Trade-offs

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H.L. MENCKEN

The other day I was having a convo with my brother about his college experience. For most people, college is a time of partying and experimenting with drugs and/or homosexuality punctuated by periods of cramming for examinations. For my brother who was an engineering major, it was a lot of hours and summers spent in the books. It was a trade-off. He could be a good student, or he could be a debauched hedonist. But he could not be both.

This is what Wikipedia says a trade-off is:

In economics the term is expressed as opportunity cost, referring to the most preferred alternative given up. A trade-off, then, involves a sacrifice that must be made to obtain a certain product, rather than other products that can be made using the same required resources. For a person going to a basketball game, its opportunity cost is the money and time expended, say that would have been spent watching a particular television program.

You only have so much time, money, and energy at your disposal. Making a choice to do one thing involves making a choice not to do something else. I call this the Principle of Preclusion. You can't be both a world class marathoner and a world class bodybuilder at the same time. One activity precludes the other. It also puts to rest any ambitions I might have had at being a Renaissance Man. Even Leonardo could not pull off that feat.

This preclusion principle makes me wonder why people have so many regrets in life. For many people, a regret is wishing they had turned left instead of right in the paths of their lives. But I find most of these regrets to be nonsense. Somewhere, my brother probably regrets not partying more in college and having more experiences. Meanwhile, there is a college dropout somewhere wishing he had buckled down harder in school and laid off the booze and the nymphomaniac girlfriend at least until he graduated.

The regrets people have are opportunity costs, and opportunity costs are infinite. This is why people with fewer choices express fewer regrets because their decisions were made for them. As people get older, they tend to get happier for much the same reasons. For others, the woulda coulda shouldas of life are more than they can bear. This is what led Michael Jordan to forsake basketball for a short lived and ludicrous career in baseball. The reality is that you can't be the greatest basketball player and a decent baseball player at the same time. One precludes the other.

It matters how we spend our time and resources. As Mencken points out, you can't be a great composer or a playwright and also be good at shooting pool or have a decent score in golf. This is why I think people with an abundance of hobbies are deluding themselves and wasting their time. My own free time is filled with reading and writing essays and fiction. I do this to such an extreme that my housekeeping has gotten really bad. My most recent hobby has been becoming a gun nut, but it is damn expensive. I estimate that the cost of a single meaningful trip to the range to be 50 bucks. Ammo is pricey even when you buy it from Walmart. The most I will ever manage is a monthly visit. Bowling is way cheaper. But I think firearms proficiency is a necessity as opposed to a hobby. It is more akin to getting daily exercise or doing upkeep on your vehicle.

Regret is one problem with trade-offs. The other is unsustainability. This is when people make a trade-off but refuse to acknowledge that a trade-off has been made. This is the person who opts to spend their days high on drugs but insists on living in a house, having groceries, electricity, etc. These people are a pain in the ass to everyone else. This isn't just bums. It can be people who seemingly have their shit together. I used to have a boss who was a triathlete. His boss was always in his ass because he spent more time training for his triathlons than tending to his career. The same thing can be said of the family man who spends too much time in the office. Here are certain trade-offs that many people refuse to acknowledge:

-You can't be in shape and also spend your weekends watching other people in shape participate in sports on TV.

-You can't drive to parties and clubs and drink heavily and keep a clean driving record.

-You can't be a good husband and also bang your secretary.

-You can't work hard and play hard. In fact, you can't play hard without sponsorship or poverty. And no, surfing for a couple of hours on Sunday is not playing hard. You're a pretender.

I can go on and on with examples. I find most conflicts come when people refuse to accept the choices they have made and the accompanying trade-off. These fools are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. But it doesn't work this way.

Every so often, some clever motherfucker will come along and claim to have beaten this whole trade-off thing. He may even write a bestseller telling how you can do the same thing. Usually, it involves diet and exercise without effort, loafing instead of working, getting rich quick, and learning how to be at peace with a bitch wife. I would tell people they should go straight to the horse's ass if they want horseshit.

The hard truth is that most things in life worth having or doing is accompanied by hard work and sacrifice. To have money to invest, you must consume less. To have fitness, you must abandon the couch. To lose weight, you must toss the Twinkies. On and on with the trade-offs. This is why simplifying your life is so effective at improving your life. By letting things go, you free up resources. You aim more at the things that truly matter to you. You focus on your strengths and capitalize on them. You have fewer regrets because you know happiness does not come from more options but from more accomplishments. You quit rethinking your choices because either way you were losing something but also gaining something.

Beethoven sucked at billiards. Goethe sucked at golf. But they were good at what they did. Maybe they regretted not doing those other things. I don't know. But those regrets make no sense. Life is full of trade-offs, and you can't escape them. It is only in our daydreams that we can have it all and do it all. To be real, you must simplify.

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