SIMULATE / TEST

Explore scenarios and prototypes before committing, so reality's surprises show up cheaply first.

For a year you have wondered whether to leave your career for teaching. The question sits there, enormous and untestable, and every dinner-party conversation about it produces the same loop: it might be wonderful, it might be a catastrophe, no way to know without leaping. So you never leap, and you never stop wondering, and the not-knowing quietly taxes everything else.

Simulate or test means exploring scenarios and prototypes before committing, so reality's surprises show up cheaply first. The cue is a consequential, hard-to-reverse commitment being evaluated purely in your head. The operation: design the smallest real trial that exercises the actual experience, not the fantasy of it. Here that might be a 30-day experiment teaching one evening class while keeping your job, with defined observations, such as how you feel grading at 10 p.m., not just how you feel lecturing. Run it, then read the results honestly. When it works, the decision stops being a leap and becomes an informed step; either the pull strengthens with evidence or dissolves on contact. The spec's boundaries: some experiments require oversight, like anything touching prescription doses, and some subjects cannot ethically be experimented on without consent, as when testing withdrawal on a partner treats a person as a trial condition.