You Are Not a Factory, and We're Not Here to Be Optimized

There's an assumption creeping into modern life that if something can be optimised, it probably should be.

To be fair, some things can. Finding the quickest route to work. Planning the week's shopping. Deciding what deserves your attention today and what can wait until tomorrow, yes efficiency has its place.

The problem begins when we start treating life itself as though it's a productivity problem waiting to be solved.

My youngest son discovered this at his first conference a few weeks ago. The first day was textbook. Every keynote. Every breakout session. Dinner. Early night.

On paper, he was doing everything right.

The second day looked very different: He stopped to chat with the people at the registration desk. They introduced him to someone else, who introduced him to someone else, and before long he'd spent most of the day in conversations instead of conference sessions. Later, while everyone else rushed off to the networking event, he stayed behind to help the organisers pack up. Hardly an efficient use of conference time. Except it was.

Those conversations turned into drinks, then dinner, then gelato (it was Melbourne IFKYK) , and eventually a long evening with people who had become genuine friends.

The next morning his Whoop recorded one of the worst sleep scores he'd had in almost a year AND he described his evening as one of the best he'd had in just as long.

His goal hadn't been to maximise attendance or optimise his recovery metrics. It was to build relationships. By ignoring the "optimal" path, he achieved the outcome he actually wanted.

And that leads me to a question that is seldom asked but is mightily worth asking: Are we optimising the metric, or are we optimising for what the metric was meant to serve?

Because we're not factories.

Some parts of life deserve efficiency and the best parts deserve our presence.