No matter your goal(s) you can always treat it like that.

Just that with most humanly shaped goals, the formula would be too complicated to be tractable, especially since you have to account for all your guesses of the unknown. People don't even know what makes them happy before they live through it, and you can only live through so many experiences.

So we `give up' and rely on rules-of-thumb and call them wisdom. And mostly we should!