The Optimisation Trap (Part 4) - Optimisery, Mistopia, and Personal Agency

Not dystopia. Not utopia. Something else.

Throughout this series I have argued that optimisation is not a preference but an emergent property of intelligence. I have also suggested that once competition and abstraction enter the picture, friction becomes something we instinctively remove. This is fuelled by capitalism and power - both amplify optimisation until acceleration becomes the default setting of civilisation. And importantly, I have also stated my belief that optimisation crosses a threshold where the benefits begin to retract and the hidden costs begin to compound.

But there is one final piece I’d like to address, and in my mind it’s the most important one. Because when you look around you, you’ll see that we are not living in a global nightmare. Most systems function, most people in developed nations are relatively safe, fed and connected. Healthcare exists, information is abundant, and the lights turn on when we flick the switch. So on paper, we have improved the human experience for many. Put simply - things work.

And yet a low-level dissatisfaction exists beneath the surface, specifically in parts of the world where huge progress has been made. Not dramatic misery, and not visible collapse - just a persistent sense of discontentment that is difficult to articulate and therefore easy to dismiss. A feeling that the texture of life is being lost. That we are comfortable but not fulfilled, stimulated but not satisfied, and connected but not grounded.

So to clarify what I think is happening, I want to introduce two terms:

Optimisery - The impact of optimisation on the human experience.

And…

Mistopia - A world structured around efficiency rather than contentment.

I’m not coining these to be ‘interesting terms’ - they are attempts to name a condition that is emerging in line with the extreme technological progress we have experienced. And right now - as we begin to hurtle headfirst into an exponential curve of AI-accelerated change - identifying that condition is necessary. Because naming it is often the first step towards understanding how we can learn to live inside it.

What optimisery feels like

Before I continue, I want to be really clear about something. Optimisery is not suffering in the traditional sense. There are people around the world facing genuine hardship, danger and deprivation, and their reality must not be trivialised. We all - especially governments and global leaders - need to do everything we can to lift people out of these situations. This is about something different - Optimisery operates at the other end of the spectrum. It emerges when we escape suffering and keep optimising beyond the point where effort and friction once provided us with meaning. 

It’s what emerges inside a world of increasing comfort - a kind of efficiency-induced emptiness that comes into being when too many barriers have been removed. It occurs when life becomes smoother, faster and more convenient, while simultaneously losing texture. Instead of being exhausted because things are hard, we become exhausted because - cognitively - nothing ever truly stops. And instead of being unhappy due to lack of comfort, we find ourselves restless within a world of abundance.

Part of the problem is that we have framed friction as the villain in our story. We see effort as something to eliminate, waiting as something to remove, and difficulty as something to bypass. As a result, vehicles now take us where we want to go, streaming delivers entertainment instantly, and food arrives at our doors. This is an existence where products appear by tapping a screen on our smartphones, and information is accessible instantly and at any moment. Understandably, we interpret this as improvement because, in one sense, it is.

But friction was never just an obstacle. It’s an essential part of what it means to be human. Effort gives weight to outcomes, delay creates anticipation, and difficulty makes achievement possible. When those elements are steadily engineered out of daily life, the human experience becomes lighter, but weaker as a result.

Optimisery is not isolation in the physical sense - it’s disconnection in a hyper-connected world. It’s what we feel when everything is mediated, curated, delivered and filtered. It’s an insidious erosion of agency that occurs when systems become so efficient that they anticipate our needs before we are able to recognise them ourselves.

The irony is that optimised systems remove friction brilliantly - too brilliantly. They deliver precisely what they were designed to deliver - reducing effort, providing immediacy, and giving us things that work perfectly. The problem is that these systems were not designed with an appreciation for human psychology and evolutionary rhythm. They were designed - quite simply - to perform.

And so we find ourselves in a state where comfort is abundant, but the need for effort is becoming increasingly scarce. Where convenience is constant, but a sense of satisfaction is harder to reach. Where we are held back from doing some of the very things we evolved to do, because the system does everything for us.

Why Mistopia is the right word

If Optimisery describes the feeling, Mistopia describes the landscape.

Dystopia suggests visible oppression, violence and collapse - this is not where we are. Utopia suggests harmony, fulfilment and peace - we aren’t here either. Both are fictional extremes we will likely never experience, but because both are rhetorically powerful they are discussed often. Regardless, neither comes close to accurately capturing the world most of us inhabit. We exist in something softer and more ambiguous - a world in which almost everything works, but where opportunities for true satisfaction feel rarer than they should be.

Mistopia is an age in which our obsession with efficiency is impacting human contentment. A state where life is engineered for convenience, scale and measurable output rather than for alignment, rhythm and meaning. It is not characterised by overt suffering for most, but by increased opportunities to feel restless, distracted and unfulfilled.

