A Global Maximum Of Happiness

"Okay, but how much does biology affect all this?" Zac asked. "Evolutionarily speaking, the courting instincts of men and women are not the same. Give a man a group of women, and he'll play. Give a woman a group of men, and she'll choose."

"Perhaps that's true in a general sense. Unlike you, I have a little something called 'standards.'"

"Hey! I have-"

"But I know men who'd rather choose than play, and women who'd rather play than choose. For me, if the right person comes along, then I'm happy to choose. But the opportunity cost of spending time with someone else is spending time with myself, and I happen to like my own company. I wouldn't have unraveled this riddle nearly as quickly if I'd had a partner these past five years.

The problem with this biological setup is that women are optimized to choose a partner who produces a local maximum of happiness, not a global maximum of happiness."

"What do you mean?"

"I just mean — you can't really know what you want until you collect data. Like, if I go to a buffet, the optimal strategy for maximizing my happiness would be to sample every piece of food, then use that data to discern what I like and don't like. I'd start by sampling a bit of everything, and then I might discover that I don't like bananas. I can then avoid sampling all other meals containing bananas. So, over time, I progressively need to sample less and less, because I sampled a lot when I first approached the buffet.

Once I get diminishing returns from sampling — i.e, I'm not learning anything new — I can double down on a single meal that I know I will enjoy. I know who I am, what I like, what I don't like, and I can choose the food that fits me best.

From the outside, that exploratory phase may seem like I'm immature and indecisive. But once I've formed an accurate model of myself and my environment, I'm actually in a much better position to optimize my happiness quickly. As a result, I end up at a global maximum of happiness.

Instead, we have traditionally expected women to pick one meal and eat it, without much sampling. It might be a nice meal, but how does she know it's the best for her? She hasn't tasted any other meals, because sampling meals makes you a slut by society's standards. Therefore, she reaches a local maximum of happiness."

"Are you talking about sex here, or mating in general?" Zac asked.

"I'm talking about life in general," I said. "Women are also given much less time at the buffet than men. As a woman, I have a biological clock ticking, so I need to figure out what I'm going to eat pretty quickly. Men get hours and hours of buffet time, where they can explore and sample and figure out who they are and what they like without feeling pressured to decide straight away. They can even experiment with their career, instead of having to have their shit sorted by their late twenties."

"You don't have to wait to have it all 'figured out' before you get married, you know? Just sample men, and if you like one, commit."

"I don't think it's that simple," I said. "Not for me, anyway."

"Why not?"

"Because who you marry is, quite possibly, the single most important decision you'll ever make in your life. And I don't want to pick someone until I know who I am. Like, really know who I am. The person I was five years ago is completely different to who I was three years ago, and that person is completely different to who I am today. One minute I'm a hippie who's obsessed with horses and oil painting, the next minute I'm running a fashion startup in New York, the next I'm training at a Muay Thai camp in Thailand while building an online coding school for children, and now I'm reverse-engineering the goddamn universe. I'm changing so frequently that I'm scared of committing to things. One minute I'm in love with something, and the next minute, that thing no longer matches who I am, so I discard it like a used toy and find something new to play with. I can do that with hobbies, but I don't want to do that with people. I want a life partner, not a partner that's a match to who I was when I was twenty-four. I have reasonably traditional family values, but the whole concept of women marrying young only works on the assumption that women are static and one-dimensional, while men can grow and change in character, and get married in their late thirties once they've figured out who they are.

I guess I'm just waiting for it all to level out. It's like I'm still rapidly building a model of myself and my environment, and I haven't yet reached the stage where I'm getting diminishing returns on my sampling. Maybe once I figure out who I am, I'll meet someone who matches that, and we'll both be more-or-less on the same growth trajectory. Until then, I have no choice but to continue my exploratory phase."

"But that applies to everyone, doesn't it?" Zac asked. "The only way you can figure out what you like and don't like is to try all the things and then double down on what you enjoy."

"Yeah," I agreed. "That's been my strategy, anyway. When I was in high school, I tried just about every extracurricular activity I could, and then dropped most of them. My twenties have been marked by failure after failure, and I don't really have anything tangible to show for it besides a better understanding of life, and myself. And I'm quite grateful to the assholes I dated when I was younger because, after those experiences, I never allowed myself to be treated like that again. They were just a symptom of my low self worth at the time, but I wouldn't have figured that out if I'd never sampled that 'bad' side of the buffet. You can't know who you are until you know who you are not, and that takes experimentation.

I guess the problem I'm trying to articulate is this: women are expected to get their shit sorted so much quicker than men. But when we color outside the lines by taking risks and sampling different things, it's not a 'practical' decision, and we should 'grow up.' But I'm optimizing my life for a global maximum of happiness, not a local maximum. How can I make someone else happy when I don't even know how to make myself happy? Or how can I raise children and instill wisdom in them, when I've never had any life experience myself? How can I encourage them to pursue their dreams, when they turn around and say 'But Mom, you never pursued yours.' I want to be a role model for my children, when I have them. I want to lead by example."

"I think that's the right way to live," Zac said.