The Hidden Cost of Optimizing Everything - The Atlantic

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Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube<br>Modern life is built to make things easier, faster, and more efficient. But what if, in smoothing away life’s everyday frictions, we’ve also lost something essential? This week on Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost about his new book, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, and why the tiny rituals, sensory pleasures, and routine interactions we tend to overlook may be the very things that make us feel connected—to one another, to the world around us, and to ourselves.

The following is a transcript of the episode:<br>Ian Bogost: So think about this in, like, really simple terms: You’re cooking dinner. Your goal is to produce a dinner. But the experience of cooking—of hearing the sizzling onions in the pan, or of chopping up the vegetables, or of opening and closing the refrigerator and feeling the gasket as you do so—all of that stuff, which is really gratifying, that’s the experience of cooking. And it doesn’t make sense to think about it in terms of goals and outcomes that you can optimize.

[Music]<br>Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to sweat the small stuff.<br>There’s this line from the author Kurt Vonnegut that I love. It’s from a 1995 interview in Inc. magazine where Vonnegut recounts, just as personal computing is really taking off, his love for doing things in a more analog way.<br>There’s this one trip to the post office he talks about: heading to the newsstand, waiting in line, making small talk with the shopkeeper. The satisfaction of sealing the envelope and bringing it to the woman he has a crush on behind the counter. He ends the anecdote with the following: “I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”<br>That quote has been banging around in my head over the last few years, as the world continues to embrace the kind of technological progress that sands down the edges of our lives and keeps our faces in our screens. There’s Amazon, Doordash, parking-lot pickup, which can be genuine godsends for people. But it’s a convenience that also comes with a trade-off of not having to live in the world, among other people in the same way that we used to. In terms of farting around, our devices offer endless, engrossing distraction from the physical world. In part, our technologies have created this world where everything can be quantified. This has birthed this optimization culture and a broader obsession with metrics and efficiency.<br>My guest today argues that, while not all of this is bad, it can come at a genuine cost. Many people have, without really deciding on it, become more disconnected from a sense of place, from a sense of self, and from the tiny, visceral, sensory experiences of being present in the world just like Vonnegut describes.<br>Ian Bogost is my colleague here at The Atlantic, where he writes about technology. He’s an author; a professor and administrator at Washington University in St. Louis; and a game designer. But he’s also one of the keenest observers I’ve ever met: not just of how technology changes us but of all those little quirks that make up our lives.<br>And that, coincidentally, is what his new book, The Small Stuff, is about. In it, Ian makes the case that some of our societal obsessions—self-optimization, career satisfaction, this constant fixation on whether we are adequately happy or not—those are all aimed at the Big Stuff. But our lives are actually dominated by the Small Stuff: the Vonnegut-style farting around that gives texture to our days. This, he argues, is good news, because the Small Stuff is abundant, and it’s actually much easier to notice, to control. And doing so can bring us a sense of genuine gratification, the kind that so many of our technologies just automate away.<br>Now, you may be thinking that this all sounds just a bit nostalgic—a couple of guys lamenting about the good old days. But Ian’s argument in The Small Stuff isn’t some screed against technology. It is, however—in a moment where AI is rapidly automating the world—a book about cultivating and strengthening the qualities that make us different than the machines, that bring us joy. That make us human. And so, Ian joins me now to talk about it all.<br>Sign up for Ordinary Extraordinary, Ian Bogost’s guide to making everyday life vivid. You’ll receive one edition every Saturday for the next eight weeks.

[Music]<br>Warzel: Ian, welcome to Galaxy Brain.<br>Ian Bogost: Thank you so much, Charlie.<br>Warzel: So we’re here to talk about the small stuff. You have a book that is all about the small stuff. Can you tell me broadly what is the thesis here of paying attention to the small stuff?<br>Bogost: So the idea is...