(read this as mostly decision making in the context of careers)

making decisions is difficult in the 21st century. one of the reasons i believe why is the paradox of choice, or choice paralysis. what exponential economic growth has now made available is the option to quite literally be able to do anything.

this wasn’t the case for most of human history. most humans that have ever lived, lived most of their lives 20-30km within their birthplace. there was no finance, or engineering or law or accounting. agriculture and hunter gathering was what there all was. in a way you didn’t even have to make career decisions. there was just that and you did just that.

now we live in wildly different times. decision making is difficult. i am no master at it.

one technique that we can borrow from mathematics is what’s called gradient ascent. gradient ascent is an unconstrained optimisation technique.

think of it this way. imagine life is a terrain and the goal is to climb as high as possible. what gradient ascent says in simple terms is that you stop where you’re standing and look at the terrain around you. then you choose the direction that takes you upwards the steepest at this point. then you reach a new point and you repeat this process.

what this assumes -

  1. that you know the terrain around you. this is most definitely wrong. one of the most limiting factors in our decision making process, i believe, is the set of unknown unknowns. choices you don’t even know you exist. therefore what we’re working with in real life is a terrain that is only half visible. you can choose only from your set of knowns.

and the classic problem with this is reaching local maximas instead of global maximas. what if, from the point you’re standing at, the ascent takes you to a local maxima, but that if you had instead chosen descent for some period of time, you could’ve reached the global maxima instead? theoretically reaching the global maxima is difficult. this i say because the domain of choices is huge now.

i think then what mindfulness and gratitude practices do is increasing the value of the happiness function across the whole domain. so that your new local maxima is better than your older local maxima.

definitely mindfulness and gratitude increase happiness and well-being. that’s well researched. the question then is the quantum of gain in well-being from those activities vs the gain from changing the local maximas.