Light with shadows: Finding your cost function

Cost function is well understood if not the necessary first step in any optimization problem in many engineering domains. Optimization cannot happen without a cost function to measure and concepts of local vs global min/max doesn't arise without a metric to start. I wonder then if most people have a life cost function or even have the concept framework to think about it as such? One of the best things about a cost function is that it forces you to break down into components and figure out the weighted sum or some kind of coherent equation. Using a list like this maybe helpful to coming up with rough components, Regrets of the Dying in alphabetical order:

• Friends/Relationships
• Health
• Job/Career
• Love/Family
• Money

from Weighted Sum Model

Some may wish to add Truth/Authenticity, Impact/Legacy, Altruism, Knowledge, Wisdom or any number of other components as separate categories, or they may collapse their thinking into one of the five listed above. Either way, the main exercise is to come up with coefficients or weights that are normalized. This is a fancy way of saying, “come up with the %'s for w so it adds up to 100% - unless you have a life cheat code”.

We can see that it's a cost function, because it usually costs something. One of the tenets of engineering is that everything is a tradeoff; can't have it all, so optimization would necessarily require choosing one over another. Perhaps on your deathbed, if you had been optimizing one, there will be no lamentation about losing out on another. If life is about a series of choices, then the actual skill to cultivate is learning to live with the full consequences of such choices. Perhaps the difficulty is what makes it an Art of Living and not an exact science.