Not sure the title here is optimal – I was about to write “emotional alienation is the reason only higher order utility actually is optimal, the others mostly must be sub-optimized”.
Sometimes we talk about short-term incentives and behavior vs. long-term benefit. People often consider that it could be optimal to pursue short-term objectives such as food gluttony, as the increased short-term benefit outweighs the loss of 20ish years of life.
Increasingly I doubt this is a correct viewpoint:
- Sleep clearly is something that you can do whenever you feel like it, with no significant ill effects.
- The taste utility of eating rapidly rolls off; the actual act of eating (e.g. vs. socializing at the table) doesn’t take more than a couple of hours per day.
- Eating too much makes you not feel good afterwards and has productivity impacts.
- Lack of exercise ultimately will catch up with you far sooner than 20ish years – more like 40ish good years lost due to arthritis and other issues. Similar issues with abusive hobbies like staring at your phone all the time.
- Moreover, improper exercise such as excessively long workouts, dangerous sports, and running on pavement can get you chronic pain, and forced addtional exercise activity, much earlier.
- Even relatively low and not highly targeted investment in your career and job skills ultimately can wind out paying out additional millions of dollars, as well as significantly increased job security and reduced work hours (critical to enjoy other things).
- Short-term promiscuous sex leads to chronic illness, also you miss out on some of the benefits of having companions you actually can rely upon.
- Finding a good spouse is far more beneficial the earlier you can do it, so spending time on flings has significant opportunity cost.
- Video games, books, media, concerts, etc. actually are good short-term uses that don’t have long-term consequences beyond opportunity costs.
- The best drug usage (heroin etc.) burns you out in a few years and leaves you wanting for the rest of your life.
So if we look at the broad classes of things you can do impulsively/listening to your body and not incur future utility losses that clearly offset the short-term benefit, your best options are sleep, recovery-type workouts (but that is a cop-out because you have to know what those are, it’s not really impulsive), sex and other bonding activities with your committed partner, and media consumption.
Moreover, there is a high degree of disassociation between the progression toward the long-term problems, and the symptomatic onset of the long-term problems – so that you have to start with a rational approach, instead of listening to your body. The consequences of overeating, or malnutrition, aren’t immediate and it isn’t obvious how you rectify. Errors in nutrition will take months or years to show up, and at that point some of the damage (tooth decay, weight gain, artery hardening) may be unrecoverable. Furthermore, your hunger signal is not the same as your body’s actual nutritional needs (both for athletes and non-athletes) so you can’t listen to your body as a specific guide. Likewise, you see people tearing up their knees running on pavement, doing workouts with improper form, etc. but the consequences can be permanent and not manifested for months or even decades.
Economically, just working hard, and feeling like you worked hard, of course has a poor correlation with how much you get paid – and the benefit of high income may be 20+ good years of life, intact family, etc. but you don’t know those consequences until much later.
Along with the preceding, the problem I increasingly struggle with in accepting that gluttony and excess could be optimal is that the time periods are so mismatched. If you are stuffing your face for 3 hours a day, you still have 11-13 hours that you have to get through. The utility of stuffing your face has to be extremely high and the consequences for the remainder of your life have to be extremely mild. If you think about highly euphoric drugs, these can have the extremely high effect that can justify other items. Hence the individual in question has to have a nervous chemistry that triggers massive amounts of pleasure – but even that isn’t quite it. Usually drug addicts have to take up vice occupations in order to feed their habit, with ill consequences like shortening their lifespan by 20+ years. Optimally, you would want to feed your habit to the maximum cumulative extent; that is, you would want to have a longer life so you could get in as many binges as possible. That means you have to mitigate the consequences of your short-term behavior. For overeating, you would have to be able to hold down a job and control the weight gain, but controlling that weight means a tremendously disciplined and well-crafted fitness regimen to avoid joint deterioration. It may also mean a heavy medication regimen to accelerate the weight loss. In other words, intense discipline and work has to accompany the short-term behavior in order to get the maximum number of binges.
It’s this combination of “your body isn’t telling you the truth/isn’t a reliable indicator of long-term consequences” and the implications of saying an individual really does have a massive desire for something that has short-term benefit and long-run detriment, that leads me increasingly to consider that reacting in the moment is incorrect for almost everyone. Rather, there should be a series of (say 10 or so) life routines that you try out and see which is the best. These would be supplemented with some deviant ones (like sex addiction) that of course you can’t really try out.