Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization

This is a book I’m going to lump in with The Good-Enough Life. It’s a polemic against how fast and efficient (“optimized”) everything has become, and how this is actually a detriment to the human race.

The author’s heart is in the right place, but this book will simply never get read by the people who need to read it in order to make the idea come about. Put another way: the author will always be preaching to the choir. The only people who read this book will be people who don’t need convincing of the core message.

The basic idea is that humans are under just as much stress as they were before everything got optimized. Capitalism generally sucks the life out of everything in the pursuit of growth and profit.

She leans on environmental concerns quite a bit. She has concerns with factory farming and GMOs. Infrastructure is also an issue, because we’ve optimized our way into a highly dependent system that can fail due to one small piece. Same thing with the global supply chain.

However, the author ignores that the pursuit of improvement and efficiency has genuinely led to some amazing improvements in the human condition. Sure, we might be under the same amount of stress, but our lives are objectively better in so many ways.

Again, I like the message that we should all take a break and slow down a bit. But that would require a massive culture shift, and I don’t even know how we’d start to bring that about. You can provide all the evidence you want and it won’t matter – there are people simply hard-wired for competition, and they will always be pushing forward.