October 2025
Life often feels simulated. Nothing novel, but life has recently been thought of as a large scale simulation, in which our world is simply one of many. While there are moments that push me towards this belief, I find myself viewing life as some game god likes to play with us mere mortals. Just to be clear this is not necessary an evil thing, rather it could be viewed in the context of the ‘life is a test’ framework popular amongst all religions. Without delving too deeply into religion in this piece, I do find my own experiences confirming this framework. Too many times to count I’ll find myself reliving the same problems of my past, meeting a fork in the road—do I change my reaction from how I’ve historically reacted, or try my hand with what I know best—habit. When these situations do happen to me, I find myself looking to the one above in quite a disbelief. Is he trying to test how I’ll change my response?Is there a correct response here to begin with? Often times the scenarios will mirror each other quite significantly leaving me no choice but to learn from my past and change my reactions—otherwise I’d be falling into the insanity of trial and error. Other times the scenario varies slightly more, forcing me to try my old habits on a slightly new scenario. So why label this as living vs learning from the past? It’s simple. The more scenarios I find myself using the tactics of the past, the stronger those habituals tactics become. Extrapolation becomes deterministic, meaning eventually any similar situation will be met with the same action and reaction, thereby solidifying a habit into a character trait. I classify this sort of occurrence as living the past. Scenarios that occur enough times in my life, that are met with the same reaction will lead to a perpetual cycle of action that is historically identical. No learning involved here, merely execution. The polar opposite is learning from the past. Extrapolating previous scenarios and altering the reactions to the current slightly different situations means you are leveraging your past, but more importantly you are learning from the failures of your past. To get somewhat nerdy here, I like to think of this from the lens of reinforcement learning. Within this field of AI, you have two potential actions of a system to maximize its reward; exploration or exploitation. Exploration refers to the system looking for new methods to gain some reward that it has previously not done, and exploitation refers to using a previously learned strategy to gain some reward. Obviously the analogy is pretty parallel. If you continuously use tactics of the past, you may never learn the strategies that increase your reward even higher. So what’s the right strategy? I’m not entirely sure to be honest. I think the reinforcement learning analogy still holds. Often times, Reinforcement learning systems will leverage exploration early on in their training, and switch over to exploitation once enough strategies have been explored. I do believe something similar holds for our life. It’s impossible to start exploiting if your initial strategies hold some faults. Naturally this is easier said than done, humans are most comfortable with what they know, and exploration can be a scary thing especially in the context of high stakes decisions. This is something I’m still learning. While exploitation holds comfort, repeated exploitation with low reward leads one to the brink of insanity. Less so a solution but more so a reflective piece, I believe the key to weighing the approaches is to truly take a step back and realize you’re facing the decision in the first place. In other words, document the fork in the road, how it resembles a previous situation, and the outcomes if you were to execute an exploitation or exploratory approach. Eventually you will develop a mental framework for what works, what does not work, and your propensity to explore will decrease over time—thereby lowering your risk and maximizing your reward on average. Here’s something that might drive you insane, as it does for me, no matter how many exploratory scenarios you conduct, there may always be an action in the playing field that is optimal. Unless you spend your whole life exploring, or you’re freakishly lucky, you may never find this action. The best you can do is get close.