Not everything needs to get bigger, more efficient, more profitable. Harmony is better than growthHarmony is better than growth
Growth without harmony is destructive, cheap and tacky. Anybody can do it, as long as they don't Consider side effects.
Growth is a part of harmony, along with decay, and stasis, and nonexiste....
An optimized system can be harder to maintain, so leaving things in a Good Enough state is a way to Be kind to Future YouBe kind to Future You
(Unless you can think of a better way to treat Future You?)
Here are some ways to do it:
Avoid debt, avoid jail
Earn enough to save
Decouple income from time spent working
....
You have to Be careful when optimizing something you can easily measureBe careful when optimizing something you can easily measure
It's easy to measure clicks on a website, and reasonbly simple to optimize for clicks. But clicks don't make you money.
It's easy to measure revenue, and not too hard to optimize for it. But that..., because they're often not the things worth your attention. And if you find out that the most important things aren't amenable to measurement or optimization, the best policy might just be "optimize nothing."
(One probable exception: Optimize for discretionary timeOptimize for discretionary time
Because time is all we have.
.)