Not Everything Needs to Be Optimized
With a few clicks on your keyboard, you can find hundreds of opinions on the best way to live, be and do. Travel, spend money, invest, be productive, structure your day, listen to music, salt your turkey – there is a right way and a wrong way for everything, and God forbid you use the wrong credit card or write an email wrong given the breadth of resources at your disposal. With so much information on how to optimize, well, that’s it, there is simply no excuse for doing something the way an expert thinks it is of poor quality. What if you take a route not recommended by Google Maps and arrive at your destination four minutes later than if you followed AI instructions? Quelle horreur.
And we are certainly to blame for this – after all, what is life hacking if not trying to come up with the best tips and tricks to help you get through the day? But while many of these tips can be enlightening – you really should learn more about investing in retirement and how to schedule email , for example – some of them are unnecessary.
Not all aspects of life need to be “optimized”, whatever that means. First, I think about it a lot when I write about money, because the “best” version of something is different for everyone. In other words, it doesn’t really exist. And second, because sometimes optimization just isn’t the goal.
Let me give you one example. In the Lifehacker chat, we discussed the best time to buy a (live) Christmas tree. Should you wait until Thanksgiving? Buy one when it’s “cheap,” like Christmas Eve ? Or find out when will it look and smell the best on Christmas? Etc. There are a million questions you can ask about this (and I’m pretty sure someone will answer some of them in a future post), about one small, almost insignificant life event. At some point, you just have to ask yourself: When do you want this damn tree to grow?
My very individual and very unscientific answer: now. I want the tree to grow now. I don’t want to wait until Christmas Eve – I want to buy it this weekend, if I get the chance, decorate it and enjoy it for a few weeks. You might want to wait until your kids get home from college so they can help you decorate, or until Thanksgiving because you can’t stand when the Christmas season starts too early. And you know what? Everything is fine. This is your optimization and you have to agree with it.
This is one example, but it applies to almost everything. Yes, I could wait another year to buy the phone and hope that the camera will be a little better in the new version. I could search a million recipes and then a million restaurants on Yelp to find the perfect meal for the perfect first date. I could wake up at 4 a.m., meditate and keep a journal for an hour, get to mailbox zero, work out for three hours, write 3000 words of my new novel, and go to bed at 8 p.m.
Or I could just buy the phone I need now, pick a restaurant around the corner that I went to once a week for the past three months, and sleep. I could give myself a break and stop thinking about how to use every second of my life in the most “productive” way possible.
I could choose the right credit card that refunds my points for purchases and stop worrying if there is a card that is slightly different and will earn me 200 more points this year. I could take a well-paying job that allows me to do what I want without worrying about whether it is perfect for every conceivable dimension. I could book a plane ticket to Delta and not worry about saving $ 15 on Spirit.
In other words, I could stop trying to maximize my life and just live it instead. Yes, I want to make smart, informed decisions. I want to save money and travel smart and learn a thing or two about the gadgets that power my life. But I also want to buy a tree now, today, and enjoy it for the next month and a half. Of course, some needles can darken and fall off, and it might cost a little more this week than in a week, two, or three weeks. But I’m fine if I enjoy it in my apartment for the next six years. It may not be optimized by your standards, but it will make me happier. And sometimes this is the most important indicator.