It really bothers me that the two fundamental metaphors of how to live life right now are “optimize” and “balance.” How can this be, I ask myself, when optimizing and balancing are like opposite activities?
“Optimize” is like finding the crucial quantity or aspect or thing and then taking it to its logical extreme. Go as far as you can; get to the max endpoint. “Balance” is anti-extreme. Please avoid the max endpoints; please find an appropriate and moderate middle ground.
If you’re looking for advice on how to live your life and make decisions in the 21st century, you can’t get away from optimize. It’s there under every life hack, every productivity app, morsel of input on improving your health, your wealth, your time, your relationships. It’s there every time we do a cost-benefit analysis or think about the greatest good for the greatest number.
If you’re looking for advice on how to live your life and make decisions in the 21st century, you can’t get away from balance. It crowds in from the ether when you try to think about the relationship between work and family, or how much time you should put into your various projects, or what should be your ratio of cocktails and cake now to trying to avoid cancer later.
From my perspective, the history of philosophy is full of the dead ends of people trying to harmonize optimize and balance. The crucial theoretical move would be to find a quantity X that if you maximize it, would yield the perfect balance for all your various life concerns.
In philosophy, the early utilitarians of the 19th century got themselves tied into knots over whether “pleasure” or “happiness” could be the name for X, the thing that when you maximize it you get the right balance. On the pleasure side, you may know about how Jeremy Bentham said “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry” — by which he meant that a dumb game like Candy Crush is just as good as any other activity as long as the pleasure you get out of it is the same.
To which Mill pointed out that having been raised on that principle as a child, he then had a nervous breakdown and could only be revived through the arts and sciences of music and poetry, so no. And 21st century optimizers are not using pleasure as their X: a life of just the right amount of Candy Crush — or opiates, for that matter — is not what the life hack team are preaching.
Mill then developed his doctrine of “higher pleasures” — you should maximize happiness, but recognize that in happiness some pleasures are better than others. To which people said: that makes no sense, how can there be one metric but it’s made up of lots of little different metrics?
I’m flying irresponsibly over a hundred plus years of debate, but my sense is that the best answer to this question involves working back from the answer: try to figure out what is best overall, then calculate the mix of things that would form X; now maximizing X is the answer to how to live your life. If you’re a utilitarian, you could call X “utility” and just divorce it from any particular sensation like pleasure.
In economics, the typical science-y approach to the puzzle of how to find X is to say that X is satisfaction of your personal preferences, which can be deduced from your behaviour. If you chose the cocktail it must be because you preferred it, because it brought you more utility (whatever that is), so ultimately when you choose it, you’re maximizing your utility so, when you balance well, you are acting optimally.
Even setting aside the ambiguity of “because” (is that a definition of utility or a substantive claim about human psychology?) the success of this formulation as a useful idealization does little to help us figure out what to do next on an individual level. The life pattern in which you work out your utility from your past choices then apply that to the future is the one in which you do the same thing over and over, simply because you’ve done that before. No life hacker or balance influencer is suggesting this, and it would be a dumb way to life your life.
And all of these puzzles arise just for one person’s optimality! We haven’t even talked about the question of how what is best overall for you individually could be best overall from a community-based perspective, which is an even harder problem.
My own take on the situation is that there is no X. There is just a made-up concept corresponding to the thing that if you were to maximize it, you’d get the best thing to do overall, with the proper balance of all your different things.
Made-up concepts are OK in some contexts, but they’re not useful for figuring out life’s practicalities. So I think "optimize" in this sense is a scam. There’s only balance.
The problem is that the balance metaphor sounds like there is no right answer, which people find destabilizing, but which I also think is true. There’s no algorithm, there are just people muddling through and trying to figure things out.
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