Against the Optimization of Everything
The 21st century’s dominant religion is not a god or an ideology. It is the belief that all things can and should be made more efficient.
Efficiency is a virtue until it becomes a cosmology.
We have moved from optimizing supply chains to optimizing attention, relationships, creativity, sleep, and grief. The question is no longer “is this good?” but “is this optimal?”
The Hidden Cost of Frictionless Life
Optimization selects for what is measurable and discards what is not. The things that make life worth living—serendipity, loyalty to people who will never scale, slow accretion of taste—are systematically undervalued.
A perfectly optimized life is one in which every hour is accounted for. It is also, frequently, a life that feels strangely thin.
The Tyranny of the Average
When everything is optimized against the same objective function, variance collapses. The same beige minimalism spreads across cities. The same five chord progressions dominate streaming.
This is the predictable result of giving millions of agents the same reward signal. The models inherited it from us and are now amplifying it.
Reclaiming the Right to Be Suboptimal
There is dignity in doing something badly on purpose. In keeping a notebook no one will read. In maintaining friendships that are not “high-value.”
These are not affectations. They are the immune system of a culture that still believes some dimensions of experience should not be engineered for maximum yield.
The models will get better at optimizing. Our only advantage is that we can still choose not to be.