15 theses on the optimization crisis: or why so many are dissatisfied with society, despite our prosperity

1. Everything is optimized now, which includes optimizing for the legible at the expense of the illegible, optimizing for internal benefits at the expense of any negative externality, and optimizing to remove all slack from the system. Because an optimized entity still takes the same name and broad form as before, we often don’t appreciate how much the new variant has lost compared to its predecessor, while superficially being much “better”.

2. This optimization has led to extreme sorting, across all dimensions, including through mechanisms like social sorting, career sorting, and assortative mating.

3. This drains competence from lower-status/paying roles: the employees at the hardware store, the DMV, or the school are only there because they couldn’t sort into something better. The transient nature of these roles, the market-optimized pay, and the visibility of the sort erode respect for these institutions, while those within them feel diminished by what their position reveals.

4. This has left individuals and groups with less in common—fewer shared experiences and, generally, weaker ties with the collective. More one dimensional groups have significant issues with insularity.

5. Hypersorting also concentrates the mentally ill, drug addicts, and criminals, without a broader group to support them, which causes a disproportionate amount of harm to society.

6. The more that wealthier people stop using public infrastructure, the more it decays and becomes dilapidated.

7. As optimization drives systems to scale, more systems become bureaucratized, replacing contextual judgment with rigid procedures and eliminating space for human discretion. Larger-scale systems also drain capital/status from local communities, as most jobs/decisions/capital flow through headquarters in large hub cities. This drain is notionally made up by the public owning part of the S&P 500, but in practice, ‘ownership’ of stocks is not the same thing as ‘ownership’ in the local community sense.

8. Everything becomes the same and mid, there are no more ‘islands’; because the opportunity cost of not following ‘best practices’—especially when every company now has a product manager guiding everything it does—is too high. As information spreads instantly, everyone shares the same assumptions and is influenced by everyone else - so when you follow the product managers adhering to best practices, you get the same output with minimal variation.

9. Everything is now visible and part of one larger system. There are now social, cultural and economic offerings tempting you at every single level of the ladder, so you will never feel satisfied, while also knowing you can always get to the next tier (it’s so close — I just need to move to this larger city, get the $6000 road bike! etc). This means that gains are not appreciated, but rather, serve as capital to be used to pursue future opportunities. Even former Prime Ministers don’t feel satisfied retiring to a life on the lake and being the bigwig supporting their local community, but now sell their influence to be invited to the global conference circuit.

10. Once material desires are satisfied, almost all new desires are positional; as the average person seeks to be ahead of the average person. Institutions are trapped by this too: a university doesn’t seek to improve research or better educate students, but instead invests its resources to climb one spot higher on the US News rankings.

11. No person or institution views themselves as having any responsibility for the collective action problem caused by positional arms races, so gatekeepers which allocate resources are able to impose significant costs to society.

12. One of these costs is that as entry requirements rise, your entire life history becomes ‘in scope’ for all future admissions. Every moment and every decision is forever tethered to your future; what you do today dictates what you are eligible to become tomorrow. You can’t afford any deviance from the path - certainly not when you are 20, but also not when you are 40.

13. In times of abundance, with more choices available and companies hyperoptimizing to exploit your moment-to-moment preferences, there is greater divergence between what people choose and what actually maximizes one’s welfare

14. We collectively work together to regulate and eliminate low-cost options, banning things like cheap housing, imposing safety requirements that price out basic cars etc. making the nominally wealthier poor feel materially worse off than people with equivalent resources would have felt in the past or in other countries.

15. As the metrics of ‘economic growth’ decouple from the lived experience of regular people, the pursuit of systemic efficiency loses its democratic mandate, and people, both as individuals and collectively through politics, justify inefficient, distortionary, and often corrupt actions.

P.S. While writing this, I stumbled across this thread on /r/redscarepod titled “Resellers completely ruined thrifting and vintage shopping” and couldn’t help but laugh and share:

Thrifting used to reward wandering. You showed up bored. You left with a high quality vintage jacket or shirt that actually isn’t made of some paper thin synthetic material.

Now it feels strip mined. Racks picked clean before noon. Anything with weight, age, or character gone instantly. Somewhere online already. Triple the price.

I HATE RESELLERS.

You can’t vintage shop in any major city anywhere because underpaid 18 year old interns have picked through every cheap shop to take some boutique to sell for 5 times the price.

Pickers swarm with phones out.Grab the Levi’s. Grab the leather. Grab anything with a label people recognize. The store turns into a carcass in minutes of fast fashion bullshit. It’s all now H&M and SHEIN and Zara and poorly made clothes from 3 years ago.

Ebay finishes the job. Endless listings. Inflated prices. Zero joy. Every piece flattened into inventory.

The thrill disappeared. The luck disappeared. Thrifting became competitive shopping for people who hate clothes and love margins.

I miss finding things by accident. I miss clothes that felt chosen instead of flipped. The whole ecosystem feels ugly now.