Mistopia does not provoke a revolt - revolutions happen when widespread situations become unbearable. Instead, Mistopia is tolerable. And because it’s tolerable, it leads to coping.

And we cope through distraction, self-optimisation, constant productivity rituals, and curated social media personas. We indulge in digital detoxes and wellness routines layering them on top of the structural misalignment we experience. We numb ourselves through endless consumption - binging content on streaming platforms, shopping online for things we don’t need, eating too much, and using drugs and alcohol to adjust how we feel.

These behaviours vary across generations and cultures, but the underlying pattern is similar. We attempt to patch over feelings of wrongness with individual strategies, rather than examining the conditions that generated these feelings in the first place.

As I said, the reason Mistopia persists is precisely because it is tolerable - it’s not bad enough to trigger collective upheaval. It’s comfortable enough for most of us to function, and stable enough to endure. And so optimisation continues to compound - quietly in the background - nudging us further into alignment with efficiency while we attempt to claw back meaning through personal hacks.

Why this is not about blame

At this stage, it is tempting to look for someone to blame. Technology companies like Google, Meta and Facebook or billionaire founders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. And doing so is emotionally satisfying - it’s human nature to want to assign responsibility to identifiable actors. But this misses the deeper point - optimisation did not hijack humanity. Humanity is a relentless optimisation machine. The issue is not that we took a wrong turn, it’s that there is a mismatch between what intelligent civilisations inevitably become, and the needs of individual intelligent creatures.

Human civilisation operates like a superorganism - one that optimises for metrics, speed and growth. It responds to competition, and compounds advantage, treating friction as inefficiency. But individual humans require something different. We require rhythm, context, connection and purpose. And perhaps most importantly, we require effort to feel agency and gain meaning. So when the might of civilisation and the needs of individuals collide, something has to give. And because civilisation operates at a scale far larger than any individual, it’s always going to be the individual who absorbs the cost.

This is why simplistic advice such as “logging off”, “slowing down” or “choosing better” feels insufficient. It’s not wholly wrong, but it is incomplete. The system will continue to push each of us in the opposite direction. Efficiency will remain rewarded, friction will remain the enemy, and convenience will remain seductive.

So the solution can never be naive rejection. And it can’t be a nostalgic retreat. It has to be more deliberate and far more conscious than that.

Where agency still lives

If optimisation isn’t going to stop, and if Mistopia is stable enough to persist, then what can we do? Where does meaningful agency exist?

Well, it no longer lives at the system level in any simple sense. Optimisation has become too embedded, too expansive, too hardwired. Individual or collective protest, while valuable for shaping policy, can never reverse systemic acceleration. Instead, agency lives at the boundary - in what you allow optimisation to touch. It lives in the friction you choose deliberately, and in the skills you decide to build slowly. It can be found in the conversations you have without mediation, and projects that take time and patience. True agency exists in the decision to value the benefits of effort, even when shortcuts are available.

To be clear - this is not about rejecting technology. Technology is essential in expanding knowledge, connecting people across distances, and enhancing enjoyment. It’s required to cure illnesses, give us long healthy lives and to help us cope with the physical realities of life. The aim then, is not to retreat from modernity, but to refuse to let efficiency define everything.

Choosing to learn slowly where depth matters, and choosing to build something by hand even when automation exists are both acts of agency. Choosing shared experiences over isolated consumption is an act of agency too. These are not empty gestures. They are deliberate boundaries that we can place around the things that should not be optimised. Because in a world that cannot stop optimising itself, the most radical thing we can do is to decide what should remain inefficient.

In closing this series of articles, I just want to say this - reducing optimisation out of choice, isn’t easy. I struggle with it constantly because the pull of efficiency is so strong. Convenience is always appealing. The problem is that the system is designed to draw us towards speed, scale and seamlessness at every turn. But even just understanding what is happening changes the equation. 

Once you recognise Optimisery for what it is, you begin to see where it is eroding your own sense of meaning. And once you see that clearly, leaning slightly away from constant efficiency becomes attractive rather than inconvenient. It becomes a source of quiet resistance, and a way of preserving agency inside a system that hasn’t been designed to give us contentment.

That, ultimately, is the heart of this series. We do not live in dystopia or a utopia. We live in Mistopia - a world that works astonishingly well, while quietly depleting meaning from our lives.

Make no mistake - optimisation built this world, and it will continue to shape it. But within its acceleration, and within its thresholds and compounding loops, there is still space for individual choice. Not to stop the machine, because we can’t...

But to decide where it doesn’t impact you.