Let's look at it this way: getting to have your cake and eat it too is certainly better than having to choose between the two options, but not having a cake which you can decide to eat (i.e. not having a choice) is even worse...

That's a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it', and I think it makes more sense if you go to that meaning (to act, free of consequence). Otherwise, you're just saying that having the option to eat cake is better than not having the option to eat it, which would strike most people as being quite obvious.

You can't really eat cake without first having a cake to eat. If you eat it, you don't have cake any more; if you don't, you still have cake.

Therefore, if you want to eat your cake and have it, you want to do something but don't want the consequence of it.

Somehow I though the cake idiom was similar to that french one: “vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (to want butter and money for butter) but it seems to differ more than I thought!

It’s about trying to exchange butter for money but thinking you could somehow end up with both, either intentionally by rigging a zero sum game to someone’s detriment, or mistakenly through a leap of flawed logic when one does not realise it’s zero sum, and thinks it can be outgamed with enough swapping around.

I'm 50 years old and have never understood that saying until now. Thank you!

> a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it'

I'm partial to "eat your cake and keep it too", FWIW; "have" is ambigous.

That's some of the rare philosophical aspect of finance/trading. Every body has sold assets that ended up exploding (Tesla or else, and bitcoin amplified this, many people had millions in their hand virtually but gave it up for a pizza).

It teaches you not to focus on regret and only care about risk/satisfaction ratio, and to keep moving.

This topic also tailor your sense of self too. When you made a few too many bad choices (job, relationship, location) you get a finer sense of what you want.

> Choice is usually portrayed as empowerment

I read this and thought maybe we as a culture are too hung up on empowerment, power, power-seeking, etc. You say true power is not needing to choose, I say why is it important to seek power at all?

I think the desire for power is understandable. We need to be able to adapt our environments, and adapt ourself to our environments, in order to survive. Arguably, power is the extent to which we can achieve that.

But you could look at it like this: by not choosing you are losing what you could have gained. I think. Maybe you are choosing the most optimal option, and giving up the lesser ones.