Is life an optimization problem?
On reflection and regret
“I’m not everything I want to be yet, but I’m a lot of things that I wanted to be two years ago, and what a wonderful thing it is to realize that.” — Unknown
As graduation approaches, I find myself cycling through a tangle of feelings. Gratitude for the people and experiences that have shaped me these four years. Inspiration from watching peers dedicate themselves, again and again, to their work and to each other. A sadness at the thought of leaving college. And underneath all of it, surfacing more than I’d like at times: regret.
Not regret over a single choice, but a more diffuse kind — the feeling that I could have done more, been more, and made more of the time available to me. When this is overlaid with the recognition that college isn’t the only thing ending — that my life, if I’m lucky enough to reach 100, is already at least 21 percent behind me — that feeling can get even heavier.
I recognize that wanting to have done better can drive us to actually do better. But there’s a version of regret that curdles into something less useful: a grief for a past that can’t be changed and a hypothetical present that could have been, but never will be. I’ve felt that version lately, at times.
So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to hold both things at once — the genuine value of looking back, and the real cost of letting that looking back become a kind of grief. A few things have helped.
The first is turning the lesson into action as quickly as possible. When I notice something I wish I’d done differently, I try to find one concrete thing I can do about it today or this week. Moving the energy somewhere useful helps me remember that these lessons have real potential to improve my future.
The second — the one that has stayed with me most — is a sentence I came across a while back: I’m not everything I want to be yet, but I’m a lot of things that I wanted to be two years ago, and what a wonderful thing it is to realize that. When I actually sit with that, it’s remarkable. The qualities I wanted to embody, the perspectives I hoped to develop, the ways of moving through the world I was reaching for two years ago — a lot of them did come to be. By this same logic, the things I’m reaching for now — if pursued with sincere effort — have a real shot too. Suddenly, there’s a person on the other side of the coming years worth looking forward to, rather than only mourning the one I could have been over the past several years.
The third is remembering that, in the grand scheme of life, I’m — if you will — “just a kid.” Some of us, or at least myself, approach life like an optimization problem, always striving for the maximum and seeking to avoid sunken resources. That drive can be a gift, until it becomes a source of pain every time I realize that there was a potentially better way to do things. Kids, it seems to me, try their best in the moment and then move on — unburdened by past failures and unafraid of future ones.
Graduation is in less than a month. While I look forward to enacting what I have learned over the past few years in the upcoming ones, I am also considering that perhaps life is not an optimization problem. Or at the very least, if I insist on trying to optimize, it’s high time I think carefully about what I’m actually optimizing for and at what cost.