My wife was a pretty big win, and she was worth the opportunity cost of anything else I could've spent the time and effort for. My son, too. It's not really zero-sum unless you're using a strange metric.
It's not zero-sum in happiness, but it is zero-sum in time and possibilities. You certainly sound like you've found a good solution to the problem (i.e., maximizing happiness, avoiding sinking valuable time into things that don't)
I don't think my original post was that well-written actually, and the point I was trying to get across is probably better communicated as:
- Every hour you spend doing something is an hour you're not doing something else.
- What you do contributes directly to your happiness. It is non-obvious, especially when young, what contributes to happiness in the long run, and what doesn't. Hermit'ing up and writing code like a madman for a week, for example, will improve your programming skills, but will also exact a toll on your personal relationships. One gives a larger short-term rush on accomplishment and accolades, the other is a better bet at long-term satisfaction.
- It is also sometimes non-obvious (especially when young) of just how much you're missing out on or damaging in your unrelenting pursuit of "winning". Your obsession with winning can also blind you as to just how good the reward is.
It's more or less a generalized form of something I've thought about over the last couple of years - human relationships matter above any material achievement. All the trophies, medals, and awards in the world pale in comparison to good relationships. And there are no easy hacks for relationships, they take a great deal of time and effort - and running an extreme "achiever" lifestyle poses an extreme risk to that.
I fucked that up in high school, and some of college, and it took meeting someone with a far better grok on life than I do to set me straight. I'm hoping fewer people fall into that trap.
I wish I could vote you up 100 times. I only am learning this lesson in middle age, and I’m coming to regret having shut myself off to others in high school and college. (Though it wasn’t just career; I also had fundamentalist baggage to jettison.)
Now I'll certainly agree that every decision made rules out other possible options, and hence there is an ever present opportunity cost for all decisions.
Yourself, I imagine. My meaning with the term is that every win (measured by some metric) for you is also an equal and opposite loss for yourself (measured in some other metric).
> "and hence there is an ever present opportunity cost for all decisions."
Well said. My point of my post was that often we are dismissive about these opportunity costs (I know I was, along with my other overachieving peers), and often not fully aware of their scope.
To bring some specificity to vague concepts: I didn't put the time in to really socialize, connect, and date during high school. I did better at it during college, but to be perfectly honest I still put too much time towards achievements that don't in the end make me happier. I'm still recovering from the effects of that now; IMHO it's easy for high-performers (in the scholastic sense) to be blindsided by this later on. I've had more than one depressing/uncomfortable conversation where the true cost of this sacrifice dawns upon a high-performer. I've had this realization myself.
If your metrics are real metrics, and actually have some bearing on utility/happiness, that can't be true.
The trivial counterexample is a situation where you're attempting to get out of a burning building. No metric I personally would use would give the option of dying in a fire equal weight to the opportunity cost of the rest of your life.
And there are countless lesser examples where there's a "losing" choice and a "winning" choice when we're going across the tree of all possible life outcomes.
I've "won" at a large number of things throughout my life, some of which I wholeheartedly value, others I consider to have been an unwise waste of time. To win at something you must sacrifice another, and the bigger the win the bigger the loss on the other end. When you see a huge win but no downside, check your surroundings and tread carefully.
Unless you've invented ways to artifically extend your lifespan, or have tripped into a time warp, time is the ultimate limiting factor in everything.
The author mentions that he often wished to have a "normal" childhood, but then dismisses that (all too quickly, IMHO) given the scope of his accomplishments. This is not to denigrate his achievements in the least, but rather that in hindsight many of the things that I sacrificed and fought for had hidden costs that didn't make themselves evident until much later on.
The advantage of leading at least a marginally "normal" childhood is your ability to identify, internalize, and connect - something I dismissed in my youth as being either irrelevant, or fixable later. It is definitely not the former, and the latter gets exponentially harder as you get older.
All in all, this is not a discouragement from going nuts and working hard, but rather a strong warning that one's time resources are severely limited even if you push your body to the limit, and that the price you pay for these achievements is non-zero and often hidden.