You can't optimize for rest (2021) | Hacker News Reader

You can't optimize for rest (2021)

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

93 pointsheadalgorithm36 comments

Optimizing for anxiety minimization and joy/meaning maximization is a pretty good alternative. I think it is a good way to be an admirable, productive person without burning yourself out to please others.

I maximize for my enemies' pain

Does it maximize your pain too?

"Irrelevant!"

It's easy to do if you are your own worst enemy.

Well, you can't optimize for 2 goals...

Yes you can. It’s called multivariate optimization.

I suspect you are confusing this with the idea that you can always optimize one variable further than two.

I assume you're joking... but it's hard to miss how much of corporate life becomes a game of chicken where managers try to find how hard they can push workers before the workers push back - or, to what extent workers will sacrifice rest and their own well-being for continued employment. Of course, the manager has a manager who's pushing them, too.

There are likely many points in a work environment where the local minima and maxima of work output and employee happiness meet. The important thing is to remember that those are balanced in the small, and that a wider perspective may yield a better outcome on both measurements if you care to search for it.

This is touched upon near the end:

> the remedies to which we often turn may themselves be counterproductive because their function is not to alter the larger system which has yielded a state of chronic exhaustion but rather to keep us functioning within it

I've recently given up on setting deadlines, shooting for milestones, etc in my hobby programming. I now just do whatever is interesting or fun.

I used to oscillate between highs of productivity and unpleasant lows of anxiety about not making progress. I just started my mindset switch (in progress) so we will see if I'm a generally more pleasant guy this way!

The article is insightful. But how serious can you take the author when it’s framed by calls to “subscribe” and “share”? What is that if not the “automatic drains” the author talks about.

He writes that there’s “a tendency to carry into our efforts to find rest the very same spirit which animates the system that left us tired and burnt out”. Isn’t that precisely what he is doing with this newsletter?

Author's lens is of work vs. rest, and sure enough, robots will always beat humans at work. Except that not all work is robotic. Sure, profits can be found in the rote optimization of process until the final result is made available through mass production for an affordable price; such optimization for process trends towards robotic optimization. But profit can also be found in the boutique, the artisan; a focus on quality and all other factors be damned, where the labor of love is self-inspiring and self-rejuvenating. Arguably, one's aim early in life should be to find for oneself labor that is so characterized - boutique, internally motivated, and capable of ekeing out a profit.

I'm sure that quality will be modeled mathematically and optimized for as well

> Arguably, one's aim early in life should be to find for oneself labor that is so characterized - boutique, internally motivated, and capable of ekeing out a profit.

This is a very modern and American take on work. Through history, work was despised and avoided whenever possible. Under that framework, the goal of the early life would be to find out a line of work which allows you to work as little as possible. Which is basically the goal of the FIRE movement.

Excluding the profit motive, different cultures had different ideals about work and not all despised/avoided work. One interpretation from the Gita is to find purposeful labor that is motivated by our inner divinity.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1394795-you-have-the-right-...

> You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.

> Perform every action with you heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.

> Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.

What I was meaning to say was, "throught western history". I don't know enough to make an universal claim. In Europe, though, aristocracy was at the top of society and they thought work was a domain of slaves. They thought highly of fighting in wars, but otherwise prefered a life of leisure.

I got about halfway through, wondering, "how is he going to tie all of this into HTTP-based API calls?" before I realized he was talking about actual rest.

Same thought. Although also tutting at the lack of capitalization.

Couldn’t find any json either

Not enough jquery

Apalled to see to many people in the comments not getting the point of the article. You can't optimize because optimizing (for whatever) is an effort, not rest; it undermines the point of rest. It points to the deeply engrained way we (humans, collectively) think, as if rest (or inner peace, or relaxation) was a project, a goal to achieve, or at least a to do item.

Interesting read. Though I can’t see how the general claim is true, “you can’t optimize for rest”..

Surely, you can. Many people do. It’s called FIRE.

No. They are optimising for financial independence. They may use that to rest, but they may use it for travel, community projects, time with family. Not necessarily restful activities.

> They are optimising for financial independence.

And WHY exactly would someone do that? So that they don't _have to_ work. Optimizing for rest does not mean resting 100% of the time. That will also lead to depression. IMO, optimizing for rest means having the freedom to work or rest as much as you need to be happy. Financial freedom provides that because one can choose to work or rest whenever they desire.

Perhaps this is a dispute over the definition of rest.

Rest is not an antonym of "employed". Just because you aren't working toward money, doesn't mean you are resting.

Yeah and it's at the expense of QOL for the younger years of your life.

I think a better title might have been "Society can't optimize for rest". FIRE is a myth, only a small percentage of people will ever have the ability and means to do it. A few can optimize for their own rest, on the backs of the rest of us who cannot and will have to work until close to death.

I think the only way you optimize society for rest on the whole would be to determine how much and what kind of time off humans need at the maxima, and then figure out how to schedule humans for the work that cannot be automated based on that. Suppose a human needs to have a month of time off per 6 months of 20 hour a week work, then we should assume no human can work for more than 20 hours a week 10 months a year, minus some other safety margin. I don't think there is ever going to be a day where society is able to optimize for rest to the extent that it's really needed, the pendulum will never swing as far as it needs to.

> FIRE is a myth, only a small percentage of people will ever have the ability and means to do it

And many of the early proponents of FIRE have been going back to work. Recently, Financial Samurai posted that he was going to return to work for various reasons (one being he's going to have to save up to pay for his kid's education).

fire may be a myth, but rest is occasional remote work, heloc, section 121, and moving every 2 years. usa only. ymmv. housing go brrr.

Can you describe more what you mean? Are you suggesting one could live by selling their home and purchasing a new one every 2 years, and doing something with credit secured by the home(s)? How does that relate to rest?

The last part hints they're probably just mocking that viewpoint, it's a reference to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/money-printer-go-brrr

Jacob Fisker Lund, the original FIRE grandaddy proved that, with lifestyle changes, you can retire in five years on $80k salary.

Even for shallow definitions of "rest" vs the deeper dive the article attempts I think that's only so true. Work or financial need are not the only sources of unrest in live.

If you have a partner, is that more or less restful?

If you have children, is that more or less restful?

Is living in a city more or less restful than on a farm?

I think the answers to these questions oscillate frequently over the course of one's life in the modern world.

I'd even go as far to say that they "oscillate" daily and hourly. One hour, it's restful that I've got a loving wife and kids, and the other, it's hard work ;-)

The point of rest and restful moments is to have enough of them, and certainly more than the non-restful ones.

For most people, that involves working until they reach retirement age. For most people, working their ass off isn't working; they will never reach financial independence no matter how much they work, or they will never reach a point where they're content.

Then they hit burn-out, and wonder how it came to this.

Seriously, chill out. It's fine to have side projects or to keep building up your career or whatever, but you need the rest as well.

Think of it this way, you can't perform well if you don't take care of yourself; this means rest, sleep, eat, and enjoy.

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