Why a 100% optimized life is a terrible idea 👇
For three years, I was obsessed with optimizing my entire life.
Especially during my Pokemon Go years, I tracked every waking minute and made sure it was spent on either the game or maintaining health or school. Although I topped the national Pokemon Go rankings, sacrifices had to be made. One time I walked out of a party just to spend more time with the game, just because I was afraid of both wasting time and falling behind. And I'm a very social person.
Still, before this year, I took time-blocking to the extreme. Every waking minute was filled with a seemingly important task, hoping to get the best future possible. Meanwhile, I was unaware that my life was entirely structured around things I had already done, not challenging myself on the social, relational, or career front.
That's the problem, being fragile and not stepping off the comfort zone
Being fragile means fearing what you do not know and can predict. If you are fragile, you depend on everything following the exact course and are harmed by uncertainty and black swan events. You are also afraid of trying new uncomfortable things since it looks like wasting time from a glance, like social parties.
By optimizing every minute for one outcome, you hopelessly predict that the world will stay the same while leaving no redundancy or margin of safety, something I learned the hard way as I moved to Poland.
As Nassim Taleb writes:
"Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens—usually"
Solution: Balance between planned time for optimizing, and unplanned time for exploring
By making sure, you have enough unplanned time, you have redundancy, a critical buffer whenever something unexpected happens. You can also afford to "waste time." Go to the party, fall into internet rabbit holes, visit new environments, etc. Everything you do not know how long will take could be pursued right then and there.
You become antifragile by having the right balance between planned optimized time and unplanned exploratory time. You get things done with high quality while at the same time taking advantage of interesting opportunities. Chaos and uncertainty cannot harm you but benefit you instead.
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