My friend and I were talking about what our future selves might say to us now. The whole thought experiment is meant to be wise, reflective, but it always ends up revealing something else: how desperate the mind is to force life into a linear shape. “If I just knew this one thing earlier, I would’ve avoided all that pain.” Yeah, maybe. But that logic is a trap. It assumes you could’ve learned the lesson without living the situation. Which is impossible. The knowing comes from the living. The error is the education. To wish it gone is to wish away the very thing that made the knowing possible. It’s tautological. A kind of emotional time travel that flatters the ego with the illusion of control.
It’s just the mind trying to secure certainty. To make life feel causal and clean. But it’s not. Life doesn’t move in lines. It unfolds. You can’t reverse-engineer it like a puzzle. You act, you fuck up, you feel, you adjust. The sequence isn’t always visible in real time. Often you only understand what something meant years later, in a completely different context.
What you want does happen—just not how you want it. That’s the strange generosity of life. When you try to dictate the how, you suffer. When you let go of the choreography, you start to move with reality instead of fighting it.
That’s what’s shifted for me. I don’t cling to outcomes the way I used to. I have a vision, but I’m not attached to the map. I used to measure myself against an invisible yardstick—“Am I making enough progress?” But enough according to who? That pressure came from nowhere real. I just don’t think like that anymore. And in not caring, I’m… content? Maybe even happy. It’s weird like that.
My answer to the future-self question was sobering: Clinging to anything too tightly makes life shit. Whether it’s a goal, an identity, a relationship, or some fantasy of mastery. It perverts the process. It makes you rush. It makes you self-flagellate. It blinds you to where you are.
Process over product. Inappropriate time pressure kills creativity. Scarcity mindset poisons desire. Perfect is the enemy of good.
The best parts of life grow naturally—like Christopher Alexander’s “unfolding.” Each step builds on the integrity of the one before it. Nothing is imposed, only revealed. My biggest wins came this way—organically, through curiosity, alignment, presence. Every time I forced an outcome, I paid for it. The worst failures weren’t bad luck; they were premature intervention. Like Donald Knuth said: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” He meant code. But it applies to life just as cleanly.
And this is where the centipede’s dilemma cuts deep. Ask a centipede which leg moves first, and it trips. The same thing happens when you interrogate the unfolding too closely. Too much reflection, too much “what would my future self say,” and you forget how to move. Paralysis by self-awareness. Endless personal development spirals that replace action with analysis. You mistake surveillance for maturity. Control for wisdom.
That’s the trap. The obsession with certainty, optimisation, foresight. It feels productive because measuring gives the illusion of control. But control is brittle. You don’t get the fruit without the chaos. You can’t skip the trench. You don’t get the system before the sweat.
The answer is not to engineer, but to garden. Cultivate. Give things space. Let meaning emerge, don’t extract it. Practise guided serendipity: get curious, work on what draws your energy, let time do its work. Growth isn’t a lever to be pulled—it’s an ecology to be tended.
Sometimes the best optimisation is none at all. Just let it unfold.