What Should We Optimize Away?
The article explores whether our drive to optimize every aspect of life (time, efficiency, productivity) might cause us to lose valuable human experiences like boredom, unhurried thought, and serendipity, questioning what we are inadvertently optimizing away in the process.
Background
This essay comes from the autodidacts.io blog, which explores technology, systems thinking, and self-directed learning. The author argues that most people fixate on optimizing narrow metrics (e.g., code speed, profit, calories burned) without asking whether the thing being optimized is worth doing at all. The piece draws on concepts like "Goodhart's Law" (when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric), "Wirth's law" (software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster), and "premature optimization" (a famous programming aphorism from Donald Knuth). The essay is part of a broader movement dubbed "holistic optimization" — questioning optimization at the system level rather than within a fixed frame. Readers will benefit from knowing that the piece is a reaction to tech culture's obsession with efficiency at the expense of meaning, and that it echoes themes from the "effective altruism" and "slow software" movements.