We've all heard this saying:
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Its meaning varies a little from domain to domain, and here I'm homing in on one facet common to some of these meanings.
In economics, a core observation is that arbitrage is undermined by the flow of information. By observing and modeling market conditions in novel ways, one may gain some temporary advantages, but as other parts of the market catch up in awareness, conditions revert to mean. Despite arbitrage having a reputation as a free money opportunity, staying ahead of the market would (theoretically) require its own form of ongoing and highly nontrivial work. In other words, there is no free lunch.
In computer science, abstractions in a programming language must be implemented in terms of an actual machine, and there might be separate implementations that honor the same abstraction but have different performance characteristics. Decades of research has produced, for many problems, multiple implementation strategies whose performances are incomparable: better in some cases, worse in others. Optimizations along one implementation choice can even conflict with optimizations related to entirely different abstractions. One gets a feeling no one true most efficient system of implementations is possible, that your programming environment can only grow more specialized at some tasks at the expense of others. In other words, there is no free lunch.
Recently I've been studying programming as a hobby, and this phenomenon in my work has found eery resonance with my own cognitive behavior.
Maybe it's the result of being cooped up indoors for a year, with only so many things to tend to. Maybe it's the culmination of psychopharmacological shift in the year I've been off SSRIs. Maybe it's been my hobby of studying programming language implementation, deeply folding my mind along efficiency-wringing shapes. But lately it's as if the Conscientiousness and Neroticism of my Big Five are having an affair: I've had this ongoing drive to do more work now with the intention of working less in the future, and spending any leftover time scrutinizing the details around me for opportunities to further perfect them.
Fortunately, this isn't my first lap around this track, and my past experience has taught me some things:
- What I'm describing is only (a caricature of) an urge. It is not the way things must be. My behavior may be different.
- Doing the urge's bidding would eventually hurt me.
- Doing the urge's bidding would make me less functional.
- Doing the urge's bidding would not even help the future very much.
Before I continue this list, I'll point right here ^^^ to the thematic connection: While some planning and preparation is good, above some amount it exceeds its own benefit, and what you get is a failed attempt at a free lunch. Moreover, the activity usually continues unless consciously interrupted—planning and preparing for the future always, without space in the present to enjoy the fruits of past labor. - I can train myself to notice the urge.
- I can train myself to notice, following the urge, the separate point of choice in my response to it.
- I can choose instead a response of, on the one hand, compassion towards the urge, and on the other hand, something more useful in my behavior.
In other words, there is a pull towards obsessive-compulsive mental functioning in my present life, and mindfulness is my first line of defense and is a tremendous help. In the heart of my keeping my mind healthy is regularly reminding myself that there is no free lunch.