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Nuance is Beautiful

28 Jan 2022

I’m learning to be a home chef. Not a professional chef, not a line cook, not anything other than a chef who can cook at home and enjoy it. It’s an exercise in what I’m seeing as “locally maximizing enjoyment”. I’m not gonna cook a meal for the queen, why should I feel like I have to be so optimal like the pros do? Why do I feel like I need the best ingredients, best tools, etc? Who’s gonna see? Is there an audience I’m looking to impress?

Part of this learning, is also the unlearning of an attachment to optimizing well-defined rewards that I am so accustomed to. In school, we optimize what we do to get the highest grades. In video games, we optimize to beat other players. With such clear definitions of right and wrong, both of these systems also make it clear that there are winning and losing strategies. But the strategies that may have worked here don’t work in more nuanced situations. This “optimal mindset” is pervasive in my life in many other areas of life post-graduation, but don’t mesh well with the overwhelming amount of nuance that life blasts you with after a typical schooling system.

(Aside: This may seem directly contradictory to another post I made (ahem) but i guess this is just another type of strategy.)

Work

There’s a plethora of nuance that goes into work performance, and cannot be so easily judged and scored. Typically with hard-to-quantify roles, when people try to reach for some indicator that’s familiar to what their used to, people tend to reach towards job title and compensation. Both of these things are quantifiable and the most correlated to performance, just like school!

The issue with looking trying to play “optimally” is that eventually (depending on the your tolerance) you’ll get frustrated with how complicated this system is to game. Consider that this “game” is presented to you, but you might not want to “all-in” on the reward, and rather find some balance to get what you want out of the game. For example, taking a pay cut to perserve a level of mental health/work life balance that is conducive to your long term goals outside of work.

Hobbies

The grindset (grinding mindset) has been about capitalizing on your side hustles and whatnot to optimize for either money or at least outside perception. This capitlistic mindset, on the surface level affected what I do. I build out projects to develop a portfolio, I keep up my social media presence to stay relevant, I practice music to sound good at performances, I play video games to gain social capital, etc. These activities and the reasons why I was doing them wasn’t too hard to critique and eventually shed off.

But more deeper than that is now I feel like I can’t do anything for purely my enjoyment. It’s a deep seeded need to be recognized and praised for what I’m doing. And to do that, I need to go really really deep and become some professional do-er, whatever it is. Gamer, streamer, tweeter, blogger, coder, photographer, whatever. So I get tricked into “You need to go ALL-IN here, or else you’ll be no one”. (Some dark-side demon shit goin on here).

My knee-jerk reaction is to be frustrated at myself – Why would I need external validation? I thought I moved past that! But maybe this is a human need, and sharing things with people in a social setting is what I need to do. Being angry at why I want something isn’t setting me up for success here.

Perfection

(Oh lawd here he goes again) I guess we can alternatively title this post “Unlearning the Need to be Optimal” and tie many things back to the previous post. I guess I’m just saying the same thing. THat would be boring though.

Systems Served to You Don’t Have to be Accepted

School and video games present you with the reward system to incentivize behaviour. Many other things try to get you to do something by giving you a reward you might like, such as social media posting can reward you with metrics (likes, followers). They either want you to get addicted (lower your standards of rewards to the ones they so easily provide) or place real value in these fake rewards. Just cause it’s in front of you, doesn’t mean you have to accept. We must critically think – does the reward serve me? Or am I just playing cause it’s convenient? And the reward is “just rewarding enough” for me to play?

The dark truth about these systems is that they’re gamed and optimized, just like school/games. And when others get ahead, our human instinct of FOMO kicks in, and makes you feel like you have to participate. It’s pretty sadistic to prey on human flaws.


God damn it I actually set out to write up a post about this bomb ass pad thai I made, but ended up writing about this. I guess it was on my mind.