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There is always something you better be doing instead

What are you gonna do this evening?

Should you spend it cleaning up the house or watching an episode of your favorite show? Should you spend it with your family or rather unload some work-related stuff that has piled up so you don’t have to work overtime the next day? If haven’t had dinner yet should you make it yourself, or rather order something and check off some couple things from your to-do list while you wait for your delivery?

Those sound like a basic time and risk management problems. But can we step back and look at why do we even have to ask those questions in the first place?

To get a bit philosophical here without going into too much detail – all we want is to live a good life. And a good life, at a grand scale, comes from what most people, arguably, want to accomplish in their lifetime – finding love, starting a family, getting rich, seeing the world, etc. On a smaller scale, you have your work, and studies – stuff that will supposedly get you closer to your bigger goals. Finally, in your everyday life, you have your immediate responsibilities, chores, and deadlines – some are more important, some are more urgent. And if I allow myself to blatantly oversimplify it, in the context of the capitalistic world we are living in, I think, it all boils down to this:

  1. You want to live a good life.
  2. You need money to live a good life.
  3. You need a job to get money.
  4. You have to be and stay competitive in order to get and keep your job.
  5. The only way to stay competitive (in a legally and morally right way) is to constantly improve.
  6. Every second of your life you invest in doing something will make you better at it.
  7. The conclusion – you have to choose to do what makes you better at your job at all times.

Something seems off about that argument, doesn’t it? Do you really have to live like that? Say you disagree, and choose otherwise. In that case, what about all the potential you are wasting? And if you agree and actually lead that kind of lifestyle, what are the limits?

The problem I am having is with an overwhelming amount of things I should, must and better do that conflict with things I want, like, and love to do. Everything from the former list seems to be both more important and urgent than from the latter. Sure, sometimes they overlap, but in that case, there are still a dozen more choices that compete with it.

The opportunity cost of watching a movie or playing a video game when I could have been doing something productive instead is so high that I don’t let myself do it even if I really have nothing else to do!

It feels like there is always something you better be doing instead. I am a dilettante when it comes to discussing the economic and political state of the world, as most of us are, but I can’t help but point the finger at capitalism for it. This constant pressure to be “productive” and “competitive” isn’t just some abstract idea, it’s baked into the system because your very survival depends on securing and maintaining a job. If you don’t keep up, if you don’t constantly improve, you risk being left behind, losing your livelihood, and ultimately, your ability to live a “good life”. This is where that uncomfortable argument starts to sound reasonable, which is disturbing.

Oh, by the way, don’t you have something better to do rather than reading this?

There is always a better way to do it

Pipelining

I have an obsession with optimizing everything. What’s funny is that this trait is fueled by my interest in computers – something I will likely connect my life with. There is a clever technique in computer architecture called “pipelining” which is basically overlapping the steps of multiple operations in the processor to get more done in less time. I use it every day, most often doing chores.

For example, say I have to do laundry, buy groceries, prepare dinner, and vacuum the floor this evening. The first step then would be to put the dirty clothes in the machine, then go to the store. Suppose that the trip to the store and preparing the ingredients to be cooked takes as much time as the wash cycle. Then I would put the clothes in the dryer, put the ingredients in the pot, and while waiting for them to be done I vacuum the floor. In the end, I have clean clothes, a vacuumed floor, and a dinner ready in the least possible amount of time. Neat!

How much I can manage to pack into an evening feels like a game and makes the boring stuff more exciting. Besides, it is not that hard to plan ahead to get the most routine and mundane things done as fast as possible, right?

Well, here is the thing. I am not a machine that has to maximize its utility, and what makes sense for a computer doesn’t necessarily apply to me. But I play this game of optimization every day, and even though it is quite an innocent example, this optimization-centered lifestyle is a constant source of stress. The actual problem here is that there is no objective reason for this to be the right way to do it if it wasn’t for the schedule, but I am so used to it that I can’t help but do it even if there is no pressure time-wise. On top of that, I get really upset if I, for instance, fail to fill a window in the pipeline with something productive, which is ridiculous.

Something like watching a film doesn’t fit in that pipeline, but a couple of Instagram reels do. An hour-long gaming session in something like GTA is a serious commitment, but there is always Subway Surfers. Maybe our tight schedules are what made these short-format things so popular?

What if we scale this up? I remember a conversation where someone argued that having kids early is good because then you won’t have to spend your adult life caring for them and have more time for yourself. That sounds questionable at the least. However, I’ve also heard people say that having kids is the best thing that happened to them and that they regret not doing it earlier.1 Could you make an argument that both of these statements come from the desire to optimize life?

Best solution

My optimization obsession doesn’t just stop at trying to cram more into less time.

