Optimization Function

In a world designed for optimization and -maxxing life — whether it is healthmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, or even alcoholmaxxing — it is difficult to know what you want to max-out on. Life unfortunately is not like your Roth IRA account with a ‘generous’ employer to match your contributions. If anything, it is quite the opposite.

I started to think of my own optimization function a while back, as senior year was creeping up and the trajectory that I had designed for myself until that point was coming to an end. In a conversation with a friend, word used loosely, I was asked what my optimization function is. “Curiosity, constrained by the limits of the circumstances”. I needed an explanation for the rather common trajectory I had chosen for myself.

As I thought about the question more, I revised my answer to maximizing happiness. That didn’t last long either. In a conversation with a friend I joked that maximizing happiness could mean that the crackhead on the side of the street shares the same optimization function as me, to which my friend suggested “maximizing the net present value of happiness”. This sat better with me, at least for some time. This is yet an incomplete response — another friend responded with “so you’re a true utilitarian!”, and I had to correct him with “no, just my own”. That sounded too selfish to be true. Another conversation with a rather conservative acquaintance about life objectives led to him responding to my optimization response with “so what about other people’s happiness? Your partner? Your potential children?” My solution was that their happiness would be an input to my happiness, so although indirectly, it would contribute to my output.

What helped me come to a partial resolve was recognizing that the optimization function, or better put, my optimization function, does not have a global maxima, but many local ones. As much as it sucks to say, the answer will be “it depends” for me. I would like that at some point in my life, my optimization function would be impact. I think that is the ultimate goal — impact has creativity, curiosity, and happiness of myself and others all baked into it. It is what you leave behind, as the old saying goes.