The Optimisation Trap (Part 2): Why Optimisation Always Accelerates

Optimisation doesn’t drift - it compounds.

In the first article of this series I argued that optimisation isn’t a choice. I suggested that once intelligence exists, competition exists, and a species can imagine alternatives, the removal of friction becomes a kind of cognitive imperative. Humans look at a situation, detect inefficiency, picture a better outcome, and then feel pulled towards eliminating whatever slows things down. That pull is not ideological - it’s biological. And it behaves less like a preference, and more like gravity.

But that still doesn’t fully explain why optimisation in the modern world feels so intense. If optimisation is natural, why doesn’t it simply progress at a steady pace - slowly improving life like a gentle upward slope. Why does it accelerate? Why does it compound? And why do systems that begin as useful tools end up swallowing the very contexts they were supposed to serve, reshaping reality so quickly that humans struggle to keep up. What is it that makes optimisation produce byproducts that feel less like progress and more like a strange kind of engineered wrongness?

To understand that, we have to lift the bonnet and look at the machinery that turns optimisation from a natural tendency into an industrial force. And when we do, we quickly find two dominant accelerants. Capitalism and power.

Capitalism and power don’t accelerate optimisation to harmful levels on purpose - this process does not require villains intent on destroying our meaning or wellbeing. Capitalism and power accelerate optimisation because, as systems, they are structurally incapable of slowing down. They can be guided and shaped at the edges, and sometimes restrained for short periods, but they cannot tolerate stagnation for long. They reward speed, punish restraint, and lock efficiency into place as a requirement for survival. And once those incentives are embedded, optimisation stops feeling like something we do and starts feeling like something that simply happens to us.

Capitalism as an optimisation engine

Capitalism did not invent our urge to optimise. If you remove markets, money, and modern economics from the picture entirely, humans would still optimise. We would still seek easier paths, better tools, and more efficient outcomes, because that is what brains do when they are capable of problem solving. But capitalism has created a framework where optimisation is rewarded relentlessly. That matters, because reward is fuel.

Under competition, the basic equation becomes unavoidable. If you can make something faster, cheaper, smoother, more convenient, or more scalable than the next company, you gain an advantage. If you cannot, you lose advantage. And in competitive systems, losing advantage is not a mild inconvenience - it’s existential. It’s the difference between growing and shrinking, surviving and dying, expanding and disappearing.

This is why optimisation under capitalism does not behave like a planned project. It behaves like a self-reinforcing loop. You optimise something to reduce friction. That reduction produces profit or dominance. The resulting profit is reinvested into tools, automation, logistics, and marketing. Those tools enable further optimisation. Further optimisation produces more advantage. More advantage increases profit, and so on. The loop repeats - endlessly. And it accelerates faster each time, because each cycle increases the system’s capacity to remove friction more aggressively.

The crucial thing most people miss is that this loop does not require anyone to be ruthless or malicious. Humans build a picture of the world through stories, and so our brains naturally look for villains when something is going wrong. Villain narratives allow complexity to be packaged into a simple story we can easily understand. We can point to a person or a company and say “this is why things are broken”, which feels emotionally satisfying because it gives us a target. But the truth is that many companies are full of well-meaning people who are not waking up each day intent on causing harm. They are simply participating in a structure that measures success by money and dominance, not human contentment. And when success is measured that way, any resulting reduction in the human experience becomes an external byproduct.

The market does not ask whether optimising a product improves human wellbeing overall. It asks whether it improves competitive advantage. It’s not good or bad in a moral, human sense. It’s just a mechanism. And mechanisms produce outcomes according to their primary goals.

This is why capitalism optimises for growth rather than alignment. It often creates astonishing innovation and genuinely improves lives at certain stages, because efficiency and access can reduce suffering and expand opportunity. But it also tends to over-optimise. It continues to remove friction even when friction was quietly performing an important role in the human experience. It streamlines life without asking what life is meant to feel like, because feeling is not measurable, and what’s not measurable is all-too-often ignored.

And so, over time, capitalism begins to treat the human experience as secondary, not because it hates humans, but because the system cannot prioritise what it cannot quantify. The only moments where capitalism optimises for contentment are when contentment itself becomes a selling point, or when meaning can be packaged into a product and sold back to us. Which is why the modern world is full of wellbeing industries, productivity hacks, self-optimisation culture, and lifestyle branding. We are increasingly sold cures for the empty feeling that hyper-optimised living produced in the first place.

So capitalism accelerates optimisation because optimisation is the language of survival within competition, and because competition does not allow calm. But capitalism is only one half of the engine. The other half is what happens when optimisation becomes useful not just for profit, but for control.

Power locks optimisation into place

Once optimisation produces obvious advantages, power adopts it and then makes it indispensable. Institutions and governments do not merely use efficient systems - they stitch them into the fabric of society. They build dependency around them, and design processes that rely on them. They reorganise policy and infrastructure so that the optimised system becomes the normal way of doing things. And once something becomes normal, reversing it stops feeling like an option.

