Of Life's Tricky Buffet
Imagine waiting in line to a scrumputuous buffet table, catering the most wondrous meals in the world. It’s such an unusual buffet for you are to be given one hour to to choose a dish among all others; one meal from the table which will be the only one you could have for the rest of the evening. Of course, you’ll set out to pick the best of the lot but there’s a catch: You can only put one meal at a time on your plate, and not all meals will be available at all times; within an hour, some dishes might fade away in only a few minutes, or some in just a few seconds, staying to exist only when you choose it. Another catch: Once you tasted a meal and decide to choose another, you can never get that same dish again. Given this situation, how would you choose?
This is actually a problem decision theorists call as one of sequential search and optimal stopping, high-falutin’ ways to describe how we go about trying to find the best things for us, with ‘best’ understood as the that one choice that would make us happy or content over the longest period of time. This problem is obviously very prominent in real-life: choosing a career or finding your one true love are very glaring examples, for in choosing any of those, we are actually trying to decide how the rest of our lives would go. This is actually very difficult because choices in real-life are not necessarily laid out for us in one neat row of choices, ready to be picked. We have to contend with our own states of mind and with time itself, balancing the two factors with the usual requisites of optimal decision-making when finally making our choice.
The choices that we had when we were young will not be the same 25 years after because our own personal experiences will have changed us. Some choices which were at the fore when we were kids might have been placed on the back burner, or for some, completely eliminated. How many of us have actually pushed through with our dreams to be an adventurer, a magician, or a rock star? Also, have we experienced adding more options and stocking up on choices — let’s say scouting out all the tourist spots in one vacation site — only to find out that you’ll get only 20 minutes worth on the actual pick because we spent too much time increasing our options?
The puzzle actually is in determining when to keep searching, and when to stop. It should have been easy if each succeeding option is better than the previous one — because that means the more we spend time searching the higher the probability will get the “best one” in the end — but real life plays dice more often than not. We will never be too sure when we’re actually letting go of something special. How would we really know?
The only thing that I could think of right now is to try to commit and to choose more. We’d have to give it a try first before we can fully be sure what that choice is all about. If we are juggling so many options at one time, then that means lesser time being spent on each one, lowering the chance of getting to know about each choice better. Needless to say, we can’t place equal weight on each choice, and give equal chances to all. To be able to enjoy an experience further, we have to limit our experience to that choice, even only for a time.
The thing is, whether it’s about career or about love, how can we know if it will work if we don’t give it our all?
