We’re Optimizing Ourselves to Death

Our automated lives are founded on the idea of automation freeing us up to do more pleasurable things, but the truth is it usually just frees us from a particular chunk of work to spend more time doing another chunk of work, all in order to keep up with those who are automating their lives. It’s the automation version of keeping up with the Joneses.

Attempts by companies like Google or Freshly to create services that save you time misfire, as millennials see them not as services that will give them more time to relax, but as services that will increase the amount of time they’re available to work.

An interesting visual metaphor:

The escalators I take to work are filled with the same desperate faces and vacant eyes I feel staring through me on the subway, except instead of standing still, they’re bounding up it, subconsciously aware that below their feet is yet another opportunity to optimize on an existing convenience. This, if anything, is a symptom of our current moment: People ignoring the luxury of a moving staircase in favor of whatever sprinting up it can transport them to faster.

This feels especially true:

in the modern era, the best way to spend your time is finding better ways to spend your time.

We are what’s being optimized:

Optimization begets optimization and says we’re its beneficiaries, and in many ways, we are. But given our reliable ignorance of what our lives have conditioned us to do with free time (read: optimize and work harder), we’re better characterized as optimization’s subjects, along for the ride as our pace of life accelerates endlessly.

The ending:

The acceleration of our collective pace of life is not a result of stupidity or irrationality; rather, it is a symptom of what is perfectly predicted by the prisoner’s dilemma at a global scale: Hyper-rational individuals making hyper-rational decisions on how to spend their time by launching into an inescapable arms race of productivity. Burnout is inevitable.