Moving Abroad Broke My Optimizer Brain

Hello. Hello. So today I would like to talk to you about, um What is enough? This is a question that I've been thinking about, uh, simply because, you know, moving to a new place, new country, and kinda going off and having a different type of life, there's so many problems, essentially. Like, uh, when you're sort of not on the default path or, like, there's just so many different aspects of your life that you kinda have to solve, right? Like, you know, I came to Vietnam, and I spent a lot of time dealing with health insurance, figuring out, like, w- you know, what kinda work I wanna do, uh, where do I wanna put my money, um, you know, dating, housing. It's just, like, you kinda don't realize how many, like, aspects of life, uh, are set for you. And when you c- go to a completely different place, uh, and you kinda have to rebuild all of that from scratch, um- Now, that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is lately I've just been feeling like super, super tired actually. And in my previous life, you know, in the Bay Area, I felt like I was something of an optimizer. You know, I would try to figure out the, the optimal way to do stuff. And there's no way. Like, I can't do that at all here And Honestly, it has been a good experience for me. Uh, f- like just getting out of my head and, like, not optimizing everything because I simply can't. I don't have enough time essentially. Like And there's like these certain... I believe that there's like these certain aspects of life, like just take for example like, uh, finance or investing where it's just like, uh, this like sort of infinite game. You know? There's, you have constantly have maintenance, you know? Like, uh, so finances like, you know, you can sort of go and ch- try to, you know, let's, let's say you learn how to trade or something like that, or you learn how to do that type of thing. It's just you constantly have to like watch it and manage it, which is super annoying. Another thing is like maybe dating, right? Like you You know, dating is c- at least modern dating if once you open up your apps and such, you know, there's like a lot of people and It's not, there's a... You know, it's... If you go around and try to optimize and be like, "Okay, can I find a hotter partner, a more successful one or the yada yada," it's, it's like never ending essentially. So one thing that I've been really asking myself across all various aspects of life is, like, what is the stopping criteria? How do you decide what is good enough? Not for, uh, just for my- myself, but as- as- but, like, generally, like, like, let's say as a human being, you know, like, 'cause I don't think we're that different, you know, as human beings and such. We all have different wants and needs, but maybe biologically we kind of have maybe like probably have similar ones, right? But I believe in the modern world there's these, uh, these sort of... Especially what's dangerous if it's, like, kind of shiny, you know? It's like, uh, making money or investing or, you know, dating or some of these things. I just feel like they can be endless optimization of... Endless optimizations. Or like, uh, even like health too. Like, uh, you see like for example Bryan Johnson, like don't die. Like, that's cool. I think it's a cool science experiment for sure. But- But if you look at a human life and you have... There's just too many things that you have to pay attention to, like, throughout a day. Like, let's say you go off the default path and, like, you have to reconstruct your health stack, finance stack, dating stack, housing stack, whatever It's just too much. So the thing that I'm really obsessed with right now in life is trying to figure out how to radically simplify actually. Um And, uh, I felt like this was especially true, uh, because I recently spent a lot of time to do, like, you know, I was a software engineer, to do AI programming, right? That's, like, kind of all the rage now to, to use, uh, Codex, Claude, whatever, to, uh, write code. And that is also another example of, like, basically endless optimizations, endless meta optimizations and this or that. Like, people are perfecting their workflows and, and I was, you know, kind of doing that too, and at some point I was like, "," like, you know, "I'm spending so much money and tokens. What am I actually trying to do here essentially?" So I think that's the theme of what I'm really trying to explore is for a lot of these domains, whether it's like AI coding, whether it's like, you know, so like work essentially, or like, you know, what is good enough? Like what allows you to stop? What allows you to sort of close loops so that you can have your attention? Because right now I feel like my life is just, it's just, it's too busy and I don't feel like I'm actually getting anywhere. And I believe my current theory is to, I need to figure out how to define good enough for these different things and basically find some sort of system to free up my attention. Because again, if you take these domains like AI coding or dating or investing or a number of these fancy ones, especially fancy ones, the fancy ones are dangerous because they're like endless. But as a human being, you're like finite. You have a limited amount of attention. And so how do you decide what is good enough? And how do you sort of give up enough that you can free up your attention? Like, I'm not even sure what I would be doing because currently I have so little attention on what I want to like really think about. I've