Please Stop Optimizing My Fucking Life

I’d like my dolphins real, my martinis made by humans, and whatever time technology supposedly saved me returned immediately.

Last week I shared a magical little story about the time dolphins may have saved me from drowning in a storm off the coast of Mozambique in the Indian Ocean.

You know. Normal life stuff.

One of the things I wrote about was how sad it is to think that, as more and more of our lives become generated by AI, a lot of people, especially young people, may miss out on experiences like that.

Almost dying in the Indian Ocean.

Which, admittedly, is not something you’ll find under “Benefits of Reduced Screen Time.”

But that’s not really the point.

The point is that I had to go somewhere. I had to get on an airplane. I had to get on a boat. I had to trust some guys I barely knew. I had to make questionable decisions. I had to be cold and wet and scared shitless. I had to taste the salt water and feel it sting my eyes. I had to wonder, however briefly, whether this was going to become one of those stories everyone else told about me because I was no longer available for comment.

And then there were dolphins.

Someday, probably sooner than we think, I’ll be able to put on a pair of goggles and have essentially the same experience from my sofa. The technology will be incredible. The waves will look real. The dolphins will swim around me. Maybe some tiny nozzle will spray salt water in my face while a haptic vest punches me in the kidneys to simulate terror. Perhaps near-death will be part of the premium package for an additional $12.99 a month.

My brain may not know the difference.

But I will.

More importantly, I think my soul will.

Because the dolphins weren’t really the experience. Everything that had to happen for me to encounter the dolphins was the experience. The inconvenience was part of it. The travel was part of it. The strangers were part of it. The bad decisions were definitely part of it. The fear, the exhaustion and the possibility that everything might go spectacularly wrong were all part of it.

You can’t optimize those things without eventually optimizing the experience itself right out of existence.

And lately I’ve been noticing how much of life is being optimized out of existence.

I spent the last couple of months in Texas, which, for the record, is unbearably hot and humid in a way I had apparently blocked from memory. Add menopause and hot flashes and I was basically a human baked potato wrapped in damp linen.

And yet somehow the greatest indignity was this: I could not get a decent espresso martini.

Apparently we have optimized those too.

More and more bars are serving premixed cocktails. The bartender no longer needs to actually make your drink. They grab a jug of brown liquid from the refrigerator, pour it into a glass, throw three espresso beans on top like they’re blessing a grave and hand it to you.

Efficiency! Innovation! Scalability!

It tastes vaguely like an espresso martini, which apparently is now good enough.

Except I like mine with reposado tequila instead of vodka. And you can’t change the liquor because the liquor is already in the fucking jug.

The jug has spoken.

I have very few pleasures left in life. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve simply narrowed the list down to what actually matters: an amazing cup of coffee and a cigarette in the morning, a manicure and pedicure once a month, and an espresso martini made to order by an actual bartender, preferably with reposado tequila, traveling directly from their hands to mine and then immediately to my mouth.

I am, at heart, a simple woman.

But apparently even that is becoming too inefficient.

And once I started noticing it, I started seeing it everywhere.

Friends who work in sales tell me they’re increasingly discouraged from actually going out and seeing customers. Why drive somewhere? Gas costs money. Mileage costs money. Talking takes time. Send an email. Send another email. How many emails did you send today? How many were opened? How many links were clicked? How many orders came through?

Did you meet the owner of the little shop and watch her pick up your product, turn it over in her hands, smell it, taste it, ask questions about it and imagine which of her customers might love it? Did you sit there long enough to learn something about her business you never would have learned from a spreadsheet? Did you develop a relationship that might last ten years because two human beings sat across from each other and actually talked?

Who cares?

Did she click the fucking link?

At least everyone can still get together at the trade show once a year and perform Human Interaction™ for a few days. There will be handshakes and name tags and tiny bottles of water, and everyone can remember what legs look like before going home and getting back to optimizing.

Even product demonstrations don’t necessarily require people anymore. Make a video. Generate a spokesperson. Automate the follow-up. Send another email.

Efficient. Scalable. Soulless as hell.

And this is the part I keep coming back to: who exactly are we optimizing all this performance for?

Because it certainly doesn’t appear to be us.

If decades of technological innovation and increased productivity were actually intended to improve the quality of human life, shouldn’t we be working about twelve hours a week by now?

Seriously.

We have computers. Email. Smartphones. Zoom. Slack. Automation. Algorithms. Self-checkout. Apps that can deliver a taco directly to your couch. Now AI can write the email, summarize the meeting, create the presentation, answer the customer and probably attend the meeting pretending to be you.

At this point I should be working Tuesdays from eleven to two with an hour for lunch.

Instead everybody I know is fucking exhausted.

Technology saves us time and then somehow the saved time immediately gets repossessed.

Congratulations! That task that used to take eight hours now takes four.

Fantastic.

Here are eight more tasks.

We’ve spent decades becoming more productive and our reward for being more productive appears to be the opportunity to produce more. It’s like winning a pie-eating contest and discovering the prize is more pie.

And the money certainly doesn’t seem to be trickling down along with all this miraculous efficiency. We’re not working less. Most people aren’t suddenly swimming in disposable income. Nobody announced that because AI can now accomplish half the work, everyone gets Fridays off and a 40 percent raise.

The profits go somewhere.

The productivity goes somewhere.

The hours we supposedly saved go somewhere.

And increasingly they seem to go up.

More profits for them. More output for them. More transactions for them. More customers processed per hour for them. More emails, more clicks, more data, more growth.

We keep optimizing the human being for the machine and calling it progress.

And somehow we’ve adopted their measurements as though they measure the quality of our lives.

They don’t.

We’ve just somehow been convinced that fewer humans doing things for other humans is progress.

