The Optimisation Trap (Part 3) - The Threshold Where Optimisation Breaks

When “better” turns into worse

In the previous two articles in this series, I have argued two things. First, that optimisation is not something we consciously chose, but an emergent property of intelligence itself. Second, that once capitalism and power structures begin amplifying it, optimisation doesn’t simply progress, it accelerates. But neither of those ideas answers what I think is the most important question:

Why does modern life feel wrong.

Not catastrophic, not apocalyptic and certainly not some kind of cinematic dystopia in which civilisation has collapsed. Many of us are safer, healthier and more comfortable than almost any generation that came before us. We have access to information, medicine, transport, entertainment and communication in ways that would have seemed magical even fifty years ago. So in measurable terms, we are living the dream.

And yet anxiety is rising, attention is fragmenting, meaning feels harder to hold onto, and deep, sustained contentment appears more elusive than it should be in a world that has removed so many barriers. It’s not that life is terrible, it’s that something feels off. Subtly misaligned, smooth on the surface but empty underneath.

I created this series to explore the idea that this feeling is not something we are imagining. And it’s not simply a byproduct of a less-resilient or ungrateful modern society. I believe it’s what happens when optimisation crosses a threshold our systems were never designed to recognise - the point where efficiency stops serving human wellbeing and starts to undermine it.

Optimisation is not linear

One of the most persistent mistakes we make is assuming that improvement travels in a predictable upward curve. We see something get better in its early stages and unconsciously assume that more efficiency will make things even better. That assumption feels logical because in the beginning it often appears to be true.

When a tool removes obvious friction, life improves. And when a process becomes more efficient, time is saved. When access to the wonders of modern technology expands, opportunity increases. These early gains are observable, obvious and emotionally rewarding. And their presence creates a false narrative that optimisation must equal wellbeing. Because this narrative has become embedded in the global consciousness, we have sought (understandably) to apply it everywhere.

But optimisation does not behave in a tidy, linear way. In fact, it behaves more like a curve that bends back on itself. There is clearly a phase where it enhances life, but then there is another phase where it begins to erode the very conditions that allowed life to feel meaningful in the first place.

Take television as a simple example. By the early 2000s it was already a highly optimised technology compared to its origins. Huge, wooden black and white sets had evolved into sleek colour displays with high definition output. As a result, the viewing experience had improved dramatically. Then streaming arrived and removed the final pieces of friction - waiting for a scheduled broadcast, and content delivered instantly to users on demand.

On the surface, this naturally looked like pure progress. The equation appeared simple - if waiting is inconvenient, let’s use technology to remove waiting. And if access is limited, let’s use technology to expand access. But what we failed to consider is that waiting to watch shows was not the enemy we saw it as. It enabled anticipation, led to shared viewing habits, and provided a subtle psychological rhythm that gave televisual experiences weight. When everyone watched the same programme at the same moment, something collective happened. Strangers shares a reference point, and conversations had common ground. Broadcast TV facilitated a synchronicity in national or international cultural moments. Streaming took this away.

So when streaming removed friction from the delivery of media, it also removed some of the texture that friction provided. The cost was not obvious at first, but over time, the shared experience of TV dissolved into fragmented, isolated consumption. Anticipation faded, and was replaced by constant availability. And in that process, something intangible but real was lost.

This is how thresholds work. At low levels, removing friction solves problems. At high levels, removing friction starts to pollute the wider systems that give life meaning. It’s a bit like diverting waste into a river, just because it offers itself as an easy solution. At first the water still looks clean, the fish are still alive, and the ecosystem appears intact. But continue doing it long enough and the damage accumulates downstream in ways that are not immediately visible at the source.

Human systems are like rivers - deep, complex, interconnected and constantly in motion. And we humans are not simple units, waiting to be optimised like parts of a machine in a factory. We are biological creatures shaped by millions of years of evolution, hard-wired with instincts that do not disappear, just because we have invented new tools that make things easier.

The problem is that one of those instincts is to remove barriers, while another is to derive meaning from effort, rhythm and shared context. So when optimisation amplifies the first instinct and reduces the second, we lose a sense of equilibrium. The early benefits remain visible as the later costs accumulate quietly beneath the surface.

Frustratingly, systems never scale neatly. Societal isolation does not scale linearly with increased access to content. Similarly, feelings of anxiety do not scale proportionally with increased connectivity. So when optimisation pushes too far, it begins to generate side effects that compound, rather than balance things out. And by the time those side effects are obvious, the infrastructure that created them is already hardcoded into the firmware of civilisation.

When systems stop serving humans

To be clear - at low levels, optimised systems serve human needs. They reduce suffering, expand possibility, and make life manageable in ways it wasn’t before. But once optimisation passes a certain point, the script begins to flip. The system no longer serves humans, and instead - humans begin serving the system.

