerry's next to me, or a smothered mate or making love or a kiss from my wife with a pint of Ben and Jerry's next to me. Those are all great, but they're all transient, and that's okay. They're part of the dopaminergic habit loops of life, and that means there needs to be some contrast so those highs hit!
But peace of mind, to me, is the absence of the worry, anxiety, and constant yapping of the part of our brain that's planning for the future. It's your frontal cortex. The part of your brain that develops last, drowns out that childhood wonder and presence and replaces it with very intense but very imaginary conversations you definitely won't have with your boss or your friend or your enemy. The part of your brain that wants to spend all mental energy planning for every contingency so that you can BE SAFE.
But you can't plan for everything.
So I optimize for peace of mind (there's a deep, old, rigorous philosophical conversation in here about how that might not be best, but I obviously side with the Stoics, the Buddhists, and ol' Aristotle. See: Eudaimonia) . How I do that is with an iterative process that involves:
A clear morality—so I make the same consistent decisions and can feel just and sleep well.
Cultivating the ability to detach from my ego—to silence the suffering thing at will.
Acting in accordance with the things I (that same ego I silenced in the last bullet) believe—in other words VOTING, with action, for the good thing you believe in, the right thing, not tolerating something you know is wrong or unethical.
There are other things to optimize for, too, like health, wealth, or good looks. You can optimize for the Earth, or for your children or your lover's life. You can optimize for your relationships You can optimize for achievements, like Olympians do. You can do a mixture of these things, of course. Optimizing for peace of mind means balancing a lot of things, for me, and not letting any one thing dominate my life at the expense of others.
It's worth thinking about—what's the highest good, that's worth optimizing for? What would a life that maximizes for that look like, and do you want it? What do you want your life to look like—not just in 5 or 10 years, but next week and next season? If you have an answer to that, then you can make plans for how to get there. What's the healthy version of you look like, and how would they spend a day, or the hour extra you have? You ought to decide what's important to you (if anything is important at all), and then start optimizing for that.