Optimizing a Life Means Suboptimizing Its Moments

There is a counterintuitive feature of systems optimization. You don't optimize a system by optimizing any one part of it. To optimize a system, you have to sub-optimize its parts. Let me illustrate by talking about a life.

Your life is a product of many things: your physical health, your mental life, your friendships and family, your sense of meaning, your connection to community, your sense of individuality within it,  your sense of legacy, your income and financial security, the pleasures of food and music and books and stories, the tribal urges that find expression in cheering for your team.

Here is the deal. If you optimize any one of these, you will sub-optimize the whole. Do everything you can to be in peak physical condition and you will have little energy left for great literature. Do both while working full-time and your social life will suffer. The hours in your week are zero-sum, and optimizing for any one piece sub-optimizes the rest. Oddly, the way to optimize any system, including and perhaps especially your life, is to sub-optimize every piece of it.

The punchline is familiar: a balanced life means moderation in all things.

Now the part that complicates this.

There is a familiar argument that to accomplish anything significant you need to work eighty hours a week. People point out, correctly, that an eighty-hour week is counterproductive. Long term, this is true. Short term, the original argument is right.

A balanced life is not something achieved in any given instant. You do not split each hour into seven minutes for workout, three minutes for great literature, eight minutes for relationships, four minutes for eating. Even within a day or a week, we focus on one thing at a time. So in any given instant, we are not balanced.

There are times in life when you need to move forward. In those instances you look for the limit or obstacle and you challenge it. You optimize to the part that is the limit, at least until it no longer is.

If you optimize a life but not any one part of it, what does it mean to sub-optimize in a way that is best for your life? It means you have stretches of life that really do optimize for one part and subordinate everything else. If you have children, you do not dedicate the rest of your life to optimizing for them. But in the first few months? First few years? The first decade or two? You often subordinate the other parts of your life to them. Nobody with a newborn is running marathons or throwing big parties or reading great literature. They are sub-optimizing everything to that new life.

If you write a dissertation or a symphony, build a business, pursue a gold medal, you will go through something similar. You will sub-optimize to that one thing for a few months or years. New parents do not put in forty hours a week for the newborn. It would die in the other eighty-eight. A similar but less dramatic version of this happens with any ambitious venture. Balance suggests you never dive in. Success suggests you do.

You may keep diving into things across your whole life. More realistically, the dives are separated by six months to six years of "la de dah," days when not much happens. (The perfect storm of incredible opportunity for which you are perfectly suited at exactly the right time of life happens once, twice, maybe three or four times in a lifetime. Know when that happens and dive into it.) You throw yourself into things that produce sub-optimization elsewhere. You are immoderately out of balance at every stage, and the end result is a full life that is balanced because it lets you experience life whole over the course of a whole life, but never in any one instant.

A life takes a lifetime. If you are interested in a legacy of any kind, you do not even optimize for a window as small as a lifetime. But that is the stuff of another post.

The Simple Trade Agreement that Helped Transform Two Countries Into a Shared Economy

After WWII, Europe transitioned from a model based on conquest and extraction to one based on trade and interdependence. You need coal and iron to make steel.

France’s steel industry relied heavily on the coal-rich Ruhr Valley in Germany, while Germany's heavy industry relied on the iron ore found in the Lorraine region of France.

Because neither country could effectively produce steel or build a modern, post-war industry without the resources of the other, they decided to merge their economic and production interests. It was a forced interdependence, almost like an arranged marriage.

The agreement to dependably formalize that trade, known as the the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), created in 1951, evolved into the EU. As it turns out, iron and coal are not the only exports / imports that go into creating a modern economy and the trade agreement that began with these simple but essential ingredients for modernity expanded to include thousands of other products and materials.

The two world wars were devastating for France and Germany.

France in WWI lost roughly 25% of all their men aged 18–30.
Germany in WWI lost about 13% to 15% of its entire mobilized military. In WWII, the destruction of the German military was even more complete; some historical estimates show that over 30% of all German males born between 1915 and 1924 were killed or went missing.

The arrangement made for trade and interdependence hasn't just made them far more prosperous, it has made France and Germany far more able to turn young men into old men rather than corpses. The last half of the twentieth century has seemed to support the notion that greater economic interdependence has made trading partners more peaceful and prosperous. 

Kyiv's 1,544th Birthday

Today, the city of Kyiv - Ukraine's capital - has turned 1,544 years old [per Olga Nesterova].

I suppose such a thing could change your perspective about how long you could hold out against a Russian invasion.

A New Kind of Hairdo

The barber was confused.

"You'd like a dome cut?" 

"No. Palindrome. I want my beard and hair cut and groomed to similar lengths so that I look the same coming or going." 

"So not a palin dome?" 

"I don't even know what that is." 

"Nor do I," sighed the barber. "Nor do I."

