Life is an optimization problem (I think)

Life moves fast. We are constantly running, working, caring for others, or spending time with the people we love. Every day we make dozens of choices about where to put our attention and energy. Early in life we’re trained for “working life,” and we try to balance career and private life as best we can. But goals change. Some people want to get married, buy a house, or have children. Others want to travel the world or start their own company.

It’s a lot to juggle, and each decade of life reshapes what matters. I want to show that we can understand all of this through a simplified lens:

**Life behaves like an optimization problem; whether we realize it or not. We are always optimizing

The three life currencies

A useful starting point is to recognize that life is built on three fundamental currencies. They are the resources you spend, exchange, and invest your entire life:

• time
• knowledge
• money

These currencies interact with one another and are interchangeable up to a certain extent.

• To earn money, you spend time and apply knowledge
• To gain knowledge, you invest time or money (courses, mentors, experience).
• To create more time, you spend money (delegation) or knowledge (working smarter).

These exchanges silently shape almost every outcome in your life. They determine what doors open for you today and which ones will open in ten or twenty years. How fast your currencies grow or decay depends on your behaviors (income vs spending, learning vs stagnation).

Currencies fuel objectives

Life is not just about collecting currencies. Currencies are inputs. What we actually care about are the outcomes they help us pursue. When you strip away all noise and trends, most people discover that they are trying to optimize the same five universal objectives:

• Healthspan
• Meaningful relationships
• Mastery and growth
• Autonomy and freedom
• Purpose and impact

Healthspan (not just lifespan) is about staying healthy for as long as possible. It includes physical health, mental resilience, and having enough energy to live without constant pain or exhaustion. A long life is meaningless if you’re not well enough to enjoy it.

Meaningful relationships come in several layers: intimacy with a partner, belonging with family and friends, and the sense of connection that comes from contributing to a community. Humans are social creatures, so relationships are not optional; they’re foundational. Relationships grow through repeated actions: love expressed, attention given, empathy practiced.

Mastery and growth are about becoming better at the things you care about.
Progress in skills, competence, and understanding gives us a sense of momentum.
A good life has a learning curve, one that keeps you proud of who you’re becoming.

Autonomy and freedom give you control over your time and choices.
Not everyone gets to choose the job or lifestyle they want, but almost everyone desires more optionality. Financial stability, and eventually wealth, expands this freedom dramatically.

Purpose and impact come from the urge to matter. For some this means legacy; for others, simply knowing their efforts help someone. Purpose often starts with one quiet question:
“Did what I did today actually matter?”

Together, these five objectives form the backbone of a life well-lived.

How objectives become life goals

Each of the five objectives corresponds to a deep human question:

• Healthspan: “Can I live a long, energetic life without pain?”_
• Relationships: “Am I loved, connected, and supported?”
• Mastery: “Am I growing into the person I want to become?”
• Autonomy: “Do I control my life, or does my life control me?”
• Purpose: “Does any of this matter?”

Your life goals are simply your personal prioritization of these universal objectives. For example:

• A 22-year-old might optimize for mastery and autonomy.
• A 45-year-old might optimize for healthspan and relationships.
• A 70-year-old might optimize for purpose and peace. Our goals shift as we do.

Why not become superhuman

Even if we understand the three currencies and the five life objectives, we still run into an unavoidable truth:

Life has limits. And these limits define the shape of our strategy.

We cannot simply optimize everything. Every person operates within a set of boundaries. Mostly universal boundaries but some are personal.

• Time is fixed at 24 hours a day, and our subjective sense of it accelerates as we age.
• Mortality sets a hard, unknown upper bound on the game
• Biology defines our genetics, our recovery capacity, and the rate at which we age.
• Psychological bandwidth limits how much attention, discipline, and emotional load we can sustain.
• Economics impose income constraints, obligations, and trade-offs in what is realistically possible.
• Relationships shape what we can do, because no one optimizes a life in isolation.

These limits do not make life worse but instead they define the shape of life and make life strategic. A life without constraints would not be free; it would be meaningless. They are what make strategy necessary and make meaning possible.

