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I turn 20 today, and in the last few years, I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about the same things again and again. This is one of those. I wrote this much before I found out about the “opportunity cost” concept in finance. Funnily enough, a lot of the philosophies I have used in my life are just concepts of finance. This is yet another one of them.

I’ve often felt that life is an optimization problem. Every day, I’m forced to choose between two or more things that both matter. Time spent on one is time lost on the other. There’s no perfect allocation, only tradeoffs. It’s not like it’s possible either, if it was, I would’ve done anything to get it. I used to think I could have it all if I just tried hard enough. I still do. But the truth is that every choice unfortunately is a cut. Every time I say yes to something, I decline something else.

What I have learned is this: suffering comes not from having constraints, but from believing we shouldn’t. The mature thing is to accept the cost. To choose, and not look back. To know that lacking in one area is not failure, but the price of doing well in another. Optimization is not about having everything. It’s about knowing what to give up, and doing it with intention.

Peace comes only when you stop trying to maximize and start trying to harmonize. The greatest optimization is learning when not to optimize at all.

But again, all of this is assuming every dilemma has a binary solution, which unfortunately is not the case.