I have spent a fair amount of my life trying to make things work better. Therapy. Training. Websites. Businesses. Books. Even kitchens, although my family would probably dispute the last one.
Efficiency is useful. I am not about to argue for badly organised hospitals, three-hour queues or software that requires a small religious ceremony before it opens. If something can be made simpler without losing what matters, good. Do it.
The trouble begins when efficiency stops being a tool and quietly becomes a definition of a good life.
We measure steps, sleep, heart rate, productivity, engagement, response time, income, calories, screen time, conversion, output and, increasingly, attention itself. None of those things is necessarily foolish to measure. The peculiar move happens afterwards. Because something can be measured, it begins to feel more solid than something that cannot.
A number has edges. It sits nicely in a box. You can put it on a dashboard and compare Tuesday with Thursday. Meaning is much less cooperative.
What gets counted starts to look important
This is not a new problem. People have always counted what they could count. Money is easier to total than contentment. Hours are easier to total than attention. Examination results are easier to compare than curiosity. The difference now is scale. We carry measuring equipment in our pockets, on our wrists and inside almost every system we use.
That changes behaviour.
If a workplace measures calls answered, calls get answered. Whether the person on the other end feels helped is a more awkward question. If a school measures test performance, teaching will eventually bend towards the test. If an online platform measures engagement, it will become extremely good at producing engagement. That does not mean it will become good at producing a life you would want to have.
The measurement is rarely evil. The mistake is confusing the proxy with the thing.
A map can be accurate and still not be the landscape. A score can be useful and still not be the person.
The things that refuse to sit still
Think about the people who matter most to you.
You could measure how often you see them. You could count messages. You could record birthdays remembered, meals shared, miles travelled and money spent. Some of that might tell you something.
None of it would tell you what it feels like when somebody knows you well enough to notice the sentence you did not finish.
There is no sensible unit for that.
We do not have a reliable scale for the moment a frightened child decides an adult is safe. We cannot put a clean number on the weight of a memory, the value of a joke arriving at exactly the right moment, the dignity of keeping a promise nobody else knows you made, or the strange comfort of sitting with somebody when there is nothing useful left to say.
These are not vague because they are unimportant. They are difficult to measure because human life is not obliged to make itself convenient for our instruments.
Optimising can become a very elaborate way of avoiding living
There is a particular modern absurdity I keep noticing. We optimise sleep so we can work better. We optimise work so we can earn more. We optimise our money so that one day we will have more freedom. We optimise exercise so that our future self will remain capable of doing things. We optimise our calendars to create time.
Then, when some time finally appears, we often fill it with another optimisation project.
This is not a criticism of exercise, saving money or getting enough sleep. I do all three, with varying degrees of competence. It is a question about sequence.
At what point does preparation for life become the life?
A person can spend years building a perfectly efficient route towards somewhere they never chose.
The problem with what scales
Efficiency has another attraction. Efficient things scale.
A recorded answer can be sent to ten thousand people. A live conversation cannot. A recommendation engine can decide what millions of people might want next. A friend has to know you. A standardised process can be repeated. Judgement has to be exercised again each time.
Scaling is often useful. It is how books work. I can spend months thinking about something once and somebody in another country can read it while I am making tea.
But the things that scale best are not automatically the things worth scaling most.
Care is stubbornly expensive in time. Friendship does not automate well. Good judgement remains irritatingly dependent on context. Presence has no efficient substitute because the inefficiency is part of what presence means. You are there, with this person, now.
That is also why many human jobs become worse when every spare movement is removed. The unused minute, the conversation not on the script, the chance to notice something odd, the opportunity to change your mind, these can look like waste from far enough away.
Up close, they are often where the actual work happens.
There should be room for things that do not justify themselves
One of the quietest losses in an efficiency culture is the idea that everything should earn its place.
A walk should improve cardiovascular health. A hobby should become a side income. Reading should make you knowledgeable. Rest should improve performance. Travel should produce photographs. Conversation should network. A child should be developing something.
Sometimes I want to walk because the weather is decent.
Sometimes a book is worth reading because I enjoyed being somewhere else for six hours.
Sometimes the point of talking to somebody is that I like them.
Human beings have always made music nobody needed, told stories that did not solve anything, decorated objects that worked perfectly well undecorated, kept ridiculous souvenirs and spent afternoons doing things that would make a productivity consultant nervous.
I do not think this is a design flaw.
Useful does not mean sufficient
I am not suggesting we throw away measurement. That would be silly. Numbers help us see things intuition misses. Measurement can expose prejudice, waste, wishful thinking and outright nonsense. It can tell us whether an intervention works, whether a business is solvent or whether somebody's blood pressure is doing something worrying.
Use the numbers.
Just do not ask them to answer questions they were never designed to answer.
A life can be efficient and empty. It can be messy and meaningful. Most lives are some inconvenient mixture of both.
Perhaps the better question is not whether we can optimise more of being human.
Perhaps it is whether we can remember what optimisation was for.
There are things worth improving. There are things worth measuring. And there are things worth protecting precisely because they refuse to become a number.
I am increasingly interested in those.