I found it also useful to realize that there are many situations in life where there are just too many unknowns. You're faced with two possible futures: should I go to University A or B? This choice is necessarily going to radically alter your life: depending which university you pick, you'll make different friends, date different people, hang out in different spots, maybe live in different cities. Based on this choice, the life you'll have in 5 years will be completely different. How do you pick which future to choose from, which one is better?

The thing is, you simply have no way to know. What exact future you'll end up with is about as predictable as the weather on this day five years from now. You have no idea who are the people you haven't yet met that are going to change your life, what roadblocks you'll find on the way, whether you'll suddenly fall into a depression, etc. You can only rely on objective metrics (trends, statistics), testimonials, and general gut feeling.

For myself, 3 years ago, after my studies, I was wondering whether I should relocate to silicon valley for a big tech job or not. It was scary. I loved my hometown, had many friends, etc. I figured, however, that I might as well do this sort of experiment (moving to another city/country) while I'm young and have no spouse or property. I did make the move, and unfortunately, I didn't enjoy my big tech job, nor did I enjoy living in silicon valley, it wasn't a good experience, so I moved back, thankfully with a decent wad of cash to wipe my tears with.

I didn't like silicon valley, but I don't regret my decision to try it. Why, because I also knew that I kind of had to try it, because if I didn't, there might always be some FOMO in the back of my mind (what if I'd taken this big silicon valley job, would my live be better right now?). Now I've done it, I've been there, and I know what it's like. The pressure/temptation is gone. So my two cents are to trust your gut, do commit to decisions, and also don't be overly afraid of experimenting when you're young: it might not work out, but you'll learn something along the way.

I'm halfway reading "Stumbling on Happiness," and one takeaway is that indeed people are happier when they take action and it doesn't turn out to be as expected, than when they do nothing. Your experience fits exactly that.

Coincidentally, I'm reading the book because I'm trying to decide whether to leave my small city teaching job at a and move to SV to get a big tech job. And the book and your experience suggest that it is better to leave and fail to thrive than to never leave at all. But may I ask why didn't you like it, or what should I look out for?

A few years ago I sold everything I owned and moved on to a sailboat. I was frustrated with my prior job and knew I was going to leave no matter what. I fretted about what to do for a while but finally decided to give sailing a try - because I could and I knew if I didn't I would regret it the rest of my life.

Turns out I both loved and hated it. I ended up only staying gone for about a year and moved back to the city I had left. I still don't regret that decision, I'm significantly happier now than I was. I think of radical life changes as tools for perspective, by doing what I did I realize how little of what I have I need and how easy it is to create a new life if the one I have isn't suiting me.

As I always say while fretting about getting out of my comfort zone - the worst thing that can happen is nothing.

Take a short trip to SF and see if you like it. Keep in mind SF is not what it used to be because of all the techies that live there now. If you really want to see what SF is like go see other areas of SF and eastbay.

Things I did like: I was on a small team, my team and manager were great people, and I got along with everyone. The work environment was very comfortable, great food, they got me a super comfortable chair when I complained about back pain, etc. The pay was great too, enough to save 40-80K per year depending on spending habits (and still live comfortably!)

One thing I didn't like was living in the silicon valley suburbs. It felt like a small town with nothing going on for me. It was really car-centric, my apartment came with a covered parking spot because they just assumed that of course you have a car. If I had to do it again I'd get a job in SF and live in SF. I don't want long commutes and I don't want to live in suburbs. Since you're from a small town, YMMV. The SV suburbs might feel like a big upgrade to you, and having to drive everywhere might be something you're already used to.

Another thing was that the work was dry. This might be very different for you based on what employer and job you pick. My team was doing mostly maintenance and incremental upgrades on a product many years old. I found that dreadfully boring. I need something creative. This is something I didn't know then. My current job doesn't pay nearly as much but the work offers a lot more novelty and creative freedom. If I had to do it again, I'd make sure to join a team that's working on a project that has me genuinely excited, preferably a team that's building something rather than doing maintenance.

It was also really hard for me to be uprooted from my hometown where I'd always lived and away from my friends. What made it even harder was that I fell into a depression right before moving to California. My mother was suddenly hospitalized, right as I was going through other stressful things and preparing for an international move. The extra stress was too much. Then I landed in California, and I had to start my first job, and I didn't have any friends there to support me. It's hard to boostrap a network of friends starting from nobody, and it's even harder when you're depressed... You have no energy to go out and you're coming from a place where you need people to help and support you, rather than a place of "I'm a fun person to spend time with".

Lastly, while I lived in California, after being on antidepressants for a bit and feeling more hopeful again, I tried dating, and I hated my experience. It feels, to me, like SV has an overabundance of men, because of the constant inflow of tech workers. If you're a single guy, you're moving to a place where there are too many men. In any other city, being a successful tech worker is something that will earn you points, but in SV, every woman knows they could date a Google engineer if they wanted to, at least that's how it seemed to me. Lots of ghosting and being treated in ways that I found disrespectful. To make matters more complicated, lots of people in and around SF are polyamorous, which is not something I want to get involved with.

I can't thank you enough for your story. It's incredibly valuable to me.

May I ask how do you feel now about your current life? Did you leave the States?

Yes I moved back two years ago. I don't regret leaving. I make less money, but still live comfortably. I can afford a two bedroom apartment a 15-minute walk away from work. I'm back in a bit city so there are as much social activities as I could want.

If you're asking if I'm happy, I would say I'm definitely more emotionally stable. I've been at the same job since I came back and currently don't plan to leave. I still feel down from time to time, not completely fulfilled, but I think I'd feel that way anywhere. I feel a little lost these days because I don't really know what I want to do with my life. I feel like I lack purpose.