**The daily state that shapes everything

We now have all the main pieces; the three currencies, the five objectives and the limits that constrain us. But there is one more crucial ingredient:

Your internal state the thing that changes every single day.

Even with the same resources, people perform differently depending on their condition.
Your sleep, stress, nutrition, and emotional stability determine how effectively you can convert time, money, and knowledge into meaningful outcomes.

These internal state variables fluctuate constantly:

• Sleep quality
• Stress level
• Emotional regulation
• Focus & cognitive bandwidth
• Nutritional state
• Recovery & fatigue
• Mood stability

These are the inputs feeding the objectives. These are not goals they are modifiers.

Good sleep, stable emotions, and balanced stress can amplify your effectiveness. Poor sleep, emotional turbulence, or exhaustion can dampen your performance and in the worst cases, reduce it close to zero.

This leads to an important principle:

Your daily state determines the efficiency with which you can pursue your long-term goals.
It can strengthen your efforts or undermine them entirely.

And this is where life starts to resemble an optimization function.

OMG, math (but don't worry)

The exchanges you make every day shape the structure of your life. They determine what options you have now, and which ones will exist ten or twenty years from now. To make this precise, we need a small amount of math; not to intimidate, but to clarify.

The inputs: life currencies

At any moment, you control only three fundamental resources: $\mathbf{r} = [ \text{time}, \text{money}, \text{knowledge} ]$ This resource vector represents what you can spend each day. Everything you do (working, resting, learning, caring, creating) is an allocation of these three currencies. But here is the crucial point:

Resources are inputs, not outcomes.

You cannot directly buy the things that matter most in life.

The outputs: life objectives

What we actually care about are five outcomes: $\mathbf{O} = [\text{Health},\ \text{Relationships},\ \text{Mastery},\ \text{Autonomy},\ \text{Purpose}]$

But, and this is important:

You cannot directly “buy” objectives.
You must convert resources into objectives through effort, choices, and action.

These objectives are not for sale. They must be earned through sustained action over time. Each objective grows through a different conversion process. Formally: $O_i = f_i(\mathbf{r})$

Health improves when you invest time and knowledge through sleep, movement, and recovery. Relationships grow when you invest time, attention, and emotional energy. Mastery grows through time spent practicing and learning. Autonomy grows through money that creates options and knowledge that creates leverage. Purpose grows through time and effort spent on meaningful contribution.

The same resources can therefore produce very different outcomes, depending entirely on how they are applied. This conversion process is where life becomes interesting. Now that we’ve built the vocabulary, currencies and objectives, we can start turning the idea into a mathematical model. This is where life begins to resemble an optimization function, because resources have to be converted into outcomes through action, and the effectiveness of that conversion depends on factors we have not modeled yet.

The hidden multiplier: your daily state

Even with identical resources, people do not get identical results. Conversion efficiency changes from day to day. Your sleep, stress, nutrition, mood, and cognitive load determine how effectively resources turn into progress. We model this with an efficiency coefficient: $\eta(\text{State}) \in [0, 1]$

When you are exhausted or overwhelmed, $\eta$ approaches zero. When you are rested, focused, and emotionally stable, $\eta$ approaches one. Most days fall somewhere in between.

This coefficient can both amplify and dampen your efforts. It does not change your goals; it changes how much value you extract from the same effort.

Your daily state determines the efficiency of your life engine.

Daily value generation

We now combine resources, efficiency, and your shifting life priorities. Not all objectives matter equally at all times. Their importance shifts across life phases. Early life tends to emphasize mastery and autonomy. Midlife places greater weight on health and relationships. Later years often emphasize purpose.

We represent this with weights that depend on age and context:

$w_i(\text{age}), \quad \sum_{i=1}^{5} w_i = 1$

Putting everything together, the value generated on a single day becomes:

$$V_{\text{daily}} = \eta(\text{State}) \cdot \sum_{i=1}^{5} w_i(\text{age}) \cdot f_i(\mathbf{r})$$

Where:

• $w_i(\text{age})$ represents the importance of each objective in your current life phase
• $f_i(\mathbf{r})$ describes how your currencies convert into progress on that objective
• $\eta(\text{State})$ acts as today’s amplification or damping factor

This equation captures something deeply intuitive. The same effort produces more progress when your internal state is strong. The same effort produces less meaning when your priorities are misaligned. And even well-chosen priorities collapse when your state is depleted.

