" Lately the best strategy seems to be doing as little as possible and riding the hills as they grow around me" I am not quite convinced that this solution is

" Lately the best strategy seems to be doing as little as possible and riding the hills as they grow around me" I am not quite convinced that this solution is universal (which is a claim you didn't make) or practical for a large set of people. What does it translate to in more tangible terms? Refuse to go to school/seek a better job/invest in something more worth one's time in wait for an unexpected propulsion to the top of a hill? I agree that the hills are rather unstable and various unaccounted for factors can cause the searching algorithm to fail. Most often being that we fail to account for all the other dimensions which also have hills that somehow need attention. One dimension is profits and it is a very popular hill, but all of a sudden you hit a point and realize that there exists a hill in health, and relationship, and personal growth, etc. What do we do as a response? Stop searching? I doubt it. It might be better to instead, accept the fact that our algorithm will never provide the perfect solution; that to optimize for one dimension (income, for example), we will have to sacrifice optimizations in other dimensions (relationships, leisure etc.) due to a finite resources and constraints outside our control, and in doing that, define priorities. The priorities need not be final values, but mutable based on environmental conditions. Today, a 60hr week might be a reasonable priority in order to - or at least, in the hopes of being able to - eventually drop that to 20hr weeks and 40 hours with family and other interests. [btw, great analogy]