The Hidden Cost of Optimizing Everything
7/10/202645 min
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,” 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.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsKarla Lalli0:00
I'm Karla Lalli, cookbook author and snack enthusiast. Do you have a sweet tooth? Check out Sweets Unwrapped, a podcast from Ferrero and Atlantic Rethink, The Atlantic's creative marketing studio. Together, we're celebrating the traditions that make life sweet. Tune in now.
Speaker 20:17
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.
Ian Bogost· Guest0:47
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, 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 r- 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.
Charlie Warzel· Host1:14
[instrumental music] I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we're gonna sweat the small stuff. There's this line from the author Kurt Vonnegut that I love. It's from a 1995 interview in Inc.