Customer service is now a chatbot whose primary function appears to be preventing you from reaching customer service. I have recently spent an embarrassing amount of my remaining mortal life trying to convince a computer that I need to speak to a person.

“Tell me briefly what you need help with.”

I JUST FUCKING TOLD YOU.

“I understand this must be frustrating.”

No, you don’t. You’ve identified three nouns and detected hostility.

“Would you like to see some helpful articles?”

I WOULD LIKE YOU TO RELEASE THE HUMAN.

Somewhere, I am convinced, there is one actual customer service representative left in America, chained to a desk in Nebraska, and every chatbot has been programmed to make absolutely certain none of us ever find her.

Meanwhile, we’re scanning and bagging our own groceries, checking ourselves into hotels, placing our own restaurant orders on QR codes, troubleshooting our own internet, filling out our own medical intake forms for the seventeenth time and then being asked to rate our experience.

At some point I expect to walk into a restaurant, cook my own dinner, wash the dishes and have an iPad swivel around asking whether I’d like to leave 25, 30 or 35 percent gratuity.

For whom?

Me?

And now AI is beginning to find its way into emergency call systems, which feels like an especially exciting place to test the limits of removing humans from human experiences.

Your husband is clutching his chest. Your kid isn’t breathing. Your house is on fire.

“Please briefly describe your emergency.”

HE’S NOT BREATHING.

“It sounds like you may be experiencing an issue related to breathing.”

YES, BRENDA 3000. THAT IS WHY I CALLED 911.

“I understand this may be stressful. Would you like me to text you a link?”

AI may eventually become incredibly useful in emergency systems. It may route calls faster, translate languages instantly, identify locations and help save lives. Great. Use it to help the human being on the other end of the phone, not to get rid of them because Karen in accounting discovered empathy has terrible margins.

That’s the part that keeps getting left out of this glorious future we’re being sold.

Technology was supposed to work for us.

Somewhere along the way, we started working for it.

Every new efficiency supposedly saves us time, but nobody can explain where the fuck all this saved time is being stored. Is there a warehouse somewhere? Do I have an account? Because I would like to make a withdrawal.

We’ve become more efficient at working, shopping, banking, ordering, communicating, consuming and complaining. We scan our own groceries, bus our own tables, book our own travel, enter our own medical information and navigate our own customer service problems while corporations congratulate themselves on improving the customer experience.

We’re doing half the jobs ourselves.

They’re saving a fortune.

And somehow we’re the lucky ones.

That is some Olympic-level gaslighting.

At some point Jeff Bezos is going to show up at my house, hand me a brown vest and ask me to deliver my own package because it creates a more seamless customer journey.

And perhaps that’s the scam hidden inside the word “optimization.” It sounds like something is being improved, but nobody ever bothers to specify for whom.

If a company replaces ten people with AI and makes more money, the company has been optimized.

If one bartender can pour forty premixed cocktails instead of making twenty actual ones, the bar has been optimized.

If a salesperson sends 200 emails instead of visiting ten customers, the sales department has been optimized.

But if the rest of us are working just as much, making no more money, doing more shit ourselves, talking to fewer humans and drinking worse espresso martinis, I’m unclear how our lives made the optimization list.

We are turning life into one giant airport moving walkway, congratulating ourselves on how efficiently we’re getting somewhere while removing every possible reason to give a shit about the destination. Faster! Easier! Frictionless! Eventually we’ll just be born directly onto the conveyor belt and deposited into the grave without ever having to inconvenience anyone by stopping for a drink.

And the weirdest part is that nobody really asked us.

The tech bros decided. The billionaires decided. The consultants decided. The shareholders decided. Somebody made a PowerPoint presentation showing that human interaction costs 17 percent more, and apparently that settled it.

So maybe this sounds ridiculous coming from a woman who just wants someone to make her a proper espresso martini.

Because I don’t want every human experience reduced to the fastest, cheapest approximation of itself.

I don’t want simulated Mozambique.

I don’t want simulated customer service.

I don’t want simulated empathy.

And I definitely don’t want simulated hospitality poured out of a plastic jug and garnished with three espresso beans.

Maybe we don’t save humanity with some grand philosophical revolution. Maybe we save it in tiny acts of glorious inefficiency.

Call instead of text. Go see the customer. Walk into the store. Talk to the bartender. Take the trip. Get on the boat. Make the questionable decision. Taste the salt water. Look at the dolphins with your actual eyeballs.

And for the love of God, make the fucking cocktail from scratch.

Because I refuse to spend whatever years I have left drinking a premixed approximation of something that used to be made by a human being while wearing goggles that show me an approximation of a place I could have actually gone.

I want the inconvenient version.

The messy version.

The version that takes too long, costs a little more and occasionally goes spectacularly off the rails.

The version where you might actually have a story afterward.

Because maybe all that friction everyone is so desperate to eliminate is actually where life happens.

And if the glorious optimized future means I get to work more efficiently, shop more efficiently, complain to a chatbot more efficiently and eventually almost die in the Indian Ocean more efficiently, I think I’m good.

I’ll take the dolphins.

And a reposado espresso martini.

Made from scratch.

By a human.

Please tip accordingly.

They’re an endangered species.

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If you enjoyed this gloriously inefficient piece of human-generated chaos, become a paid subscriber for $5 and I’ll send you a free digital copy of my book Killing Buddha. Think of it as supporting one of the remaining humans before we’re all replaced by chatbots and premixed cocktails.

Or you can just Venmo me. Your contribution will be converted directly into reposado espresso martinis made from scratch by an actual bartender.

No algorithms. No optimization. Just inefficient human-to-human wealth transfer.

Please tip accordingly. We’re an endangered species.