> It's not naive to try and optimize learning to help maximize a fulfilling life. The time in life to learn is finite and therefore choices have to be made. Th

> It's not naive to try and optimize learning to help maximize a fulfilling life. The time in life to learn is finite and therefore choices have to be made. There's lots of enjoyment to be had in learning things that aren't immediately (or even remotely) useful, and there's often a lot of unanticipated utility in learning things that are pursued for pure enjoyment. There are entire fields in mathematics that were/are pursued for personal enjoyment and later proved to be incredibly useful (or might never be!). > Not every subject has equal importance. It would also be naive to think every subject or skill has equal relevance to a particular person's life and therefore one can just choose randomly. I'm not saying you need to choose your pursuits randomly or without account of the time they take, but I think making these choices only for monetary gain or purely on some basis of what utility you think they'll provide is a pretty joyless existence in either case, and w/ the latter consideration is a pretty naive accounting of your ability to meaningful assess an "opportunity cost". Leisure activity, learning for learning's sake, broadening your cultural horizons, etc. are all worthwhile things in my book. If you're talking about opportunity cost in a fuzzy "there are other things I'd rather learn, or some particular thing seems more useful to me now" kind of way, that's a goofy metaphor and an unhelpful insight in the context of offering advice about what things to learn. > (I learned that lesson very late in life. In my 20s, I was very careless and carefree about what I learned and I squandered away a lot of valuable years. I wasn't discriminating enough about the topics I spent time on.) Without any context into what you think was squandered by learning other things, it's impossible for me to appreciate your POV on this, but it seems unlikely to me that you lost all that much.