been just dealing with housing and visa issues and like just all sorts of stuff that I feel like I'm treading water, just doing admin and not really getting anywhere. So that is my current research project to figure out how to uh, define good enough. And I'm particularly really inspired by, , a man named, Herbert Simons, who, who when I was, when I was doing the agent c- uh, AI coding, you know, with AI coding, uh, he was a behavior psychologist who wrote about the architecture of, of complexity. And actually I believe that his work has a lot of relevance to, uh, AI coding. , He, for example, he has, you know, a story about like the different, uh, like watchmakers. I believe it's like Tempus or I don't know. I kinda forgot the exact names. But the idea, hmm I need to explain this a little bit better. But Okay, so I think with this, this type of stuff, I need to write an essay actually So maybe I will attach the essay So anyways, he, he created this concept called, like, satisficing. You know, we need to figure out what, like... figure out what is good enough and sacrifice the rest. And when I first read that, I was like, "Hmm," like, "no, no, no, I want, I want the best," you know. "I want optimal." But now I realize that it's not possible. Or, like, my current theory is that for most of the things in life, you kind of just satisfice. And for a few things that you choose to wanna go really deep in, that you go, you just go really deep in. But, but first, you kind of have to secure the foundations. Okay. The thing-- Another thing I kind of want to say is... So I'm building my current life, and one thing I'm very interested in testing is the idea of dependencies. Because, like, in software, you know, there's, uh... What I learned from sort of AI programming is that it's really just about planning and figuring out what the dependencies are, and making things reliable. Like, the foundations always have to sort of come first, duh, but, you know, it's-- I, I don't think most people treat, uh, life planning that way. You know, they kind of just sort of say, "Okay," like, you know, "I want this," and therefore, uh, you know, that's fine. But the question is, like, okay, what is, what is the sequencing? What is the bottlenecks, and what is dependencies? You know, and, and going to a new country, uh, where, you know, none of the infrastructure is laid out, uh, it's become pretty clear to me,- there's these dependencies, right? Let's suppose my goal was that I wanted to move to a country, you know, I wanted to build a new life. I wanna do good work, and yada, yada. You know, I wanna enjoy myself. Um, I wanna learn a few things, yada. That's, you know, that's a, that's a good goal, but you kind of have to decompose, , all the things that are part of this big goal, right? Like, it's kind of like software planning, right? Like, let's say you wanted to create a piece of software, or you wanna create some project or something. You kind of have to decompose into different tasks, and then sequence the tasks, , to, to accomplish it. But my idea is like, I wonder if it's possible to do that with like life in general. You know, like let's say you kind of have a goal, and then you decompose it, , and then figure out how to sequence it really correctly. For example, let's say I'm moving to Vietnam and such. It's not, , as simple as just moving here, and then, you know, everything's cheap and therefore, you know, like everything works. Not at all, actually. It's actually quite difficult. , Yeah, it's like not easy, I would say. It's certainly not easy. Like let's say you have a goal. Like what are the dependencies for the goal? For example, this partic-particular goal, it might be a visa first, and then you need like a, a stable housing situation because, you know, people kind of travel. Let's say you travel every three days. There's no way you can get any real work done, you know? Let's say your goal was to be some sort of digital nomad, right? Or whatever. How can you do that in a new country? How do you decompose and what's the sequencing? First is obviously visa, like which countries can, uh, if, if you don't have the visa situation sorted out, uh, you know, that's a limiting on, on housing, right? You can't sign a six-month lease or like a one-year lease on a housing unless you have the visa sorted. So that's, that's like bottleneck number one. And then you, you kind of have to have, uh, figure out housing because living in like hotels and, and moving every three days, you're never gonna get any real work done, you know? Like, uh, like each time you move to a new hotel, you have to like unpack And then when you leave that hotel, you have to repack. And then, generally you, you waste a lot of time, and then you, like, you always lose stuff, like when you, when you do the shuffle essentially. I've lost, like, so many random shirts and stuff. Like, it, it's, , super nerve-wracking actually every time you move, uh, for me at least. So yeah, so then it becomes housing. And then once you solve housing, then you have... You get your attention back from housing, and then there's, like, other problems. So, like, I guess my point is, uh, I'm not... I'm less interested in finding some, grand vision or finding some, , grand thing to do. My sort of philosophy at the current moment is just trying to aggressively eliminate, , open loops that take up my attention essentially , and sequence and decomposing the problem into its, like, tasks and then sequencing it correctly. So yeah, that's how I'm thinking about things