Hacker News Reader

Why optimize for the contentment of one moment of your life? There's no way to know, usually, how such will play out. I think people should optimize for every day contentment with an eye toward the future. I.e. Periodically evaluating how content they feel and making due adjustments.

Dying is but a moment.

View on HN

The point isn't to optimize for contentment at the end of life. Rather, it's a technique for getting to the 50,000-foot view of one's life.

There's a saying "what you focus on gets bigger." If you live in the day-to-day, it's easy to turn the minutiae into your whole life.

Also, "pleasure" and "happiness" are fairly orthogonal. Living in the day-to-day arguably prioritizes pleasure over happiness.

i optimize for the medium term. long term is too risky and short term leads to local minima

Reply on news.ycombinator.com