No Free Lunches

In my last few days in Palo Alto, I stumbled upon my college personal statement from several years ago. For the longest time, I wished I had chosen a more profound theme. Even as I wrote it, I was vividly aware of its triteness, yet some innate pull, or perhaps simple sunk cost, compelled me to see it through to the end.

The essay opened with a five year old me stuck in a grocery store, torn by the dichotomy of choosing between various brands of cereal. I extended the metaphor to my cross-country journey where I struggled to choose which unfamiliar path to tread. In short, I was haunted by the uncertainty involved with committing to a choice. Perhaps not the most ideal topic for a college application.

Years later, the essay took me to Dartmouth. I’ve since forgotten about the contents of this essay and have gone on to proclaim that the most meaningful pursuit is that of freedom and variance. This philosophy has brought me some of the most joyful moments of my life but also a myriad of angst, leaving me with a collection of unsettled thoughts that I have now decided to disentangle. 

I viscerally feel every choice I make. My mind tends to focus on the doors that close rather than the ones that open, so I try to hedge by leaving every door open, but sometimes I encounter a door whose opening forces the closing of another. I’ve always told myself that ‘if there is a will, there is a way’, but this loss is absolute and there is no way to make it less real. And even if there was a way to keep every option open, is that what freedom truly is? It has begun to feel less like so.

The world has been whispering the same motif throughout my life. In Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard tells us that the pursuit of variance as a means of escaping commitment to an identity or an existence of monotony prevents any one life from becoming real. mnqrls on Substack brilliantly writes, “a fulfilling life is therefore not defined by how many possibilities remain available, but by whether we have allowed one possibility to acquire weight and consequence.” Alex Hormozi reminds us that freedom and having options are only purposeful if we exercise them. Eren Yeager from Attack on Titan proclaims that he has “become a slave to freedom” after realizing that the forced pursuit itself was the antithesis of what he aimed to obtain. When I was split between Dartmouth and Brown, my classmate told me that “it isn’t about making the right choice, but about making the choice right.” We’ve all heard that the grass is greener on the other side. Even a phrase from my childhood has revealed itself as part of the same motif, when Winnie the Pooh remarked, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” — perhaps love is meaningful precisely because it makes loss possible. The oxymoron “bittersweet,” one that I hear too often, precisely embodies this dual nature of tradeoff. The sweetness is inseparable from the bitterness. Even in CS curricula, the No Free Lunch Theorem tells us that we cannot optimize in all directions. For an algorithm to excel at one set of tasks, it must necessarily perform worse on others. The underlying theme across all of these instances is that of tradeoff: in order to gain, we must let go.

I’ve found that life is a multidimensional scale with unactualized values. We are constantly at the cusp of balancing what to let go of and what to gain, without ever being fully sure of what exactly we are weighing. Our angst is driven by being finite beings with non-finite desires. We wish to live longer, yet our time is finite. We wish to experience more in every moment, to truly “live in the present.” I’ve so often found myself in a moment trying to take more in, hoping that perhaps if I feel more, I wouldn’t later wish I could return to that moment, only to find that you can capture only so much at once. We will always miss part of a beautiful moment because our attention is finite. We wish for the freedom to choose every option, yet there are only so many doors we can walk through at once. Perhaps it is precisely within this finiteness that we derive value: death gives life value through the deliberate rationing of our time, and tradeoffs give each choice value through the things we choose to leave behind.

It helps that we cannot measure value during our lives. We never know if a choice is right or wrong prospectively, only retrospectively. In The Black Swan, Nicholas Taleb characterizes a black swan event as one for which we can always cherry-pick a causal chain of events to retrospectively explain what happened. I posit that the same logic applies looking forward. We can cherry-pick a causal chain of events to explain why we might expect a certain outcome, but life has too many latent variables and too much uncertainty. We never really know the value of our choices.

So in that case, why worry so much?

As my roommate in Beijing often says, “there are no wrong choices, only uninformed choices.” Kierkegaard’s aesthete fails to live a complete life true to themselves by refusing to close any door. They are always caught between different lives, splitting their attention among many possible versions of themselves, despite none of them being fully lived. The aesthete struggles with closing doors, but I believe the same claim can be made about making choices. A choice becomes meaningful precisely because it comes at the expense of other possibilities. And perhaps a choice only acquires its full value once we stop measuring it against what we gave up.

That doesn’t mean the tradeoffs disappear. In fact, I think the key is accepting that we are going to feel them. I have this tendency to believe that whenever I feel something missing, or experience any hint of negative emotion, it means that something has gone wrong. Perhaps there was something I could have done to feel less adversely, or some problem I could solve so that I would not have to feel this way. And maybe the problem is not that I miss someone or the good memories, but that I think the feeling of missing is itself a problem to solve, when in reality it is simply a feeling to feel.

I’ve found that the dots tend to connect themselves just as Steve Jobs had stated in his speech. Maybe that is enough. I still do not know whether I am making the right choices, but I am learning that I do not need to. The doors I leave closed will always exist, and I will always miss some of what lies behind them. That is not necessarily a sign that I chose wrongly. It is simply the cost of choosing at all.