Cities provide a clear illustration of this process. Originally built to facilitate human interaction and trade, many urban environments have gradually reorganised around traffic flow and vehicle efficiency. Streets have been widened, reducing space for pedestrians, ambient noise has increased, and movement has become mechanised rather than embodied. The modern city is now optimised for cars rather than people, even though people are the reason cities exist in the first place.

Work has followed a similar path. At one stage employment was structured around tasks that had clear context and tangible human outcomes. But over time, metrics have replaced meaning, productivity indicators have replaced craftsmanship, and performance has become quantified, tracked and analysed. The system of work became optimised for measurable output, not for the lived experience of individuals that exist inside it, or - in many cases - for those who benefit from the products or services produced.

Communication has shifted in the same way. The internet began as a tool for connection, but has morphed into a tool for engagement. Platforms measure clicks, screentime, shares and reactions. They have been optimised for capturing attention because… well, attention can be monetised. Connection - the original vision of the internet, created by Tim Berners-Lee - has become secondary. Metrics are now the mission.

Importantly, none of this required a bad actor deciding that humans should come second to efficiency. It happened because optimisation continued removing friction without considering the human context that originally justified the system’s existence. Human-made systems do not ask whether something feels right. They don’t ask (or think) anything. They only respond to what performs - visibly, and in terms of output.

What’s really damaging is that once optimisation crosses its threshold, slowness begins to look like waste. In addition, reflection begins to look like delay, rest begins to look like inefficiency, and human rhythms are reframed as obstacles rather than necessities. And gradually, without any dramatic collapse, the baseline of normal human expectations and behaviour shifts. What once felt excessive becomes normal, and what once felt enriching becomes exhausting.

This is why debates around the rights and wrongs of technology often feel confused, with people going round in circles and never arriving at a workable direction. Critics appear nostalgic, advocates appear naive while both make valid points about the benefits and drawbacks of ‘progress’. Because the harm does not arrive as a single catastrophic event - it arrives as a shift in the baseline of what life feels like. And because of that, it rarely triggers alarms. Instead, the impact of optimisation is felt as an erosion rather than an explosion.

Why we always notice too late

The most dangerous feature of optimisation thresholds is that they are invisible at the point we cross them. Early gains are so obvious and so desirable that they mask emerging costs, and by the time those costs are evident, reversing course feels impossible. And because optimisation is interwoven into our processes, stopping is - often - impossible.

Fossil fuels are a prime example. They transformed transport, industry and living standards, providing enormous benefits in the early stages of their use. Back then, the environmental costs were diffuse, delayed and hard to see. And by the time the damage was obvious, global infrastructure had already been built around them.

The same pattern has appeared in digital life. By the time attention began to collapse, platforms that steadily dissolved our ability to focus were already embedded in work, socialising, education and identity. By the time loneliness began to increase, patterns of remote working, online interaction and urban restructuring were already normalised.

The harm does not land in a single moment - it spreads across decades. It disperses across multiple areas, and appears as a subtle shift in how life feels rather than as a headline event. Which is precisely why it is so hard to challenge. 

This is why modern life can feel smoother yet less satisfying. We do not live in a world where optimisation failed, we live in a world where optimisation succeeded beyond the point that it aligned with our needs. It works brilliantly at removing friction - so brilliantly that it has begun erasing the friction that gives life meaning.

This is not a story about humans being weak or ungrateful. It’s a story about systems optimising life beyond natural levels. Our biology did not evolve for constant connectivity, infinite choice, perpetual stimulation and frictionless consumption. It evolved to prepare us to expend effort in exchange for rhythm, community and delayed reward. So when optimisation outpaces our biology, misalignment and negative consequences are inevitable.

Living past the threshold

So where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us in a world that is not dystopian - there is certainly no universal oppression or global collapse. But it is also not utopian either. We exist in something softer - a place where everything works, yet something essential is missing. A state where comfort is abundant, but widespread contentment is becoming increasingly scarce.

This is why I argue that the problem is not progress itself. Instead, it’s uncontrolled acceleration beyond the threshold of human alignment. It’s the assumption that efficiency is directly linked with wellbeing. It’s a belief that if removing friction helped at the start, removing friction indefinitely will help further.

So the next step is not to reject technology or romanticise a past we can never return to. It’s to recognise that we live inside systems that cannot sense the human cost of over-optimisation. These systems optimise for measurable performance, whereas we humans require meaning, context and rhythm.

In the final article of this series, I will explore what it actually means to live inside this reality. Not in an attempt to overthrow it (we can’t), and not even to try and find out how we can become a different type of civilisation. But how to discover how we can preserve our agency, safeguard our purpose and rediscover contentment in a world that is structurally inclined to erode all of these things.

Because this isn’t about collapse, it’s about misalignment. And once you can see that misalignment clearly in your own life, you are in a much better position to decide where optimisation belongs, and where it doesn’t.