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Comment by pants2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really hard on myself even for small things like missing a turn that takes me 5 minutes out of the way. Or making a minor mistake in my morning breakfast routine that I've been optimizing for 3 years. It's just how I'm wired.

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Thing is, over-optimizing is not optimizing. "No plan survives contact with reality", as it is said. Optimal strategies in games, for instance, include lots of adaptive branches to deal with the suboptimal reality of what actually happens - otherwise the plan is really fragile.

(Having said that, restarting a game over and over in order to force your one perfect linear optimal plan to eventually work out can be lots of fun. But this is not an option in real life.)

While I'm on the cheesy aphorisms, I'll throw in "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans". But that one's too pragmatic, I think. It's not as if we have zero control. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "life is what happens while you're busy making loosely similar plans".

I think the antidote is to intentionally avoid routines to optimize. Cultivating an objective of variety helps break out of the mundanity-loop. (caveat: everything in moderation, including moderation)

You can think of it as "just how I'm wired" if that helps, but these things are tendencies not absolutes. I've been similarly harsh with myself in the past and now I do that less frequently with lower harshness even though I know it's a natural tendency.

It is possible to lessen the effect of these things if you put effort into it.

OK, now I'm being harsh with myself about how I'm failing to get better at not being harsh with myself.

For me work stuff bothers me like making a mistake/looking dumb. But also when other people make mistakes I don't judge them that harshly/don't obsess over it as opposed to myself.

What if you were to optimize for happiness, resilience, and peace of mind?

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