We live in the age of optimization. Optimize your morning routine. Optimize your workout. Optimize your sleep, your diet, your reading list, your commute, your inbox, your calendar. The implicit promise: if you optimize enough variables, you'll arrive at the optimal life.
This premise has a problem: it's not clear that an optimal life is a good life.
The Efficiency Trap
Optimization requires a metric. You can optimize for speed, for output, for revenue, for followers. But the act of choosing a metric changes what you do in ways that are hard to see from inside the process.
A writer who optimizes for output produces more words. A writer who optimizes for engagement writes for reactions. Neither of these is the same as writing something true, or beautiful, or worth reading ten years from now. The things that matter most tend to resist measurement — depth, originality, the slow accumulation of craft.
Goodhart's Law, Applied to Life
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This is Goodhart's Law, and it applies everywhere once you start looking. A university that optimizes for rankings games the metrics instead of improving education. A company that optimizes for growth sacrifices the sustainability that growth was supposed to enable.
At the individual level: optimizing your reading for "books per year" incentivizes short, easy books over difficult, rewarding ones. Optimizing exercise for calories burned ignores the meditative quality of a long walk. Optimizing social connections for network value poisons the thing that makes friendship valuable.
The Virtue of Slack
In engineering, slack is the deliberate introduction of excess capacity. A bridge designed to hold exactly the maximum expected load is a bridge that will collapse. The margin of safety — the slack — is what makes the system robust.
A life with no slack is a life with no margin for error, no room for spontaneity, no capacity to absorb the unexpected. It's maximally efficient and minimally resilient. The afternoon you 'wasted' reading in a park might produce the insight that makes next month's work meaningful. The unoptimized conversation with a stranger might change your understanding of something important. These returns are real but unmeasurable, which means optimization systematically eliminates them.
What to Do Instead
I'm not arguing against effectiveness. Being intentional about how you spend your time is valuable. Having systems that reduce friction is valuable. The distinction is between removing obstacles (good) and maximizing throughput (often counterproductive).
Instead of optimizing, consider satisficing — doing enough, well enough, and then stopping. Read books that interest you and stop counting them. Exercise in ways that feel good rather than ways that burn the most calories. Work with intensity during work hours and stop thinking about it afterward.
The goal isn't to extract maximum value from every moment. The goal is to build a life that's worth living — and the difference between those two things is larger than the optimization crowd wants to admit.