I am the type of person who would read a ton of reviews before buying something. Even if it is a minor thing like a desk lamp, or a pencil even, I will take my time to conduct market research to see what it has to offer and search for the best deal. And, speaking for myself, I do it quite well 🤠 Research is what I have been taught to do all my conscious life, and I feel like “good at googling” is a line I can put on my resume. Because of that the things I buy for myself generally are good products, and people usually trust my opinion.2

The problem is – when I apply this approach to things that require investment of time and energy it breaks down badly. More often than not I catch myself spending much more time searching for the best solution, rather than actually doing the thing. And this is, funnily enough, kinda computer related thing again:

Before getting into anything new I want to make sure that I will be doing it the right way from the start. Sounds reasonable, doing research before doing something novel is being smart and careful, right? Unfortunately, I am not that. The reason I do it is because I don’t want to find out halfway through that there was way quicker, easier, better way to do it and I have just wasted time doing it the “wrong” way, and admit that I wasn’t smart enough to find the shortest path to success.

But if you are smart, it should be obvious that you become better at it by doing it, not by planning for how to do it.

I often take it to the extreme and it becomes the question of not just doing it the “right way”, but doing it the “best way possible”. It gets worse when I go on exploring every little detail, looking for all the caveats and potential pitfalls.

The worst part is that despite doing all that work I am never quite sure if I have found the optimal solution – there always seems to be a better way to do it. What is actually happening is – I am so scared of doing it wrong – that this search for an optimal solution becomes something that I do from cowardice, not out of carefulness. The irony here is that I am not scared of actually DOING anything, really. I am just scared of doing it wrong.

And I think this comes from having so many options. Until literacy became widespread I suppose your only source of guidance was your family and friends. Now there is information available about almost everything. You’ve got all kinds of influencers that are telling you that you have been eating, sleeping, walking, talking, sitting, and shitting wrong your whole life! You’ve got AI which recommends you to eat rocks. You are flooded with YouTube tutorials, online courses, books and manuals. What route to choose is not clear at all.

THERE ARE TUTORIALS ON HOW TO PROPERLY PLAY VIDEO GAMES! And you can’t even enjoy a movie for its own sake anymore, you have to know the context, all the references that the director made, easter eggs that he put in, or else you feel incomplete, you feel like you’ve missed something.

As matters get more complex, I start to lose grasp of it completely, and eventually reach a point where I can’t physically know everything about it. On top of that, even if I decide to just jump in and try something, there is always that earlier question in the background about what makes a “good life” and whether what I am doing right now is contributing to it:

Okay, I’m doing something, but is this something actually helping me achieve those bigger things I want, or am I just spinning my wheels?

So do nothing

One of the greatest achievements of capitalism is the tremendous amount of options we have nowadays. I acknowledge that I am privileged to have the opportunities I have, and I am grateful for it. But I think it is a double-edged sword because it comes with a cost of having to navigate in this world of opportunities.

As a kid, you don’t feel it that much, as most decisions are made for you. The first real major decision you have to make is maybe – coming back to my first post – what you gonna do after school? In it, I mentioned that I am skeptical of the idea that you can be whoever you want. An interview I read on The NY Times made me contemplate on what implications that this idea might have.

There is a thing called “analysis paralysis”, more catchy name for it is FOBO – the fear of better options. It describes a situation when you fail to make a decision due to overthinking or over-analyzing the situation, caused by having too many choices or feeling like you need to find the “perfect” solution. Interviewee Patrick McGinnis describes FOBO as follows:

I see F.O.B.O. as an affliction of affluence. In order to have F.O.B.O. you must, by definition, have options. It is a byproduct of a hyper-busy, hyper-connected world in which everything seems possible, and, as a result, you are spoiled for choice.

Choosing a major to study is an example of a big one, and you probably want to spend some time on that. But imagine spending the same amount of time you’d spend on choosing your major on every single small decision you make every day. Insane.

Sometimes I find myself in that situation. Often it takes me so much time and effort to first find the best thing to do, and then figure out the best way to do it, that it feels easier and safer to just give up and do nothing. This is what deters me from doing something I like to do, as well as ever stating anything new.

I became too afraid to live non-optimally that I end up doing nothing.

Run, rabbit, run

You could argue that we don’t have to relentlessly pursue self-improvement, strive to be the best, and still be totally content with what we have and live a good life. Well, yes, you are totally right! I am not making an argument that the good life is the best life possible. Indeed, everyone has their own definition of a good life, and surely the are people who would be fine living in a hut. However, even if you are not that ambitious – you still have to eat. Since we are not living in the wild anymore – coming back to the argument made earlier – you need to do something that pays, and the implications of that still hold.

