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Comment by basicallybones | Hacker News Reader

Optimizing for anxiety minimization and joy/meaning maximization is a pretty good alternative. I think it is a good way to be an admirable, productive person without burning yourself out to please others.

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This is touched upon near the end:

> the remedies to which we often turn may themselves be counterproductive because their function is not to alter the larger system which has yielded a state of chronic exhaustion but rather to keep us functioning within it

I maximize for my enemies' pain

Does it maximize your pain too?

"Irrelevant!"

It's easy to do if you are your own worst enemy.

Well, you can't optimize for 2 goals...

Yes you can. It’s called multivariate optimization.

I suspect you are confusing this with the idea that you can always optimize one variable further than two.

I assume you're joking... but it's hard to miss how much of corporate life becomes a game of chicken where managers try to find how hard they can push workers before the workers push back - or, to what extent workers will sacrifice rest and their own well-being for continued employment. Of course, the manager has a manager who's pushing them, too.

There are likely many points in a work environment where the local minima and maxima of work output and employee happiness meet. The important thing is to remember that those are balanced in the small, and that a wider perspective may yield a better outcome on both measurements if you care to search for it.

I've recently given up on setting deadlines, shooting for milestones, etc in my hobby programming. I now just do whatever is interesting or fun.

I used to oscillate between highs of productivity and unpleasant lows of anxiety about not making progress. I just started my mindset switch (in progress) so we will see if I'm a generally more pleasant guy this way!

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