The thing with leverage

The reason for asymmetry in results is leverage. But leverage costs you one very important thing. I remember this career guidance class in university where the instructor asked us to map out our sixteen waking hours like we were conducting some kind of time management séance. The whole exercise felt deeply stupid even then, but I played along because I was nineteen and still believed that following instructions would somehow lead to happiness.

My classmates dutifully drew their little boxes: 8 hours sleep, 8 hours schoolwork, 1 to 2 hour commute, 1 hour eating, 1 hour exercise, 1 hour "personal time" (whatever that means). But I kept thinking: what if you read while you commute? What if you listen to podcasts while you exercise? What if you have a really good conversation during dinner that somehow makes the food taste better and the day feel less like a series of optimized transactions?

That's when I realized we don't actually have sixteen hours. We have something more interesting: overlapping experiences that create new experiences. When you're driving while eating that Java House cookie you got at Shell and "Nickels & Dimes" by Hov comes on randomly from your playlist (and I mean really comes on, not just plays as background noise) you're not doing three separate things. You're creating this fourth thing that belongs entirely to you. The song doesn't just play, it inhabits the moment. The cookie isn't just fuel, it becomes part of the ritual. The driving isn't just transportation, it's the medium through which this specific combination of experiences becomes possible.

The fun part of life is having your own contribution to the life that you live. Which is why creativity feels so essential to human flourishing. People gravitate toward having their own distinctive flavor, their own sartorial signature. This expression would be obliterated if everything operated under pure efficiency. It's crucial to maintain your own interpretation of things.

The problem is we've somehow decided this is inefficient.

Which is why the first casualty of AI and these optimization technologies will be style and taste. Just as the digital revolution transformed us into beings obsessed with binary thinking—metrics, data points, quantified selves. Just as the hippie movement redirected attention inward when the external world demanded engagement.

We are still navigating transit systems designed by previous generations while using our devices to play Wordle, endlessly scroll through TikTok's algorithm-curated content, respond to BeReal's manufactured spontaneity, or engage in heated debates about cinematic universes in Discord servers we joined during pandemic boredom and never left. We're inhabiting physical infrastructure built by people who believed in permanence while our consciousness migrates to platforms designed by twenty-something Stanford dropouts who mistake disruption for wisdom.

One of my favorite films is Ready Player One, but what haunts me is how the protagonists literally inhabit a total wasteland before plugging in with their VRs’. I think that's a devastatingly accurate preview of what happens when you misalign your consciousness toward efficiency or toward fundamentally hollow pursuits.

And that's precisely our current trajectory, perfecting our digital existence while our tangible reality atrophies into irrelevance. We've traded serendipity for convenience, style for optimization, and somehow convinced ourselves this constituted evolution rather than surrender.

And style, real style, not the kind you can buy or copy from influencers, is what happens when you refuse to be optimized. It's the residue left behind when you insist on doing things your own weird way, even when the algorithm knows a better way. Especially then.

I’ll end with one of my favorite Charles Bukowski poems: