Over Optimization Is Killing Everything You Love
How optimization is destroying sports, art, your bank account, and more.
Recently I went to a museum in Abu Dhabi, where I made friends with a stray cat and had coffee with a pretty neat view.
Just five feet beyond the border of these photos, I saw a woman posing in front of the museum at the edge of the water, making her husband take no less than a thousand photos of her.
The woman went through a series of predetermined poses in rapid fire sequence. It looked like someone with Parkinson’s trying to do a Bollywood dance in fast-forward. She would go through this routine, walk to her husband, review the photos, and proceed to berate him for getting something wrong. She would then return to her starting position and go through the whole routine from the beginning, looking increasingly upset every time.
After about forty minutes she had all the pictures she wanted, so the two of them finally left, arguing and bickering all the while.
I was watching the woman out of the corner of my eye the entire time, curious as to whether she would ever actually turn around and look at the museum and the waters with her own eyes. She never did.
It seems like various aspects of our existence have cracked in some meaningful way, leaving us perpetually disaffected.
Despite the plethora of entertainment, we are more bored than ever. Despite the many communication channels with which we might reach out to each other, we are lonelier than ever. Despite advances in biology and physiology, we are more obese and more sleep deprived than ever. Despite having greater access to the world and all of its various cultures, we are becoming more homogenized than ever.
This essay examines all of these phenomena at a deeper level, showing how much of the malaise, boredom, and maladaptions throughout society can be neatly approximated to a single word: optimization.
Optimization is an oracle who gives with one hand and takes with another; usually the things that it provides are clear and tangible, with immediate effects, and the things that it takes are slow but long-lasting, usually of greater value than we had originally given them credit for.
Examples Of The Optimization Crisis
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