Dating here in a big city seems easier than in the Silicon Valley suburbs. It's tricky (because dating is tricky), but I have no trouble getting dates. I did lose touch with many acquaintances after being away for a year. Party friends, when you stop going out with them regularly, stop thinking about you. I have a small number of close friends that I had before I left and I generally feel like I get enough social.

The thing is, and we do not collectively teach young, is that many decisions are workable but some have bad consequences that are nigh irredeemable. Then there's the sunk cost fallacy, all too common. Estimating the cumulative sunk costs and arriving at robust decisions is feasible.

Choosing a college may be a cost, but for now there are workable alternatives.

And you always have the way to know or at least roughly estimate which is good enough for a sane decision. You just take the cost of acquiring information into your decision time and you're gold. Apply hard limit for time and problem disappears. You did the best you could given the constraints.

In fact, the typical problem today is that you have too many ways to know and not enough ways to verify veracity.

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing. It reminds me of Sylvia Plath's fig tree - [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7511-i-saw-my-life-branchin...] which I always think about. I've observed that it's useful to think of the one future that you would sacrifice all other futures for. Which would be what exactly do you value?

On regrets and mistakes, Jordan Peterson talks about this sort of thing in a beautiful way as the idea of "redemptive mistakes", and that "people are a lot more unhappy when they look back in their lives about the things they didn't do than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things" - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGDnSWmqhM]. It has stuck with me as I try to be more permissive of myself making mistakes and being imperfect.

This is in no way an endorsement of doing without thinking, which will catch up with you and result in you being forced to skip options. At least I hope it isn't.

There's a clear spectrum between recklessness on one end, indecision and inaction on the other and doing right things right in the middle, spontaneously or in a planned way.

Relevancy is key, nobody remembers things that are irrelevant by definition as a regret... Cost is a kind of relevancy.

Going back to the article, you almost completely lost contact with the original problem once you're past third or rarely fourth order thinking because you will lack enough particular data to decide on any measure of success, with exception of particularly structured recursive problems. Welcome to decision variant of Goedel's second. Decisions and axioms (data points) are countable.

I don't think everybody has the capacity to be reckless. I think we are bounded by our temperament (nature + nurture). Some of us have exact perfectionist tendencies, and some of us have creative tendencies, and more. This is very much an oversimplification, but you can think of a Scientist as trying to get to the exact truth (in the realm of theory) and science as a field that aims for perfection. Engineers on the other hand are used to working with constraints and imperfect conditions (in the realm of practice), and the motto seems to be "get shit done" (a kind of pragmatism). And so sometimes you have to be a scientist and sometimes you have to be an engineer.

Science is also there to "get things done". You set out with a goal or stumble upon one. You have only limited time to go stumbling and digging too deep is only sometimes productive. But when it is, the results are profound if not immediately used or understandable. Like the one about decision or chance exchangeability. Regardless, mathematics is partially the art of building high order abstractions that explain the world, at the core. (And of course applied mathematics is the practice.) It is not a coincidence that it was mostly developed by people with many brain cycles to spare. There are many outdated (usually superseded, limited or outright meaningless, sometimes finished) branches of it too, which may not be apparent.

This was a hugely helpful insight for me. First, because I found it much easier to accept "deliberating has a cost, factor that in" than a generalized claim of "stop thinking so much". Second, because thinking more really does help sometimes. "Go with your gut" doesn't sit well with me; every once so often I think about a decision and notice that I've made some major oversight in my first assessment. Aiming for the 'right' amount of thinking, as a function of stakes and urgency and complexity, has been much better for controlling overthinking while still catching those mistakes.

I think going with your gut can be a fine solution, but it's probably worth assessing how well your gut has served you historically.

For me, my gut has generally been more right than my over-analytical mind. But I have a number of friends where I think it's the other way around.

This definitely seems like a "competing needs" thing. People repeat the advice that helps them, but different people need to adjust in different directions. "Look before you leap" versus "he who hesitates", I suppose.

There's an interesting result from studying people's prediction accuracy in which they improve simply by being asked to think about their answers and whether they're sure. For me, overthinking often leads me to explain away 'irrational' reactions that were quite accurate, but taking at least one extra look to say "has my first reaction missed something fundamental" is a lifesaver.

I've never really understood "Go with your gut", because my gut is still my brain.. I would be curious if individuals have a process for thinking. A kind of structured thinking, instead of all abstract. I've noticed that it's really important giving my abstract thoughts a solid form, either by writing them down or speaking in a conversation (even to myself). Helps a lot in refining them, and figuring out what exactly am I aiming towards.

> my gut is still my brain..

I think they mean deciding on the basis of preverbal emotional reactions, rather than on explicit values. That decision could be in reaction to outcomes you've already put a lot of thought into predicting, though.

That's interesting. I can empathize with most of what you said. How do you see self-reflection fitting into this? I spend way too much time self-reflecting on all the stuff I said and did throughout the day or the week. I try to think about how another person interpreted my actions, based on their level of familiarity with me. I have to force myself to just "go and do stuff" without constantly slipping into that.

Self-reflection when taken to the extreme becomes ruminating and dwelling on the past. I'd say bound your self-reflection time as well. And part of the mindset I guess is that you are imperfect and it's okay making mistakes. From my experience, the unbounded self-reflection mindset often becomes the always self-critical mindset. I've often found myself in a self-improvement loop where I'm so focused on improving that I'm not kind to myself. I had to consciously recognize and break that, and then go read some about self-compassion :)

Just accept that very little things in life are set in stone. Take a decision and then adapt, when the need arises.