How To Avoid Peaking In University
Don’t Get Stuck in Local Maxima
When someone has an overly romanticised view of a period in the past (usually an era when they were young) — we say they ‘peaked’.
Maybe they peaked in university. Or maybe they peaked in high school.
It’s quite a brutal, if not jealous, insult. ‘Peaked’ implies that someone’s life will not get better than or even as good as it once was.
This insult implies that someone is stuck in (or trying to return to) local maxima.
In mathematics, local maximum refers to a point in a graph that appears higher than all other points in its nearby vicinity but is not the highest point overall.
Local maxima can be anything. About the university experience, or just youth in general, ‘local maximum’ is a period where a person reaches a peak in a specific area — whether it’s academic performance, status, or self-gratification. So much so, that they wish to remain in this state.
A local maximum is a peak that does not represent someone’s true potential for happiness, intelligence, pleasure or love, it just appears to. A global maximum represents one’s true potential, and many don’t reach it. They fall into the many traps that exist post-graduation.
Sometimes they are also stuck in Local Minimum. They went from peaking to troughing. Their tremendous high went to a devastating low.
After university, many people go from getting plastered multiple times a week and living in a manipulative holiday resort to suddenly working in a boring 9 to 5 and watching the tremendous social circle they once had, slowly decay.
To cope with the drudgery of this 9 to 5 life, they spend every weekend trying to relive the glory days.
They’re overly nostalgic for the past. They’re attached to their memories, their old identity and unable to embrace their new one.
Instead of cutting down the far-too-normalised level of drinking that is prevalent in university, they continue these habits in adulthood.
Instead of trying to make new friends with different personalities, they stick with their old circle. Instead of exploring new relationships, they hold every new relationship to the benchmark of the thrill-filled ‘first love’ in university.
Instead of trying new skills or pursuing new hobbies, they assume their identity is already fixed. They can’t play an instrument because they’re not ‘musical’. They can’t start a blog because they aren’t ‘creative’ enough.
They lie to themselves, because they think who they are is who they will always be.
The Solution
We all might get stuck in wanting to return to local maxima from time to time — thinking that a generic experience such as university was as good as our life was ever going to get, but we have to stop ourselves.
Nostalgia isn’t a bad thing. But the idea that if we could go back to the past, we would certainly be happier there, is driven by the same short-run but fallacious thinking that even computer programs cannot fall victim to.
For computer algorithms to avoid local maxima they have to do a variety of things — dimensionality reduction, noise injection, regularisation and more…
Luckily, for human beings, the solution is a lot simpler.
To avoid the trap of local maxima we simply have to remember one thing:
Our standards for life should not be based on nostalgia, which is a very permanent, but unreliable sensation.
If we fall victim to our nostalgia (so much that we try to retain or renew experiences from the past) we will restrict our growth, failing to ever reach global maxima.
