Suck Reduction: A Life Philosophy

This is a brief introduction to the mathematics of how to make your life suck just a little bit less—from the perspective of a Population Geneticist.

Taxonomy of the Problem

Distilling things down to their very essence is a fundamental tool for working in frameworks (e.g., general toolsets that can be applied broadly) instead of focusing on domain-specific solutions to many problems you may have. This becomes essential for the “Philosophy of Life” caliber of topics.

In its simplest form, things in your life can be categorized into two mutually exclusive groups.

• Things that suck
• The rest of the stuff

Algebraically, things that suck occur at a frequency of p, whereas everything else in your life can be represented as q = 1 — p. Clearly, p + q = 1, and this is nice because I’m a population geneticist. We like to deal in simple probabilities because they allow us to extrapolate ad absurdum (for example, one of our founders with his trusty Guinea Pig below).

Visually, one may represent the fractions of suckiness and non-suckiness in our lives using a simple pie chart (I know those miscreants who do not like the pie chart, but this is a lame attempt at foreshadowing a future joke, so buzz off). As an example, from my own life right now, the fractions look something like the following:

We must not only visualize this relationship but also keep a running log of how the suckiness in our lives changes through time. Now that a algebraic and visual representation has been defined, let’s turn our attention to the kinds of things that contribute to your life sucking.

The Shape of Things That Suck

So what are these things that ‘suck’, how do we know about them, how can we identify them, etc.? As in Buddhism, things that suck are ultimately the things in your life that cause suffering. Suffering is inevitable and part of the human experience. Some people even seem to need suffering as a condition of existence (my grandparents, for example, to be miserable).

In the modern age, the kinds of things that suck include (but are not limited to):

• Running out of ink on your printer the morning your paper is due,
• Being a Cleveland Browns fan,
• Stevia,
• Waking up 45 minutes before your alarm goes off,
• Most Pop Music (not you Tay Tay),
• The Windows Operating System,
• Stepping into the cat’s newly created “hairballs” in the middle of the night,
• Finding that DoorDash delivered you the veggie burger instead of the dozen wings.

I’m sure you can add many additional things to this list, but this only scratches the surface. Hopefully, it gives you a general idea and direction to start your inquiries.

Other-than Radiohead's “Creep”

So it is true that the “rest of that stuff in your life” is a big grab-bag of items. That is OK. As long as each of them does not suck in any way, they can stay in this category. However, it is crucial that you look at these items often and Marie Condo them to see if they do suck, but you’ve ignored them mainly because the amount of sucking they contribute to is only marginally larger than zero.

Be vigilant! Do not let these things persist in this state. You MUST eradicate and exile them to the “Suck” category. Failing to do so results in a condition called Suck Creep, which through time, will slowly eat all of your non-sucking life parts. Eventually, your life will completely suck.

Below is a simple MCMC⁷ stochastic simulation in which an entire semester portion of incremental creep was ignored because “I’m too busy trying to be a good professor over here…”. Notice, there is an apparent fixation of total suckiness in the life after time step 69… (last year of the excellent muscle cars, too, IMHO), beyond which there is no hope for this poor professor to recover from a life that sucks 100%.

Mitigating Suckiness

So, one of the best ways to gain pleasure and enjoyment in your life is to figure out how to reduce that suckiness in your life and remove it.

In the examples above, we have a situation where roughly 22.2% of the life is classified as The Part that Sucks. Now, suppose that through some deep introspection, a week-long silent meditation retreat, experimentation with some “homemade cleansing elixirs,” and a dash of what can only be called honest self-reflection (this is the hard one), you can partition those things that suck into two subcategories, p = p₁ + p₂.

• The fraction things that suck, but there is no way I can do anything about it. We can call this Immobilis Petra, whose frequency will be defined by the parameter p₁. This is essentially the parts of your life that suck, yet you are going to have to come to some understanding with the forces of the universe on the magnitude of p₁ in your life because there is nothing you can do about it.
• The things in the large category of “things that suck” that, though some less feat of will, you can do something about can be parameterized as p₂. If you know p (how much sucks) and (p₁ the sucky things you have no control over), you can estimate p₂ by subtraction (e.g., p - p₁=p₂) in the same way that we typically find the Error Sums of Squares in our stats homework.

That situation looks like this:

Now, here is the solemn truth of this entire philosophy. Look at the things that make up p₂ in your life and consider one of the following strategies:

• Suckexcision: Remove them from your life (e.g., stop using Windows),
• Suckslocation: Give them to someone else (e.g., rehome the cat) or
• Suckorcism: Reconfigure your life so they no longer live rent-free in your head (e.g., become a Seattle Seahawks fan)

Then, you can enter what is technically called a period of suckiness reduction. You cannot rest upon your laurels, though; your life is anything but static, and without constant vigilance, suckiness returns (the above description of Suck Creep is but one avenue). The best we can hope for is reaching an equilibrium of sorts—a Plateau of Suckiness—commensurate with an enjoyable life. That being said, after all this effort, your life will be more like this:

And by definition, you must reduce the amount of suckiness (don’t take my word for it; compare the last two graphs!).

A concomitant feature of this is that

Your life will now suck just a little bit less.

Which is the “sunny side of the pyramid” we are all attempting to reach—even if only metaphorically.

- RJD