I remember in quite a few occasions in the past I was feeling I had nothing to lose and I was making quite radical decisions using mindset. Decisions are straightforward when you have nothing to lose. After acting on those decisions, I - sometimes - ended up worse than where I started. It seems that I had something-s to lose but the nothing to lose feeling helped me decide faster.
When you no longer have the luxury of "nothing to lose" or you don't have the time to deceive yourself into believing so (a painful process) or you just grew up and need to decide not only under emotionally charged states - you face another problem.
It's very difficult to mitigate risks to the extend you never lose. One has to accept that there will even be occasions where actions are going to lead somewhere worse - not just partially but in every aspect. Why would you risk to decide something with the potential of such consequences? Because the alternative is inactivity and the cost of being inactive (or choosing your current state) shouldn't be underrated.
It really reminds me simulated annealing - a nice little algorithm for optimization. It starts by looking around for better solutions and at some point it jumps to another completely random place. Then it searches a bit there... and then again it jumps somewhere else. The degree of jump-ness is defined by the "temperature" (thus the name) - a variable which continuously falls - making the algorithm more and more conservative. The reasoning behind all this "pointless dance" is trying to avoid as much as possible getting trapped in "local optimums".
You probably have already spent years of your life in
local optimums. Highly likely you do it right now - exploring one narrow
area of the terrain of your life. Certainly that's true for me.
I think that at the end of the day, having or not having something
to lose, we live life more fully by consciously, rationally moving to
something better or something worse... prolonged idleness is guaranteed loss.
No comments:
Post a Comment