Optimization is the Enemy of Happiness—Try This Instead
Rugged and reasonable commitment is a more fruitful path to follow.
We all want to optimize life, right?
Perhaps the following questions have come across your mind at some point: How can I create the perfect morning routine? What is the ideal schedule for my workday? How can I create the best exercise routine? All of these are good questions. But they’re usually the wrong ones to ask.
Optimization is the process of finding the “best” solution from all possible solutions.1 This might work well in mathematics, economics, or statistics.
But it does not apply neatly to real life. Part of the reason is that some of the most important aspects of life resist mathematical quantification.
How would I measure the quality of my relationship with my wife over time? And would this attempt even really capture the meaning of the relationship in that time? The value of many experiences are only clear in hindsight and in light of other experiences. The worst moments might be seeds of the best.
Measuring widgets made per hour is a far easier “counting” task.
The second issue is that we can never really find the “best” solution for any major life decision from all possible outcomes. Want to get married? Technically, to optimize that choice, you would need to date or at least vet billions of people available in the world. Want to find a job? To optimize that choice, you would in theory have to try every conceivable job or field of jobs in the world.
The desire to optimize can keep us from living life as it is.
The Obstacles of Optimization
Optimization can become the enemy of happiness for a few reasons.
Optimization can keep us from getting started.
If we are busy researching new exercise equipment, organizational systems and planners, or morning routines, we might not ever get to the actual work.
Perhaps there’s some ideal planning system just around the corner on Google. But even if you find and adopt it, that system in itself will not move you forward in actually doing the thing you need to do. A simple to-do list, prioritized according to importance, made with pen and paper might be good enough for now.
Getting started today is usually better than optimizing for tomorrow.
Optimization can distract us from taking the next step.
To strive for excellence is good. But focusing excessively on the accomplishments of other people (the “optimal”), and measuring how we do not live up, can keep us from moving forward. If your measure of charity is Mother Teresa, and you constantly measure your progress against her, you might start to feel discouraged.
And I think this is actually what Mother Teresa would say—if you can’t feed or help the whole world, start with the person in front of you. Again and again.
Optimization can keep us from helpful failure.
The best way to learn about what works for you—when it comes to organizing, working, exercising, eating, resting, or whatever—is to actually try it. We need to try things and fail in order to see what works and what does not work.
FEFO: fail early, fail often, in order to succeed. Feedback in the early stages can help us to iterate quickly. Failure is useful. A desire to optimize can keep us from striking out, making mistakes, and learning from them, to move forward.
Standardize Before You Optimize
In short, we need to standardize before we optimize.
James Clear writes the following:
“People often think it’s weird to get hyped about reading one page or meditating for one minute or making one sales call. But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.”
Showing up—standardizing—is more important than optimizing. That is especially true at the beginning of anything. I don’t need a perfect meal plan to improve my nutrition. I don’t need a perfect exercise routine before I do some push-ups. I don’t need a plan to save the world before I can help someone in need.
We just need to start now, start small, start imperfectly.
Chasing Happiness and the Optimization Trap
How does all of this apply to happiness?
Well, we all want our lives to be perfect! At least I do, most of the time. We want the perfect spouse, the perfect children, the perfect house, the perfect job. The unfortunate issue is that life is not perfect. None of those things will ever be perfect. Because we are all works in progress. As is the universe.
The biggest problem with optimization, when it comes to happiness, is that it can distract us from what is really important in life. If you are trying to optimize (and I mean really optimize) your business revenue, your yoga practice, your GPA—chances are that other things in life are going to suffer. You might win the reward you’re after, but watch out that it doesn’t take the rest of your life in its wake.
So, by all means, we can aim for excellence, aim for success, aim for greatness. But it would be helpful for us to remember—perhaps here I am speaking most to myself—that true greatness, the greatness that is really worth pursuing, is about the shape of one’s whole life.
An optimal life will have mostly sub-optimal parts. If you have a newborn child, your kitchen and cooking is often going to be a mess. In fact, if you have any children, the whole of your life is not going to be optimized: your finances, physical fitness, domestic cleanliness, social life, and so on. That’s okay.
Commitment: The Alternative to Optimization
If we shouldn’t “optimize” our life, what is the goal?
One of the biggest issues with optimization, taken in a literal sense and applied to the major decisions of life, is that it is simply not feasible. By all means, we should think long and hard about our choice of spouse, profession, etc.
But at some point, after reflection, we need to commit. We cannot try every job. We cannot vet every spouse. But we can make a reasonably informed decision, commit to it, and live into the mystery of the choice once made. When challenges come up, we can adapt and grow and learn from the past to lean into the future. Call it rugged and reasonable commitment.
Optimization is the enemy of happiness because it is the enemy of commitment. And I do not think you can be truly happy unless you have deep commitments. To a profession, to a family, to a community, to a faith or philosophy.
Life is not an optimization problem. It’s a commitment to be made. It’s a question to be lived. It’s a story to be told. Imperfectly, haltingly, obscurely. But not for that reason any less beautiful and worthwhile.
More specifically, optimization seeks to find the best solution given all possible solutions within certain limitations or constraints. I think even this kind of modified “optimization” mentality is not especially helpful for thinking about growth and next steps because it keeps us from starting, moving through the process, and iterating.
The problem with an optimization mentality is not so much with aiming for “better” but with trying to start with “the best” right out of the gate.
Hat tip: I would like to thank Gregory Pine, O.P. who mentioned this idea to me in conversation. Life is not an optimization problem. James Clear and others write on similar topics. He is famous for the adage to standardize before you optimize.