Nash Equilibrium for life?
Our everyday decisions create a major impact in how our future will turn out to be. It’s amazing to think that we are literally one decision away from a whole new life. So far up to this point in our lives, every decision that we have made has led us to this exact moment, you reading this blog post. One change in any of our decision making in the past could have potentially put us in a whole different situation right now where you aren’t reading this blog post. So, with every decision that we make in our everyday lives, we have probability p for saying yes to a decision and 1-p for rejecting the decision. However, p isn’t simply .5 for all of these decision that us humans come across everyday. For example, getting out of bed in the morning is definitely not a half and half decision because there’ll be times where we want to stay in longer or maybe we wake up feeling sick. There are many hidden variables that play out in our decision making so calculating p is almost impossible. However, can there be a way where we can balance all of life’s challenges and still be happy? Nowadays, mental health is heavily stressed, more than ever before and I strongly believe that if there was a way to make all the right decisions at the right moments, can we create an equilibrium where we can honestly say that our life is balanced?
A concept that will allow me to further explain how these decisions, even the small ones, can make a change in the future is the Chaos Theory, more importantly, the Butterfly Effect AKA “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” This idea was discovered by MIT meteorologist, Edward Lorenz. A demonstration of how the butterfly effect can be seen in our everyday lives is the weather. From https://lewisgametheory.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/game-theory-intution-and-the-butterfly-effect/ , it discusses how Lorenz tried to find a way to correctly predict the weather for an extended period, however, he came realize early on that it is impossible because of all the lingering factors that aren’t considered.
From this YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w40fxsyraE (Definitely give it a view if you have extra time!), you can find out more about The Butterfly Effect and how your everyday decisions now will create a major impact for your future. For example, learning a new skill that will help you land a job after your time at the college level.
This idea can perhaps be visualized as a matrix, not 100%, where every column will represent as a yes to a decision An where n will be the number of decisions made in a day and every row will represent as a no to decision Bn such that An + Bn = 1. Not sure how each payoff will work but that’ll depend on what you see as important. So for example, let’s say it’s a Friday night and you are stuck whether to study for an exam on Thursday or go to a movie with friends. Which would you decide? What are the payoffs of each one? What are your priorities? So in a decision like this, the payoffs for each decision will be solely based on an individual since we were all born to not be the same. But now to extend this from one decision to the multiple that will happen in a day, can there be a way to optimize ourselves as individuals and live a happy, balanced life?
Maybe the secret to life is finding our optimal probability p to attain this perfectly balanced life that I’m more than sure a lot of us are striving for at the moment. Thanks for the taking the time out of your day to read this post and I hope you have an AMAZING day!