5  Allocating time and energy

Avoiding excessive limitation

Do not excessively limit connection. For example, if you are reading this because of a desire to find a relationship: when you are in a room, and everyone else in the room is known to not fulfill your absolutely mandatory criteria (correct religion, single, etc.), you should still make the most of the situation. Completely avoid these:

  • Thinking that most bonding with them would be disordered
  • Excessively narrow view of what can be platonic
  • Fear of “leading on”

Here’s the biggest reasons to connect with them:

  • Limited connection is incompatible with habituating the fastest possible trigger for connection.
  • It allows the habits involved in connecting with everyone to be good enough and grow fast enough.
  • When analyzing the experience later, you might learn about yourself and what you admire in other people.
  • It prevents you from having an unnecessary disadvantage if someone later fulfills your criteria.
  • Connection is complicated. For example, knowledge about how good you are could spread to other people.
  • Excessive frequent change in your level of activity is bad.
  • Connection by itself is good.

Choices

When there’s multiple possibilities of people to interact with in the same time frame, restrict direct access to your choices of who to interact with and any plans of timing. It’s okay for these to have a direct effect:

  • Chance of regret from not interacting with the person (this one is very good)
  • Random selection
  • Commitment to someone, only in an official relationship
  • Completely undeniable proof that the person is currently unavailable for your goal (the person claiming to be single is an example if the goal is a romantic relationship)
  • Emotions in the present moment
  • Positive emotions that are predicted to be felt during or immediately after interacting with the person
  • Previous awesome interactions with the person
  • Specific observations about the person (“bad vibe” does not count)
  • Chance of breaking your personal record of how much complementarity you discover with a person

Use caution when allowing things that are not listed above. Locking down these things is especially important:

  • A situation with an individual person
  • How close you think you are to entering a relationship with a person
  • Apparent good effects or requirement of giving a person exclusive attention or treating them differently from other people
  • Information you’re only up to 99% sure about

Examples of things that are made possible by low security include:

  • Someone accidentally slowing down all of your social activity or cause a deadlock by ghosting you, instead of the effect staying between you and that person
  • An incorrect gut feeling or suspicion having a delayed or prevented end and restricting you
  • Heavy dependency on deep understanding of your situations with people
  • Wrong level of standards
  • Imbalance in the explore-exploit tradeoff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration-exploitation_dilemma)

If you still think that something should be added to the first list, use the “report an issue” link.