You could also say that this is just a skill issue, and it is just an excuse coming from weakness and laziness. Yeah, maybe. But I want to believe that all healthy and sane people are intrinsically motivated to do something. I don’t think that any adult actively wants to rot in bed scrolling through their phone.3 Living life has to be, at the very least, interesting, right?

That feels like another big topic to uncover in another post, but for the purposes of this discussion, I suggest looking at indecisiveness and laziness not as some inherent human traits, but as a consequence of capitalism. Maybe the economic system is not designed for flesh and bones? Maybe we are just tired from work? Maybe we are just overwhelmed by choices?

Speaking of choices, almost all advertising is built on creating a fear of missing out. Every single product seems like a life-changer, and every deal feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

OH MY GOD, you have to have THIS in order to be smarter, stronger, prettier, JUST BETTER. If you don’t have THIS you are basically TRASH and don’t deserve to be called a human! You don’t have it already? Are you STUPID?!

I mentioned earlier that I am quite good at finding stuff I want to buy, and part of that is being aware of such advertising and not being fooled by it. (Although I admit that I do make impulsive purchases sometimes.) However, these skills do not directly translate to finding something worthwhile to invest my time and energy into. There are only so many options for smartphones you can buy. You can list them all and filter them out. There are so many options to live your life. Good luck on writing out that list.

But is it capitalism’s fault? Isn’t it what gave us so many options in the first place? Wasn’t that supposed to be a good thing?

I love my iPhone.

It is a phrase I use when someone speaks against capitalism. However, I am well aware that I am only able to have it for this price in this shape and form thanks to cheap labor and poor working conditions. Besides, I wonder if would I be talking differently if I was a young girl living in Afghanistan. Is it just me suffering from success? Would I even think about this stuff if I was a young boy in Ukraine or a mother of three in Gaza? Nowhere is perfect, but some places are definitely better than others. But then I listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast where they discuss how the US should export their constitution to other places in the world to solve the immigration problem. That doesn’t sound right either.

Speaking about alternatives, I haven’t lived under a socialist regime, so I might be speaking outta my ass, but it seems to me a planned economy guarantees you a job, meaning unemployment is a shortcoming of capitalism.4

You might argue that capitalism champions the freedom to “do what you want”, which is a valid, genuine, and powerful privilege in many ways. The problem with that is that this freedom often depends on “what you want’s” market viability. We’re encouraged to pursue our dreams, but those dreams should ideally be monetizable, profitable, or at least marketable. Your passion needs to get you a paycheck, otherwise, it is nothing, which leads us to optimize our very selves for economic relevance and doing “what pays”.

One thing I got from the single business course I took so far is a definition of economics by Lionel Robbins: “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses”, or how our professor put it – “the study of the allocation of scarce resources”.

And in a sense, this search for a better solution seems to be inevitable. No matter what economic doctrine we praise we have to choose what to do with the limited resources we have. Thus, it seems rational to search for the optimal choice, capitalism just seems to be embracing it the strongest and placing that responsibility on the individual.

Dig that hole, forget the sun

So capitalism seems to imply a relentless pursuit of self-improvement and the psychological and social effects of this, it seems to me, are far more substantial than might seem at first sight.

For starters, there is a constant feeling that you have missed an opportunity or have chosen the non-optimal path which makes you second guess and regret every decision. This mindset depreciates the personal life experiences because there always seems to be a better way to live! It’s not even about competition with others, it is a personal mental struggle with the crushing feeling of wasting your life doing stupid stuff in a stupid way. I have lost the ability to enjoy life because at all times I am thinking about what I could’ve been doing instead, or how I could’ve been doing it better.

It is made worse by having to do it all in time. I am, and I am sure you are too, living by the clock. We both probably woke up to an alarm against our will at some point. I have a time tracker on as I am writing this sentence. Heck, it has gotten to the point where I don’t feel like having done meaningful work if I haven’t tracked the time I spent doing it.

There is a constant feeling that you staying behind, not being able to keep up with the pace of the world. But where is the world going? Tomorrow day? We all seem to live in a limbo where we are all running late, but no one knows for what.

This illusionary time-induced stress disconnects from the present moment, and from everything and everyone present in that moment. Consequently, it affects our relationships because we lose empathy. I think the only time you can be mad at someone is if you are literally dying in an ambulance going to the hospital and they are getting in your way. All the other non-lethal things are outside of your control anyway, and if they’re not, it means that it was your own fault in the first place. But we lack the patience to see the others’ perspective because if something takes too long, it means we are late for something else. For what? Better life?

McGinnis says:

FOBO is also driven by narcissism. People with F.O.B.O. put themselves and their needs and wants squarely around the people around them — all of the people who are adversely affected by their F.O.B.O.

