The Case for Inefficiency
Against the cult of optimization, and for the things that don't scale.
Efficiency is a good servant and a terrible master.
As a servant, it helps us accomplish more with less — a genuinely useful thing. As a master, it tells us to optimize everything: our time, our relationships, our learning, our leisure. It suggests that every moment not spent productively is a moment wasted.
This is a pathological idea, and it’s quietly making us worse at the things that matter most.
What Doesn’t Scale
The most important things in life are inefficient by design. Deep friendships require time that doesn’t compound. Understanding requires sitting with confusion. Creativity requires wandering without destination.
You cannot batch-process your way to wisdom. You cannot A/B test your way to values. The things worth having — genuine expertise, real relationships, hard-won perspective — require inefficiency as a feature, not a bug.
The Optimization Trap
The optimization mindset produces people who are very good at achieving goals they haven’t examined carefully enough to know if they’re worth achieving.
The faster you move, the less you notice what you’re moving toward. Speed is useful once you know where you’re going. Before that, it just gets you lost more efficiently.
A Defense of Slowness
Some of the most productive periods of my life have looked, from the outside, like nothing. Long walks. Reading books with no obvious application. Thinking about problems that weren’t urgent.
That fallow time wasn’t wasted. It was when the important connections got made, when the real problems became visible, when I developed the judgment to distinguish work that matters from work that merely looks productive.
Occasionally, the most useful thing you can do is refuse to optimize.