Optimization is a great servant and a terrible god.

When it's your servant it makes life easier. Reduces suffering. Builds bridges that don't collapse. But when it's your god it starts telling you what's valuable. And that's when everything goes to shit.

There's this slow boil happening. We're all sitting in the pot getting cooked and nobody's jumping out because the temperature rises so gradually you barely notice. The edges of everything getting sanded down. The parts of life that used to be unpredictable and deeply human now have the giant accusatory microscope of society pointed at them. Trying to cure these inefficiencies.

But what if the inefficiencies were the point?

I used to watch baseball with my dad. There was bunting. Hit and runs. Guys who could only pitch to left-handed hitters in the seventh inning. Weird deliveries. Strategy that felt like jazz. Improvisation within structure.

Then someone brought a calculator and proved that walks plus home runs equals wins. Now every game looks identical. Three true outcomes. Strikeout, walk, home run. The sport got "solved" and the prize was a worse product. Congratulations.

Look at movies coming out this year. Scream 7. Toy Story 5. Devil Wears Prada 2. Ready Or Not 2. Scary Movie 6. Jackass 5. Minions 3. Star Wars spinoff. Mortal Kombat sequel. And that's just the first half of the year.

There was a time you could stumble into some low budget film that was strange or imperfect and somehow unforgettable. Maybe the director had a particular sickness in their soul. Exposed a feeling the audience had but never verbalized because they thought nobody else felt it. Sometimes these films failed. Sometimes they became cult classics. Sometimes they became the type of movie you watched at the wrong age and then became permanently rewired by.

But the economics changed and the entire supply chain got optimized. Franchises are safer than originals. Known quantities outperform risk. So risk gets priced out of the system entirely. The weird mid-range where cultural experimentation used to live just doesn't exist anymore.

Matt Damon recently admitted while promoting his own movie that films are becoming shittier because audiences need to be bashed over the head with plot points. This is literally the definition of stripping away nuance. And he's in the machine saying this.

Music figured out the same trick. Songs now feel like they're grabbing your collar begging you to please please don't skip. Intros are shorter. Hooks show up faster. Everything within the same bpm range. The skip button is one thumb away so naturally songs adapt. Artists seeking the greatest surface area. Learning to be immediately legible to an audience.

Being immediately legible comes at the cost of creating art that changes people slowly. Some of the most impactful shit I've experienced didn't immediately resonate. It was uncomfortable or confusing or I didn't know how I felt about it. There was a baked-in patience required. Modern culture is quietly training us out of the ability to experience this.

The mechanism is painfully consistent.

We measure what we can measure. Sometimes this is actually what matters but a lot of times it's just the thing that is measurable.

Then we reward the measurable thing. Money, status, engagement, clicks, watch time, conversion.

Then people adapt because we're rational enough to respond to incentives and insecure enough to care when the room is clapping for something.

Then a meta forms. The tyranny of best practice takes hold. The best way gets identified and crystallized and suddenly any deviation becomes a tax. Weirdness becomes prohibitively expensive.

Fewer styles survive. Fewer weirdos thrive. Fewer happy accidents happen.

This is model matching at civilizational scale. Everyone performing to the algorithm's model of what should exist instead of making the thing they actually want to make.

You see this in venture capital. Supposed to fund the stuff furthest out on the risk curve. Literal meaning of the word venture. But it's warped into a sorting machine for social proof. Same schools, same networks, same vocabulary, same "this reminds me of..." Same resume shapes. Humans acting rationally in the sense that you're not rewarded for looking stupid. So as long as you can fund something that resembles something else you can cling to the illusion of safety.

But safety is a seduction. And it's how we end up with a future that looks like a linear extrapolation of the present.

Novelty is illegible by definition. The weirdest thinkers who historically birth new categories are usually obsessed with something that doesn't even have a market yet. Little evidence beyond untranslatable conviction. The optimization machine can't process conviction. It needs data.

Social media did this to personalities. We learn which version of ourselves performs best and slowly become that version until our personality hardens into a shareable archetype. Being called schizo is a compliment now because it signals your personality isn't static or easily bucketed. You haven't collapsed into a formula.

The world feels flatter. Technically better in most ways and somehow less alive. Everything converging toward the efficient answer. The same restaurants in every city. The same music on every playlist. The same opinions on every feed.

There's this concept from reinforcement learning. Exploitation versus exploration. A system that only exploits becomes very good at a narrow thing and then gets stuck. A system that explores creates the possibility of discovering something better. Something stranger. Something that rewrites what better even means.

Cultures that explore create art movements and revolutions and new genres. Cultures that only exploit create monoculture. And monocultures are fragile.

Jazz wasn't respectable when it started. It was weird and uncomfortable and made the status quo super uncomfortable. That discomfort was part of the point. Impressionism got mocked. Punk got dismissed. Hip hop was treated like a local nuisance until it became one of the largest cultural forces of the last half century. Bitcoin was a niche cypherpunk experiment.

All of these things were weird enough to be quickly dismissed by the optimization filters we now deploy across everything. They existed in the exploration space long enough to find the people and the meaning that would enable them to become real. Most of them wouldn't exist today. They'd get killed in the first eight seconds.

The future will arrive wearing clothes that look ridiculous at first. That's the nature of novelty. And we're building systems that reject anything that doesn't immediately fit the pattern.

We need what I'd call wide games. Environments where lots of different strategies can win. Where weirdness isn't punished by default. Where the incentives don't collapse everything into a single dominant meta. Poker is a wide game. The three-true-outcomes version of baseball is a narrow game. The current internet is an extremely narrow game.

If we collectively build individual lives where every decision needs to justify itself then we're naturally going to build a world where the same is true. And then we're all just living inside a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets are awesome tools but I imagine they're pretty shit as homes.

The next wave of meaningful things will look weird. That's not a bug. That's the feature that keeps the weak minded away long enough for real value to develop. Same dynamic as the crowded trade. By the time the consensus arrives, the interesting part is already over.

I don't have a clean solution here. Maybe that's fitting. The whole point is that not everything needs to resolve into a clear answer.

What would happen if we gave ourselves permission to be less legible?

Less easily understood. Less refined. Less optimized.

I keep referring to a brute de force quote I came across. Systems are so complex that going into the wires is useless. Best fix for everything is destroying and starting again.

Maybe that's what has to happen to the culture too. Not some grand coordinated reset. Just individuals choosing to stop consenting. Letting their taste atrophy from the algorithm and rebuild from scratch. Accepting that they might look stupid for a while. That the thing they care about might not have a market yet.

The optimization machine will keep running. It's too profitable to stop. But you don't have to feed it.

Some things are worth doing poorly. Some things are worth doing without measurement. Some things are worth protecting from the spreadsheet entirely.

The interesting question isn't how to optimize your life.

It's what parts of your life you're willing to leave completely unsolved.