Somewhere in the last decade, without a vote being taken, we agreed to treat our lives as engineering problems. Sleep became a metric. Friendship became a network to be maintained. The morning, once merely a thing that happened to you while you were still partly asleep, became a "routine" — stacked, optimised, and increasingly photographed. We did not set out to industrialise the self. We simply downloaded the apps, and the apps had opinions.
The logic is seductive because it is half true. Some things genuinely are better when optimised. Tax returns. Supply chains. The order in which you run errands. The trouble began when we mistook the technique for a philosophy and started applying the metrics of the warehouse to the parts of life that were never warehouses to begin with.
The tyranny of the measurable
Optimisation has one fatal property: it can only improve what it can measure, and so it quietly persuades you that the measurable things are the ones that matter. Steps, not walks. Hours slept, not dreams had. Books finished, not books loved. Connections made, not the single long unhurried conversation that changed how you saw your own life and produced no data whatsoever.
This is not a small distortion. It bends the whole shape of a life toward whatever happens to have a number attached, and away from the things that resist counting — which, awkwardly, turn out to be most of the things that make a life feel like one.
The most important things in a life are precisely the ones that cannot be optimised, because they cannot be measured, because they are not problems. They are experiences.
You cannot optimise a friendship. You can only have one, slowly, with a great deal of apparently wasted time — the dull stretches, the in-jokes that took a decade to ripen, the evenings that went nowhere and were the whole point. The efficiency expert looks at all this and sees waste. The friend looks at it and sees the friendship. The waste was the friendship.
In praise of slack
Engineers know something the lifestyle gurus forgot: a system optimised to its limit is a system with no resilience. Remove all the slack from a supply chain and it runs beautifully until the first disruption, at which point it shatters, because there was nothing left to absorb the shock. The same is true of a person. A life run at one hundred per cent utilisation has no capacity for the unexpected — no room for the chance encounter, the change of mind, the afternoon that derails productively into something better than the plan.
Slack is not laziness. Slack is where the future comes from. The wandering walk that solves the problem you weren't consciously working on. The boredom that finally drives you to make something. The unscheduled hour in which an idea, denied any stimulation, is at last forced to entertain itself and accidentally invents your next ten years.
A perfectly optimised life is a perfectly brittle one. The friction we keep trying to remove is, very often, the texture — the thing that lets a life grip the world instead of sliding frictionlessly past it.
None of this is an argument for chaos, or for the romanticisation of the missed deadline. It is an argument for keeping some part of life unmeasured on purpose. Take the scenic route occasionally, not because it is faster — it never is — but because the fast route was only ever fast, and you are not a parcel. Leave one corner of the week unaccounted for. Be, in at least one small domain, gloriously, deliberately, irreducibly inefficient. It may be the most human thing you do all week, and not a single app will reward you for it.