the physics of choice
i’ve always used analogies to make sense of things. the world feels less like chaos when you can map one thing onto another, when you can see patterns in places they weren’t meant to be. like how social media is a hacked version of real life—dopamine on demand, without the friction of actual human connection. or how caffeine is a hacked version of sleep—borrowing energy you don’t have, a loan you have to pay back with interest.
but i didn’t realize, until much later, that these hacks weren’t just isolated cases. they reveal something bigger about how we move through the world. people are like balls rolling through a vector field—nudged, pulled, slowed down, redirected. incentives shape our movement, but we don’t teleport to our goals. we roll there, pushed by forces we sometimes don’t even recognize.
think about it. you don’t become a writer by banging out a single essay and calling it done. you become a writer by embedding writing into your daily incentives—by ensuring that the natural slope of your life tilts in that direction. if you want to stay fit, you’ll need to keep your vector field in the direction of draining your long term battery (adipose tissue) not your day-to-day battery (glycogen) by fasting one day and thinking the few pounds of water weight you lost is actual weight (Karpathy). the trick isn’t just setting goals. it’s structuring the field around you so that rolling toward them becomes inevitable.
but here’s where it gets interesting. humans don’t like rolling along the natural vector field. we like shortcuts. we like hacks. the easiest route, the fastest dopamine hit, the illusion of progress.
you see this everywhere. students gaming the system, sharing test answers in group chats. people devouring productivity hacks instead of doing the actual work. the idea is always the same: find a way to jump straight to the goal instead of moving through the field. but hacks have a cost. they don’t materialize into anything lasting. drink caffeine to wake up, and you crash harder later. cheat on a test, and you learn nothing, which catches up to you eventually. use steroids to get stronger, and your body forgets how to sustain real muscle growth.
we think we’re outsmarting the system, but more often than not, we’re just deferring consequences. like dumb creatures trying to sprint across a field that was never meant to be sprinted across, convinced there’s always a way out.
at the end of the day, we’re all rolling balls, and our incentives shape the path we take. you can hack your way from zero to google, from zero to stanford, chase status for the sake of it—but long term, you as a ball in the vector field wouldn’t be satisfied. you wouldn’t understand the right incentives, the ones that lead to real fulfillment.
don’t hack the system. enjoy the process, enjoy your education, enjoy your friends, enjoy nature, enjoy your food. and most importantly, enjoy being yourself.