In today's world the expectations of what we can achieve are unrealistic. We have become accustomed to optimizing everything: not just production processes, but also our activities, health and relationships. And sure, why would we not want to achieve the best?

We tend to forget that life does not always proceed as we wish. Optimization is a theoretical mathematical concept that assumes that all necessary parameters are known: conditions of the world, how our actions change the world and what we want the world to be like. But is this possible?

When I plan my day, I cannot foresee who is going to call me, which bugs I am going to find in todoListo that need fixing, how long each of my tasks will take. I might not know exactly how this blog article is going to be (if I knew, I would have already written it). And I may not even be able to fully specify the goal or purpose of my working day. Finish a certain task? Get as much done as possible? Work on interesting things? Live a fulfilling life?

As a species we have managed to build ourselves a relatively safe and predictable environment. We order items from an online shop and can be pretty sure that we will have them in a few days. We can program our ovens to heat to a precise temperature and stop after a certain time. We have timetables for public transport and online maps to predict our driving time.

But there are limits to prediction. The parcel with my order may get lost. I can program my oven, but I may not be able to know in advance when the particular cake will be done. There are things like traffic jams and bad weather that prolong my journey.

We are so used to predictions that we treat them as a given fact and get annoyed when some incident destroys our well-optimized plan. And instead of accepting life as an adventure that we cannot fully predict or plan, we are putting more and more effort into measuring parameters and improving predictions. But crystal balls don't exist.

So without reliable parameters and predictions, optimization doesn't work. We still can try to do our best, but the best doesn't mean to optimize, but to choose courses of actions that still work if our predictions (or wishes) fail.