Harari and the Claim That The Whole of Human History is About Cooperation

 "The whole of human history is about, How do you get more people to cooperate and to trust each other? And you cannot do that only with brute force."

- Yuval Noah Harari on Ezra Klein podcast

Bull Market

Bullish and bull shit (excuse my language) sound quite similar in the conversation about market projections.

How You Ask Someone to Dance

The way my two and half year old granddaughter asked me to join her dancing. 

"Do you want to be dizzy like me?"

Scientific Ambiguity

The difference between them? Bob read a lot of science fiction. Carl read a lot of science nonfiction. Bob thought the difference between those two was mostly fictional. Carl thought the difference was real.

If Nvidia Were Priced Like a Few Other Tech Stocks

Nvidia is the world's most valuable company. If it were priced like comparable stocks, it would be worth even more.

As of this writing - Monday, 25 May 2026, the day the market is closed - NVDA price is $215.33.

If it were priced at the same forward as ...

Microsoft, with a Forward P/E of 21.6, it would be priced at $235.00,

Alphabet (GOOG), with a Forward P/E of 26.6, it would be priced at $289,

Amazon, with a forward P/E of 30, it would be priced at $324.

Nvidia price has gone up so much so quickly that it might just be lagging its real price. Which seems worth considering. 

A Very Simple Explanation for the Rise of Right-Wing, Populist Parties Across the West in Recent Decades

Until roughly the era of Reagan and Thatcher (the 1980s), the simplest predictor of whether you were rich, middle class, or poor was which country you lived in. The gaps between nations were enormous, and the gaps within the wealthy nations were relatively compressed. Globalization changed this. As trade and capital flowed more freely, the gaps between countries narrowed while the gaps within countries widened. The income disparities that had once shown up mainly between nations increasingly showed up within them. A class of relative losers emerged in the wealthy democracies, workers whose incomes stagnated even as the global economy grew.

This economic shift created the conditions for political backlash, but it did not by itself determine the form the backlash would take. The dissatisfaction could have been channeled toward redistribution, which is the traditional left-wing response to inequality. Instead, in most of the wealthy democracies, it was channeled toward nationalism and opposition to immigration, which are right-wing responses. The rightward direction was shaped by additional factors: the convergence of mainstream parties on support for globalization, which left the dissatisfied without mainstream representation; the shift of left-wing parties toward the educated professional class, which left the working class politically homeless; and the cultural dimension of the dissatisfaction, which the right addressed directly and the left, committed to cosmopolitan values, could not. The economic foundation produced the dissatisfaction. The political and cultural context determined that the dissatisfaction would find right-wing rather than left-wing expression.

On a Scale from Is This a Great Country to Or What?

11 years ago. Back when there was still reasonable doubt.

Nvidia's Phenomenal 2026 Growth

For the next fiscal year, Nvidia's projected revenue is more than $300 billion - a single year gain of more than $100 billion.

Nvidia Employees Net Worth

Informal report on Nvidia employees shared by Rick Munarriz  at Motley Fool ....

80% of Nvidia employees are worth at least a million dollars and 50% are worth more than $25 million.

There would be some fascinating insights to come from understanding how Nvidia retains employees whose salary no longer makes much difference to their wealth.

(And I'm sure there is a lag between when they "get" the stock options and when they can exercise them .... and yet ...)

Troops in the Middle East and Treasury Yields at 5.2%. It is Like 2007

In 2007, we had 170,000 troops in Iraq.
Now we have 50,000 troops in to the Middle East for the special operation in Iran.

In 2007, 30-Year Treasury Yields Reached 5.2%.
Now, 19 years later, they've hit that level again for the first time since.

In 2007, we got hit with our worst recession since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are focused on using their majority to get one billion in funding for Trump's ballroom, the one priority they are aligned on.

Hey Trump voters. Maybe your boy will save the last dance for you.

If You Want a Successful Organization, Draw Talent from Around the Globe

NBA, NHL, and MLB - professional basketball, hockey, and baseball in these United States - include a lot of foreign born players.


National Basketball Association (NBA)
The Status: Every single team has at least one international player. The Data: The NBA started its season with a record 135 international players representing 43 different countries. Even the least internationally diverse team in the league—the Dallas Mavericks—still carries two Canadian players and a center from Guinea on its roster.

Major League Baseball (MLB)
The Status: Every single franchise features international talent.
The Data: Roughly 26% to 28% of all Major League players on Opening Day active and inactive lists were born outside of the 50 United States.

National Hockey League (NHL)
The Status: Every team has multiple foreign-born players.
The Data: The NHL has the highest percentage of foreign-born players of any major American sports league. Because the league is a joint enterprise between Canada and the United States, and draws heavily from Europe, roughly 70% to 80% of all NHL players are born outside the U.S.