The Cost of Optimization

When the Maker Serves the Machine

The other day I caught myself between two screens, one ending, one about to begin, and realized I hadn’t taken a full breath all morning. The rhythm of work has changed. People speak faster now. Shorter. Less eye contact, fewer pauses. Everything feels like throughput.

It wasn’t always like this. When we met in person, there was a natural rhythm to things. You’d walk into a conference room, greet each other, catch up for a minute, laugh. You knew you’d see those same people later in the hallway, at lunch, or in the parking lot. Words carried weight because they lingered in shared space. There was accountability in proximity and something else too, a kind of energy that moved between people when they were fully present.

Now, presence has been replaced by performance. Meetings happen through screens. Conversations are recorded, analyzed, and summarized into “insights.” We optimize tone, timing, and talk ratios, as if humanity were an algorithm that could be tuned.

At first, I loved this technology. I believed it could make organizations more transparent, forecasts more accurate, and performance more measurable. And in many ways, it has. But somewhere along the line, optimization became its own goal, less about enabling people, more about controlling them.

We measure everything now: engagement, productivity, sentiment, even “energy.” What we can’t measure, we quietly stop valuing. Sellers, teachers, creators, all judged by dashboards that capture their output but not their essence.

The machine was built to serve the maker. Somewhere along the way, the maker began to serve the machine.

And the cost isn’t inefficiency. It’s aliveness.

Optimization promised to make us better. What it really did was make us busier. We learned to speak in data instead of dialogue, to manage activity instead of meaning, to perform connection instead of feeling it. The result is a kind of professional loneliness, a world full of communication, and very little contact.

The answer isn’t to abandon technology. It’s to remember why we built it. Metrics and machines should amplify what’s human, not erase it.

So, when I unplug now, even for an hour, I notice something I’d almost forgotten — that people still have their own rhythm. That conversations can breathe. That not everything valuable can be captured, summarized, or scored.

Sometimes, the best data point is the feeling that passes between two people when no one is measuring it.