This is the core of the engine. Each objective contributes differently to your overall life score depending on your current life phase. These contributions are represented by weights: numbers between zero and one that express how important each objective is right now. In early adulthood, mastery and autonomy naturally dominate. Later in life, health, relationships, and purpose grow heavier in the equation.

These weights are not fixed. They drift as your priorities evolve. As your life shifts, so do the weights. As your state fluctuates, so does your efficiency. The interaction of both is what produces the value of a single day.

Constraints: the walls of the system

Like any optimization problem, life has boundaries. You cannot allocate resources freely because you operate inside a fixed container of human limitations.

The most fundamental constraint is time: $\mathbf{r}_{\text{time}} \le 24h - \text{maintenance}$ Maintenance includes the unavoidable costs of being alive: sleep, nutrition, hygiene, commuting, and logistics. This is why most “perfect schedules” fail; they ignore maintenance. Whatever remains is your usable time budget, your true decision space.

There is also a psychological constraint:

$\text{stress}(\mathbf{r}) \le \text{psychological bandwidth}$ Push beyond your bandwidth (e.g. too many tasks, too much emotional load, too much pressure) and the penalty appears the next day: $\eta_{\text{tomorrow}} \downarrow$

Your efficiency collapses. Tasks feel heavier. Progress slows. Motivation fades. You convert resources into objectives far less effectively. Even simple tasks feel heavier, slower, or emotionally harder.

Biology and mortality do not appear as explicit constraints because they operate at a deeper layer of the system. Biology shapes the conversion functions themselves: recovery speed, injury risk, cognitive stamina, and baseline energy all alter how resources convert into outcomes. Mortality defines the upper bound of the integral. It is the horizon of the optimization problem, not a variable inside it.

Constraints do not make life worse. They give life structure. They define the shape of life.
They are the walls of the optimization problem you are trying to solve. They are what turn existence into strategy.

The cumulative score: what a life really is

No single day defines a life. Life is the sum of thousands of daily values, minus entropy.

$$\text{LifeScore} = \int_{0}^{T} \left[ V_{\text{daily}}(t) - \text{entropy}(t) \right] dt$$

The upper limit $T$ is unknown in advance. That uncertainty is mortality. Entropy represents aging, randomness, decay of skills when unused, loss of relationships when neglected, and health degradation over time. Entropy is what happens when you skip leg day (for years).

Entropy cannot be eliminated, but it can be counteracted consistently through better state management and better allocation of resources. Entropy here is not caused by effort, but by neglect and time.

The integral is simply a way of saying that life is not defined by any single day, but by the accumulation of thousands of days and each with its own state, constraints, decisions, and entropy. Small improvements compound. Small neglect compounds as well. Your life score is the sum of everything you did, everything you maintained, and everything you allowed to decay.

The simple version (back to earth)

If all of this feels abstract, here is the intuitive form of the model:

$$\text{LifeScore} = \omega_1 \text{Healthspan} + \omega_2 \text{Relationships} + \omega_3 \text{Mastery} + \omega_4 \text{Autonomy} + \omega_5 \text{Purpose}$$

The only trick is that the weights change over time.

Most people don’t fail because of laziness or lack of discipline. They fail because they optimize their current life using an outdated weight function. They optimize their forties with the priorities of their twenties.

That mismatch and not lack of effort is the reason many people feel stuck. At twenty, mastery and autonomy dominate. At forty, health and relationships must take precedence. At seventy, purpose often becomes central.

The optimal solution always shifts.