I can see where is this coming from. This optimizing mindset, supported by capitalism, creates a consumerist look at everything in your life, and unfortunately, at people too. At any point, you might be calculating “What can I get out of this person?”. The worst part is that it is celebrated in our society and even has a name – networking. I want to call it “LinkedIn syndrome” – a worldview that emerged and spread only because our lives have become a pursuit of maximizing gain and minimizing loss as much as we can.

Lastly, to to keep up with this crazy world we take shortcuts. One thing my teacher said that stuck with me was:

Every successful person you see had to sacrifice something to get there.

At high enough stakes that sacrifice is usually ethics. We want to get there, we want to get there fast, so we take shortcuts. Cheating on an exam is a shortcut. Lying on your resume is a shortcut. Corruption is a shortcut.5 But are we inherently immoral or do we have to take them due to the system’s imperfections?

This idea is constantly hammered into our brains:

You can get the best life, the right life for you if you do the right things now. But hurry, because life is short. You don’t want to miss the train, right? Work now, forget everything else. You will have your rest and the chance to worry about the important things later when you get there.

We can’t get fully invested in the present moment and truly be there because what we are doing right now is advertised as a temporary struggle on our way success, on our way to a good life. But that promised land is not real. The only place we can be, the only thing we can feel and the only time we can do anything IS ONLY the present moment. Therefore, although it is true that the world will not stop for you and you shouldn’t expect it to, I think it is good sometimes to hit the breaks, look around, and ask yourself “What the hell am I even doing?” and “Why am I even doing it?”.

Breathe, breathe in the air, don’t be afraid to care

I try to catch insights from every conversation I have. Sometimes someone might say something that clicks with me and changes my life. Talking to a lot of different people and trying to understand their perspectives made me realize that a lot of things in our lives are common. We often face the same problems and make the same mistakes. While you’re undoubtedly the main character of your own story, so is everyone else around you. And even though there are countless stories, you’d be surprised how many of them share the same struggles.

We can look for directions in the stories of others. Literature and cinematography, especially biographies and documentaries in a sense are like product reviews for a life. Like reading reviews before choosing stuff to buy, you could make decisions on how to live reading or watching other people’s reviews on their lives. Personal blogs and telegram channels, YouTube vlogs, and Instagram stories are the less sophisticated versions of that. But what is unique about them is that they have the advantage of being “live” and relevant to what is happening right now. Good books and movies might give you inspiration and might help you answer the big questions, but they don’t tell you what you should eat for breakfast and how to brush your teeth. (Or maybe they do, I don’t know, but I hope you get what I mean.)

Nowadays, you have the choice to see what others have done and are doing out there and build your own path. You just have to be smart enough not to get overwhelmed, and brave enough to act. And if you’ve got experience – I think you should share it! Maybe your “good enough” choices, your mistakes and discoveries, might become the very thing that will push someone else to find their footing and realize they don’t need the “best” decision to start building a better life.

This is not a rant directed against capitalism or a call to action against the system. It is not about the toxic productivity, nor is it an advice on how to make your life better. It is also not me searching for cope and an excuse not to work 😄 I apologize if it reads all around the place, attempting to capture multiple loaded topics on many different levels. I think the final message that I wanted to get across is the following.

The world we were born into is far from perfect. No one is born all-knowing into it. There is no “right” or “best” answer to anything. There are some questions that have no answer at all. Therefore, the are no “best” decisions. We live in times where we have so many options, and being able to tell right from wrong is more important than ever. But getting comfortable with that inevitable ignorance and having the courage to act even when there is uncertainty is what actually makes you better and ultimately gets you closer to your goals. It is also important to not let that pressure of having to get better harm relationships and remember that we are all in this together. Good AND sad thing is that no one knows shit. But by following the examples of the courageous ones among us that were kind enough to share their experience we can make the decision to act a little bit easier.

Footnotes

  1. Having kids is a very selfish thing, huh? ↩

  2. A friend of mine was genuinely surprised when I bought some random moisturizing cream from a supermarket (I just needed a cream because my skin was drying out from winter’s cold) and jokingly mocked me for it, saying: “you have lost your powers”, haha. ↩

  3. I suspect that this argument might fail if you’ve ever tried heroin. Allegedly, there is nothing in the whole world that can give you the same ecstatic experience as heroin, so it kinda makes sense to seek just that. And maybe your social media feed engineered to be addictive works the same way. ↩

  4. Of course, this is a big claim and a bit of a stretch. Planned economies have their own issues with employment type, motivation, and resource allocation. ↩

  5. Imagine stealing 783 billion tenge for fuck’s sake. ↩