The Loneliness Of Optimization
Authored By Jake Engel
I got a hug in the grocery store last week.
This isn't normally noteworthy. I've received hugs before, and grocery stores have certainly seen stranger things. But this one came from an old coworker I hadn't seen in a long time. A few aisles earlier, I'd run into someone else from my past, and we'd stood there talking long enough that I temporarily forgot whatever I was supposed to be buying.
I left with my groceries and this little feeling that I'd gotten something else from the trip, too. On the drive home, I realized how easily I could've missed all of it.
Most weeks, I don't wander through a grocery store. I open the Kroger app, press a button, and have everything arrive at my door. I can buy almost anything without entering a store, deposit a check without entering a bank, work without entering an office, and get almost anywhere without asking another person how to get there. I love these conveniences and have absolutely no interest in giving them back.
But driving home, I started wondering whether, while we were busy making everything easier, we also made other people increasingly optional.
We make time for the important people in our lives. Friends, family, coworkers. I'm thinking about everyone else – the people who used to populate the edges of our ordinary lives.
Growing up in small-town Seymour, Indiana, I remember riding through the bank drive-thru with my mom and waiting for the pneumatic tube to come back, mostly because there was a decent chance a Dum Dum would be inside. I had a barber who knew which guard to use without checking my preferences on his iPad. Years later, I worked in a building where the same cafeteria staff made my breakfast and lunch for so long that we knew one another in that peculiar way you can know someone without ever deciding to become friends.
None of these were important relationships. They happened because life required me to keep showing up in the same places. Today, it increasingly doesn't.
We've spent decades removing friction from our lives, usually for very good reasons. The errand becomes a delivery. The teller becomes an app. The commute disappears. Each trade seems worth making on its own. Yet, I'm less sure about what happens when we make all of them at once.
An ordinary day used to require small interactions with people you hadn't chosen. You asked someone for directions. You talked to the person behind the counter. You sat next to a coworker you might never have picked as a friend and, after enough time together, somehow became one anyway. Together, those interactions created a background hum of human contact that I don't think we fully appreciated until we started designing it away.
Now I can have an extraordinarily productive day entirely by myself.
We've never had more ways to communicate, yet so much of connection has to be deliberately arranged. We schedule dinner. We plan the coffee. We choose the people we follow and the communities we join. Even our social lives can become optimized around the people we already know and the things an algorithm has learned we're most likely to enjoy.
What's disappearing is randomness, and randomness did more work than I think we gave it credit for.
It gave us familiar strangers – people whose names we might not know but whose presence made somewhere feel like ours. It put us next to people we wouldn't have chosen long enough to discover that we liked them. Sometimes it simply reminded us that there were thousands of other lives unfolding alongside our own.
Maybe that's part of why loneliness feels so strange now. We tend to describe it as not having enough people, but there's another version: having plenty of people in your life while having fewer moments when you feel surrounded by people at all.
Optimization can create that world without ever feeling like anything has been taken away. We get time back. We avoid traffic. The package appears. The groceries arrive. Everything works exactly as intended.
I don't want to make life deliberately inconvenient, and I certainly don't want to return to the era when my mom printed MapQuest directions before we drove to the Children's Museum. I want the faster route, the shorter line and the delivery when I need it.
But efficiency is a strange thing to maximize without limits, because eventually we have to ask what all those saved minutes are actually for.
Maybe a little of what we're looking for is hiding in the time we've worked so hard to save.
