You Don't Know What You're Optimizing
and other lessons from lemon pepper
Optimization.
That single word sums up about a decade of my life in the way one might look back on a ridiculous fashion trend from years prior.
It’s an interesting effect that only time can reveal. Consider for a moment that 40 years ago, most everyone certainly felt like their own flavor of original, but we just look back at the 80s and think: hair.
A trend is something that sort of comes into focus in the aftermath, upon analysis. It really exists in retrospect more than anything else. But in the moment, things aren’t always so clear.
A decade of “optimization”. I look back and smile.
“Life is like a video game”
“How can I achieve this in the fastest way possible?”
“What are the actionable steps here?”
“What’s the single, highest leverage activity I could be doing to achieve this goal?”
If any of these sound like you, I invite you to tune in a bit. Because these certainly sounded like me.
Lessons From Lemon Pepper
For a moment, I want you to imagine that you are making a dish. And after tasting it, you conclude that it could use a little pepper. Now imagine that you had unknowingly reached for the lemon pepper instead.
All the while you thought you were giving the dish just what it needed—and you were—you were also giving the dish a fair amount of something it probably never needed.
Now, the obvious lesson here is to be more careful about which seasoning you’re pulling from the pantry. But that aside, there’s really a much broader theme on offer here with applications far outside the kitchen.
Black Box
In the case of the kitchen, it’s quite straightforward to keep a close eye on whatever ingredient happens to be in your hand. So, you can be fairly sure that whatever you are trying to add to a dish is in fact what you are adding to it. And any failure here is merely a failure to pay attention.
But life has a way of being slightly more complicated than the average kitchen adventure.
In life, we often have ideas and intuitions about how we might improve it. We often spend our entire day contemplating this project, in one form or another. And never mind the fact that we are only ever something like 4 minutes away from the perfect for-you page that will endlessly confirm our latest self-help theory or delusion.
From projects we should tackle and skills we should develop, to traits we should foster and habits we should form, there is truly no end to the list of ideas and theories one might have about how to accomplish any of this.
But the changes we are trying to make in life are rarely ever the only changes we are making in the process. And this isn’t due to a mere failure to pay close enough attention—as in the case of the lemon pepper. It’s more to do with the shrouded and complicated nature of the world that stretches out before us.
There is so much already baked into any question we might ask—that the questions themselves are often more important than the answers.
The problem with “optimization” being the primary lens by which we navigate the world, is that our eyes simply aren’t as good as we think. Nor could they be.
We don’t always know what all we’re optimizing, when we are.
We can’t always see the lemon in the pepper. And in most cases, there’s probably more lemon than pepper to begin with—and lemon might just be the beginning.
Put differently, most of the time we’re just plain wrong about why something is working, or why it isn’t. We overestimate our ability to correlate the right factors with the right outcomes, or to even know what those outcomes and factors are. We overprescribe medicine to ourselves for diseases we don’t even have.
The point isn’t that optimization would be a bad strategy in life, but that it isn’t a real strategy, in the way we tend to think of it. Optimization itself exists in theory.
Most of the time, we think we’re operating with a kind of surgical precision in our lives, but fail to see that nothing in life is ever truly separate from anything else. It’s naïve to assume that any one thing can be optimized in isolation.
Take a moment to consider these questions:
“By trying to get more of this, what else am I also getting more of?”
“By trying to get good at this, what else am I also getting good at?”
“By throwing this away, what else am I doing away with?”
“By measuring something in this way, what aspects am I choosing to ignore?”
These kinds of questions can help illustrate the virtual impossibility of compartmentalizing our lives. And if this is true of things we know and are simply ignoring, imagine how muddy the water gets when we introduce an ocean of unknown unknowns.
That is the world you live in.
A Delicate Dance
You are constantly doing 99 other things alongside the 1 thing you think you’re doing. And I don’t mean to imply a kind of “multitasking” here. I mean to say that the “1” thing you think you’re doing would really be understood as a symphony of 100 different things that are intimately working together, if only you had the eyes to see the orchestra.
But we can’t see the orchestra, and it must be this way. Because if every single thing was simultaneously in the spotlight of our conscious attention, then nothing would be. There would be no more “spotlight” at all. The stage would just be brighter.
It’s absolutely necessary that this contrast between foreground and background be maintained. That is what gives our world depth. But it’s also crucial to recognize that most of the world persists therefore, outside of our gaze.
We talk about tunnel vision as though it’s a kind of “hyper-focus” in one direction. But it isn’t that at all, really. It’s more like a loss of perspective. It’s the inability to see anything beyond that narrow scope of our directed attention and the utter lack of any recognition that it’s even there to be seen.
It’s not a brighter spotlight. It’s fooling oneself into thinking that there is no stage beyond what is illuminated by the spotlight.
The point isn’t so much that optimization should be abandoned altogether (it clearly shouldn’t) but to recognize that these kinds of forces are always at play in our every attempt to bring it to bear.
We are hardly in a position to claim omniscience over everything that we do and everything that we are, and that is to say very little of the world that is most certainly beyond us.
We don’t always know what all we’re optimizing. And when we do, we’re fooling ourselves. And the world, it turns out, is not so easily fooled.
We are eventually up against the true nature of things.
Moving Forward, Or at All
If conscious optimization is something like an illusion in the first place, then what are we to do with our lives? How are we to move forward towards anything?
In my own life and practice, I am learning to rely less on explicit, declarative reasoning as my default modus operandi.
I’m learning to recognize my own capacity to fool myself to no end, and to pursue certainty with less zeal altogether. Whether it be a goal, a task, a feeling, or a process, optimization on its own isn’t the devil to be cast out. It’s the all too precarious relationship between optimization and certainty that gets us into trouble.
In our efforts to optimize something, we tend to adopt a view of the world that favors things that can be measured, made explicit, and articulated thoroughly; we like to deal in certain terms. This can greatly “simplify” the task of optimizing something. But the problem is that this tends to also breed a growing hunger for certainty in situations where there may be none on offer.
In an investigation where police are under significant pressure to produce a suspect, this hunger for certainty too early on can render something closer to a witch hunt than an honest investigation of the truth in service of the good.
If we are not careful, we can end up in a world characterized by a kind of blinded utilitarianism that’s been unmoored from the initial landscape of values that brought about its raison d’être.
If we must be so certain about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how it’s working, and why it’s working…then we will be forced to produce answers where we may in fact have none. And equally devastating is the fact that over time, we will begin to favor only the things in life for which we can more easily produce these answers, and ignore the rest.
…
I’m finding that by loosening my grip on the world and in my life, a greater breadth (and depth) of things are suddenly available to me—to try, to experience, and to marvel at.
A Brighter Sky
By breaking free from the illusion that I know exactly what is best for me—and let alone how to get it—I am free to move forward in life more open-endedly and towards better goals that I didn’t even know were there to be desired.
All of this was essentially off the table for a young man who thought he was much smarter than he was. And that’s every young man, really. The key being to realize that you are always younger than you will be: we’re all that young man.
And as we should be.
I’m finding that life is increasingly mysterious if we so let it. And consequentially beautiful when we gain the ability to see and appreciate that which we cannot understand. There is always more to the world than meets the eye.
There is always more to you than meets the eye.
So let yourself take roads that you wouldn’t take. Because that’s how you make roads that no one else could make.
And I’ll see you around,
— David Kennedy