Optimized to Death

Abhijit Das
Nov 9
4 min read

Convenience has been the great narcotic of modern life. We've been sold the idea that friction is the enemy, that every obstacle should be smoothed away, that the good life means minimal effort between desire and satisfaction. One-click ordering, algorithm-fed content, pre-chewed opinions, relationships reduced to swipes.

But convenience is anti-generative. It's the opposite of the struggle that produces meaning. You don't get depth from the path of least resistance..you get soft, passive consumption. You get people who've outsourced so much of their thinking, choosing, and creating that they've atrophied the very capacities that make them human.

The fool's gold: convenience felt like progress, like liberation from drudgery. And some of it was washing machines, modern medicine, these genuinely expanded human possibility. But we didn't stop there. We kept optimizing for ease until we started optimizing away the friction that actually matters: the struggle to learn something hard, to build something with your hands, to figure out what you actually think rather than what you've been fed. The loss of community and culture as we need it.

Generations raised on this are now facing systems that can out-convenience them. AI can deliver faster, cheaper, more optimized versions of convenience than humans ever could. So what's left?

What's left is precisely what can't be convenient: the messy, difficult, inefficient work of being fully human. Creating something that matters. Wrestling with hard questions. Building relationships that require effort. Making art that comes from necessity rather than algorithm.

The tectonic shift away from convenience isn't just economic, it's existential. It's people waking up to the fact that the convenient life is also the empty life, and that meaning requires exactly the kind of friction we've been taught to avoid.

The ball is rolling, but it's rolling through a landscape of numbing distraction.

The "inescapable dullness" feels like a kind of spiritual exhaustion. Not the productive exhaustion that comes from real effort, but the hollow fatigue of endless scrolling, algorithmic content loops, manufactured outrage, and entertainment that requires nothing of you. It's everywhere, it's free, it's optimized to capture attention. And it's profoundly deadening.

Cheap entertainment isn't just a distraction from the tectonic shift, it's almost like a last-ditch defense mechanism of the existing system. Keep people pacified just long enough, numb them with dopamine hits and parasocial relationships and endless content, prevent them from sitting with the discomfort that might actually catalyze something real.

But here's what's insidious: you can feel it's cheap. People know they're being fed empty calories. There's a growing awareness that something is deeply wrong, that life shouldn't feel this flat and meaningless, but the convenience and distraction are so pervasive that breaking out requires an act of will that feels almost superhuman when you're already depleted.

So the pressure builds, but slowly. Like water heating in a pot. The frog doesn't jump because the temperature rises gradually, and there's always another video, another scroll, another easy hit of nothing.

The question is: what's the catalyst that makes people choose the difficult path of meaning-making over the easy path of continued numbness? Does it have to get worse before it gets better? Or can the dullness itself become unbearable enough to spark movement?

If you're waiting for the breakthrough, the moment when everything clicks, when the pressure releases, when people collectively "wake up” - you're still trapped in outcome-thinking. You're still optimizing for a destination. The story isn’t in the climax or the end. The story is in the BTS (behind-the-scenes). But to do feel that, you must have realized that much of “success” is merely ceremonial and temporary at best.

The journey itself, the struggle with irrelevance, the friction against convenience, the daily choice to create meaning in a world designed to numb you - that's where the actual living happens. That's where you become who you are. That’s the telling story, which in fact is also the real bestseller.

We know what's on the other side. Not because we can predict the future, but because we've seen this cycle before. Collapse and renaissance. Irrelevance and meaning-making. Death and rebirth. The pattern repeats because it's fundamental to how we work. We need to lose ourselves to find ourselves, we need the void to remember why creation matters.

The people going through this now..facing automation, economic irrelevance, the hollowness of convenience they're not headed toward some unknown fate. They're walking a path that artists, mystics, and outcasts have always walked. The specifics change, but the essential journey doesn't.

So maybe the real insight isn't "how do we fix this?" or "when does it get better?" but rather: how do we walk this path with awareness and intention? How do we recognize that the discomfort, the irrelevance, the stripping away of false comforts..this is the work itself, not the obstacle to the work.

The debris is fertility to the mushroom.

The mushroom doesn't grow despite the decay..it grows from it. The rot, the breakdown, the composting of what was..that's not waste to be cleared away before something new can begin. It is the beginning. The substrate. The necessary condition.

All this irrelevance we're talking about, the collapse of old systems, the obsolescence of conventional paths, the dullness and cheap entertainment..it's not the tragic prelude to renewal. It's the “material” of renewal. The debris is generative.

And you can't rush it. You can't skip the decomposition phase and jump straight to the fruiting body. The mycelium has to do its invisible work in the dark, breaking down what was, threading through the decay, building networks in the wreckage. That takes time. That requires patience with the process.

This also means the people experiencing irrelevance right now - economically, culturally, systemically - aren't victims waiting to be rescued. They're standing in the richest soil for meaning-making that exists. They have access to something people chasing relevance don't: the freedom that comes from having nothing left to optimize for.

The question isn't "how do we help them survive until things get better?" It's "do they recognize they're already standing in the mushroom patch?"

Maybe that's the real creative work of this moment..not building new systems, but learning to see the fertility in the ruins.