Optimisation does not just save time and money, it stabilises systems. Standardisation is much easier to govern, automation is easier to control, and predictable processes are easier to manage. Populations become simpler to organise when behaviour can be nudged, measured, tracked, and streamlined. So once power becomes dependent on any kind of optimised infrastructure, slowing down becomes risky.

This is why large organisations rarely do a voluntary U-turn. It’s often not stubbornness or arrogance, it’s structural. Reversing course means admitting the system was wrong in the first place, which threatens legitimacy. But more importantly it means surrendering advantage, and surrendering advantage inside a competitive environment feels like putting your own safety at risk. That is true for governments on the global stage, where strength is measured in economic output, military capability, and technological dominance. And it is true for institutions domestically, where power is maintained through stability and perceived competence.

Even when negative effects are obvious, power resists slowing optimisation because the optimised system has become infrastructure. It’s embedded and hard-wired. It’s the thing the system now relies on, and at that point, optimisation is not just a tool being used. It’s the scaffolding holding the entire structure up.

That’s where this discussion becomes uncomfortable, because people want to believe we are steering civilisation forwards. We want to believe that progress is guided, planned, and directed by rational minds aiming towards a better world. And we naturally prefer that story because it makes us feel safe. 

But the reality is a bit messier.

The illusion of control

One of the strangest things about highly optimised systems is how deliberate they appear from the outside. We talk about society as if there is a control room somewhere with a group of planners at the helm, steering us from an inferior present towards a superior future. We assume that because systems look engineered, they must be controlled. We think that because things are optimised, somebody must be optimising them with a coherent plan in mind.

But this is a mirage. In the big picture sense, there is nobody steering. There is no pilot. There are of course local actors responding rationally to local pressures, but the system that emerges from those millions of rational responses behaves unpredictably, like a weather system. It is responsive, turbulent, and often directionless, even though it appears intentional.

This is why modern life feels simultaneously engineered and out of control. The systems around us are designed to the extreme. They are engineered to capture attention, to streamline labour, to optimise logistics, to reduce inefficiency, and to maximise output. And yet the overall direction of society feels chaotic, because when optimisation reaches a certain scale, control evaporates through complexity.

It is like being on a plane, trusting the pilot to get you where you to a destination, only to slowly realise that the plane is only moving because the engines are running - not because anyone has decided where it should be going. The engines are powerful, the speed is fast, and the ascent is undeniable. But the direction is not being consciously managed in the way we like to think it is.

Optimisation has no goal other than to increase efficiency. Capitalism and power accelerate it, but they do not give it an overarching human purpose. They do not ask whether the outcome feels right, because systems do not feel anything - they only measure, reward, punish, and reinforce. Because of that, we end up climbing a ladder of optimisation that feels like progress while it simultaneously undermines some of the conditions required for a satisfying human life.

This illusion of control is comforting, but it also shields us from the truth that we were never fully in charge. No single person decided to start this journey, no single organisation chose the direction of travel. and no single policy can meaningfully reverse it. That’s because the pressures are distributed across competition, advantage, and reinforcement loops. Each actor is responding to what is immediately in front of them, while the overall system becomes something much larger than any individual intent.

This is where the threshold problem begins to matter. Because if optimisation is accelerating and we cannot steer it in a clean, controlled way, then the real risk is not that progress continues. The risk is that acceleration outpaces our human ability to adapt.

And I’m sorry to say - that’s what’s happening right now. 

When acceleration becomes the default

This is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of modern civilisation. Optimisation accelerates not because we demand it, but because the systems we built require it. Capitalism rewards speed and compounds advantage. Power entrenches efficiency and treats reversal as a risk. Meanwhile, competition punishes restraint. And once those forces align, optimisation becomes self-sustaining, endlessly sped up, and effectively unstoppable.

This is why ethical appeals often fail at the system level. It is not that ethics are irrelevant - far from it. But ethics are speaking a different language to optimisation - you can’t negotiate with systemic acceleration. You can only hope to understand it, and then decide how to respond at the levels where response is still possible.

Because there is an imperative that begins to emerge once you are able to see all this clearly. If optimisation always accelerates, regardless of what we do, then the mission is not to try and halt progress itself. It’s to explore what we can do when progress becomes so rapid that human rhythms, human psychology, and human meaning cannot keep pace. When systems move faster than our nervous systems can adapt, we begin to feel out of sync. When we begin to experience life as though it is happening to us rather than being lived by us.

Extreme optimisation, I think, is one of the core reasons modern life feels the way it does. Not catastrophic, not apocalyptic, not dramatic misery, but a persistent sense of being pushed, rushed, pulled forward by forces that are difficult to articulate, and therefore easy to dismiss.

In the next article, I want to drill into the breaking point itself. The threshold where optimisation quietly turns from better to worse, and where systems that originally served human needs begin to invert and start using humans to serve the system instead. Because that moment explains a lot about why the world feels smoother but less satisfying, and why our age of constant connection is also an age of fractured attention, rising anxiety, and eroding contentment.

This was part two of a four part series called The Optimisation Trap. In the next part we’ll explore where the shape of the problem becomes much harder to ignore.