想象有一群人在爬一座塔，爬得越高越厉害，你也不知道为啥要爬这座塔，但有人跟你一起玩这个游戏，让你有了想取胜的欲望，同时与他们的联接也能带来安全感，满足一定的社交需求。

但当你越爬越累，发现自己并不喜欢这个游戏时，问题就来了。下去吧，不知道去哪里，还会丢失好不容易积攒的高度，继续游戏吧，又很难再往上走，于是就开始了内耗。

像这类对将来具有重要性，但在选择时未经仔细审视（比如随大流）的事，可以采用这篇文章中的做法，给自己一段时间，仔细把这个问题想清楚，然后就按照这个结果来做。

When multiple people are striving towards a shared goal, they often rank themselves by progress within their peer group. This was my mistake — I swapped an absolute goal (figuring out how bits of nature work) with a relative one (scoring higher on tests than my classmates). Later, when I found myself unhappy, I couldn’t leave without feeling like I’d lost something. That social capital sunk cost was the first part of the trap I found myself in.

当多人共同努力追求一个共同目标时，他们常常会根据在同伴群体中的进展情况来对自己进行排名。这是我的错误 —— 我将一个绝对目标（弄清自然界的运作方式）换成了一个相对目标（在考试中得分高于同学）。后来，当我发现自己不开心时，我无法离开，因为那样会让我觉得自己失去了什么。那种社会资本的沉没成本是我困境的开端。

I’d never given physics much thought at all before my senior year in high school — but once I was surrounded by other physics students, competing for the same pool of grades and research positions, I could think of little else. This inherited desire was unchecked because I had no life outside of academics — no fixed reference point. Although quitting would have made me happier, I felt like I had nowhere to quit to.

在高中最后一年之前，我从未认真考虑过物理。然而，当我被其他物理学生包围，大家在同一个成绩和研究职位的池子里竞争时，我几乎无法思考其他事情。这种继承而来的欲望没有受到任何限制，因为除了学术之外，我没有其他生活——没有固定的参照点。尽管退出可能会让我更快乐，但我却觉得无处可退。

That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable. If you value the process itself, that’s fine. I didn’t. Cowardice kept me from acting on this, and after a while I came to believe I had to succeed in this field I’d fallen into essentially by chance.

这就是所谓的模仿陷阱：离开会让人痛苦，但又无处可去。它将社会奖励信号与客观现实脱节——你可以在一个等级体系中花费数年时间往上爬，却没有产生任何对人类有价值的东西。如果你重视这个过程本身，那倒也无妨。但我并不这样认为。懦弱让我无法采取行动，久而久之，我开始相信我必须在这个我几乎是偶然进入的领域中取得成功。

You have an obligation to use yourself well, your time is valuable, and there are right and wrong ways to spend it.

你有责任善用自己，时间宝贵，使用时间有对错之分。