Written: September 30, 2018 | Released: August 13, 2021
I think one of the big choices to be made in life (once basic needs are well met) is whether to try to optimize more for a life of stability or for a life of acceleration. There is a tension between these two types of lives because they imply making different decisions in many realms.
From what I can tell, the significant majority of people on this planet (even among those who have their basic needs already well met) seek a life that is more one of stability than one of acceleration. And I think that, to many, stability epitomizes most elements of what it means to live “the good life”: forge friendships you can keep for decades, find work you can be a master of, meet a life partner with compatible goals and values, buy a house you will live in indefinitely, spend your free time doing the hobbies you love most, etc.
Yet, in some social circles I encounter in New York and San Francisco, the presumption seems to be that acceleration is the obviously superior goal.
So which do you seek more: stability or acceleration?
Optimizing for stability may involve things like…
(1) hobbies: figuring out what you enjoy doing most and doing those things whenever you have time,
(2) friendship: figuring out who you like being around and turning that group into your permanent circle that you spend almost all your social time with,
(3) work: getting skilled at some type of work that provides the lifestyle you want and doing that thing you’ve mastered day after day,
(4) risk: avoiding substantial risks, even if they have high expected value, or avoiding situations that seem very difficult or that provoke anxiety,
(5) romance: finding a reliable partner who shares most of your values and long term goals,
(6) beliefs: being skeptical of bizarre or wacky ideas, especially if they contradict your deeply held beliefs or challenge what has worked well for you,
(7) location: finding the place you want to be and putting down permanent roots,
(8) behavior: developing habits that work well for you and making them permanent,
(9) self-improvement: working on the behaviors or traits you have that increase instability in your life, for instance, those that cause conflict with people you care about or that make you unhappy in your current situation,
(10) mindset: treating your values as relatively static (i.e., you value what you value), your talent level as relatively fixed (i.e., fixed rather than growth mindset), mistakes as something you should seek to minimize, your optimization procedure as seeking something “good” rather than spending more time attempting to find “the best” (i.e., “satisficing” instead of maximizing), “exploitation” (as opposed to exploration – “exploitation” in this context doesn’t refer to exploiting people but refers to going with the best things you’ve found so far), and
A focus on stability may also be associated with: conservativeness (“if we’ve always done it this way and it’s worked for us, why change things?”), older age (“I’ve already explored enough”), and coming from a region/upbringing with economic or structural instability (e.g., “I want the stability I never had”).
On the other hand, optimizing for acceleration may involve things like…
(1) hobbies: regularly trying new activities, including ones that you don’t predict you’ll enjoy much, or doing hobbies that cause perpetual learning,
(2) friendship: regularly making new friends and interacting with people that are different from the ones you already know,
(3) work: switching jobs or pushing to get promoted whenever your work feels too routine or easy, or when it feels like you’re not pushed right to the edge of your ability,
(4) risk: periodically taking significant risks when you think the expected value is high, or throwing yourself into situations that are very difficult or anxiety-provoking when you believe they will make you better in the long-run,
(5) romance: finding a partner that challenges you to become a better version of yourself, or to do things outside of your comfort zone, or that you can learn a lot from,
(6) beliefs: taking bizarre or wacky-seeming ideas seriously before deciding whether to reject them (at least, when they come from sources you have respect for), even when they challenge your basic premises or lifestyle,
(7) location: exploring many different places to live (e.g., countries or regions) and environments to live in (e.g., alone/with groups, around different subcultures),
(8) behavior: regularly discarding old routines and trying on new ones to see if they have benefits, or resisting making routines at all,
(9) self-improvement: pushing yourself to always learn new things and to work on the behaviors or mental habits you have that may be limiting your potential, and
(10) mindset: thinking of your values as continually evolving, believing you can improve yourself in nearly any capacity if you work hard enough (i.e., growth mindset), treating mistakes are an opportunity to learn and as a positive sign that you are trying things that are sufficiently hard, and believing you should strive to do the very best you can and to be the very best you can be.
A focus on acceleration may also be associated with: liberalness (“we should be open to and learn from the ideas and practices of those who are very different from us”), younger age (“I want to explore all that’s out there”), and coming from a region/upbringing of abundance (e.g., “I want something even better than what I had”).
Note that acceleration is not necessarily exponential. In many cases, especially when trying to accelerate an area that you’ve already spent a lot of time working on, improvements will be slow and linear (whereas acceleration may be rapid in areas where you’ve done relatively little optimization before).
Some life choices cause an interesting mix of focus on stability and acceleration. For instance, having children is, I think, very much an action that drives acceleration: it annihilates routines, carries significant risk, speeds up maturity, and challenges you to be a better, more selfless person. On the other hand, once you have a child, there is pressure to seek stability for the sake of that child. So perhaps it is a choice that produces a focus on acceleration in the short term but on stability in the long term.
Of course, you can seek stability in some areas (e.g., romance) while seeking acceleration in others (e.g., work), but I think as a simple, compressed model, it can be useful at times to view stability and acceleration as existing along a continuum.
Some people seek neither stability nor acceleration, but I don’t think it is terribly common to seek neither of these for a large proportion of life. Counterexamples, though, would include hedonists focussed on maximizing their pleasure and a subset of people with long-term severe depression who have stopped actively seeking any improvements to their life (perhaps due to “learned helplessness”).
The idea of stability vs. acceleration is related to (and includes in it) the idea of an “exploration vs. exploitation” tradeoff (discussed in the machine learning literature, and more recently, in a self-improvement context). However, I intend this concept to be much more general, as it also encompasses ideas like risk aversion, openness to ideas that challenge your lifestyle, and how you choose to direct your self-improvement efforts.
I don’t think that either stability or acceleration is “better” than the other. Where you should ideally fall on the spectrum right now depends heavily on what you value, as well as your life circumstances and opportunities. You may choose to emphasize stability at one point in your life and acceleration during another, or you may be caught right in the middle, trying to strike a balance between the two (even as they tend to be in tension against each other).
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