Travel hack

One of my personal objectives is, of course, travel.love exploring this planet and seeing how other people live. Within the life model we’ve built, travel has a particularly interesting property:

Travel is one of the very few actions that can improve almost every objective at once

It consumes all three currencies ( time, money, and knowledge ) and yet somehow returns far more than it costs. Travel tends to generate gains across the full objective space:

• Health (you walk more, you rest differently, you disconnect from routines)
• Relationships (shared memories, deeper bonds)
• Mastery (new perspectives, ideas, and mental models)
• Autonomy (freedom of movement and choice)
• Purpose (the world expands your sense of meaning and context)

Conceptually, this looks like:

$travel(time, money, knowledge) → [H, R, M, A, P]$

In optimization terms, travel is unusually close to a multi-objective optimizer. This is what I like to call the travel hack.

This is not universally true, it is not universally positive. Its impact varies significantly by person, phase of life, and circumstances. In the language of the model, its effect is governed by individual coefficients.

Adding travel to the LifeScore

To model the effect of travel, we can treat travel as an additive bonus across the five core objectives:

$TravelBonus = \lambda_1 H + \lambda_2 R + \lambda_3 M + \lambda_4 A + \lambda_5 P$ Where:

• Each λᵢ represents how strongly travel boosts that specific objective
  (for example: λ₂ may be higher if you usually travel with loved ones)
• λ-values capture your personal bias, travel affects each person differently
• H, R, M, A, P here represent the incremental objective gains produced by travel

Because travel is episodic rather than continuous, it cannot simply be added once at the end.

It affects the daily value of life and often dramatically. Its effect is concentrated in specific periods and often dramatic. The correct place to include it is therefore inside the integral, as part of the moment-to-moment reward:

$LifeScore = \int_{0}^{T} \left[ V_{\text{daily}}(t) - entropy(t) + TravelBonus(t) \right] dt$

Here:

• $TravelBonus(t)$ is positive only during periods of travel
• Non-travel days simply have $TravelBonus(t) = 0$

In this model, travel is not a goal in itself. It is a temporary multi-objective optimizer that spikes your score when it occurs.

In other words:

Travel doesn’t just feel good. Mathematically, it biases the system in your favor; briefly, but meaningfully..

The real twist: life is a reinforcement learning problem

If we step back and look at the entire model with all pieces: currencies, objectives, limits, state, travel and the $LifeScore$ integral something interesting emerges:

Life behaves exactly like a reinforcement learning system.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. You never know the true reward function upfront. You take actions, observe feedback, and update your beliefs. You constantly balance exploration and exploitation. Some behaviors reinforce themselves and harden into habits. If early success teaches you that overworking equals reward, that policy may persist long after it starts harming health and relationships. Others fade away. Over time, certain policies become sticky, not because they are optimal, but because they were reinforced early and often.

You are continuously doing online learning in an environment that drifts over time. And to make the problem harder still, your own body is changing the rules as you age.

If we model life computationally, something subtle but important happens. The $LifeScore$ function begins to behave like a reinforcement learning reward signal. You do not know it in closed form. You infer it gradually, through experience. You are the agent.
You take actions.
You receive feedback.

But the feedback is noisy and delayed. It does not arrive as clean labels like “+10 reward” or “−30 penalty.” Instead, it comes as sensations and signals: joy, regret, pride, pain, connection, burnout. You try something. It feels better or worse. You adjust.

Over time, you converge toward a policy; your habits, routines, preferences, and default responses. This is how identity is formed. Not through single decisions, but through the slow accumulation of reinforced behavior. No one provides you with ground truth. This is not supervised learning. It is reinforcement learning.

And at a deeper level, it is reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF):

You are both the agent and the human trainer.
The one acting and the one evaluating.

Your internal signals, so your emotion, meaning, fulfillment, regret and pride, shape the reward landscape that trains your future behavior. Every day slightly updates the model. Every choice nudges the policy. Every experience shifts the weights.

This analogy has limits, of course. Human lives are not Markovian systems, and meaning cannot be reduced to a single scalar reward. But the structure holds: what you repeatedly reinforce becomes who you are.

This is the real implication of the model.

You are always training something. Not toward perfection, but toward consistency. Not toward a final answer, but toward a stable way of being.

You do not get to stop learning. You only get to decide what you reinforce.

Growth, in this sense, is not a phase. It is the ongoing process of shaping the policy you live by.