THE OPTIMIZATION TRAP

How We Learned to Confuse Maximum with Optimum

The Perfect Roast Chicken

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned came from a chef, not a psychiatrist.Years ago, when I was a student at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, I arrived expecting culinary magic. I imagined endless French sauces, impossible pastries, and chefs balancing tiny edible flowers on towers of food with tweezers while speaking rapid-fire French. I assumed greatness meant complexity. Surely the world’s finest chefs were the ones who knew the most techniques, owned the most expensive knives, and could dirty every pan in the kitchen before lunch.

Instead, one of my instructors quietly dismantled that fantasy.

He told us that the mark of a truly accomplished chef wasn’t preparing the most complicated meal imaginable. It was roasting a chicken perfectly. Every single time. The same went for mushroom soup, mashed potatoes, or green beans. Simple food leaves nowhere to hide. If your roast chicken is dry, no amount of truffle oil, edible gold leaf, smoked rosemary, or interpretive parsley placement is going to save you.¹

At the time, I thought it was a strangely anticlimactic lesson. Here I was at one of the world’s premier culinary schools, and my instructor was basically telling me not to screw up dinner.

Only years later did I begin to understand what he meant.

Like a lot of people, I enjoy watching cooking competitions. The contestants on Chopped are astonishingly talented, and I have no doubt that most of them could cook circles around me. Yet over the years I found myself noticing that every season seemed to demand a little more than the one before it. The mystery baskets became stranger. The ingredients became more exotic. The presentations became increasingly theatrical. Every entrée arrived accompanied by a personal story compelling enough to justify its own streaming series. Television, of course, rewards spectacle, and I certainly don’t blame the producers. Four chefs quietly preparing beautiful roast chickens would probably make excellent cooking and terrible ratings. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something subtle had changed. Were we rewarding better cooking, or had we gradually begun rewarding complication itself?

• A perfectly roasted chicken rarely goes viral.
• Liquid nitrogen almost always does.
• There is still no known substitute for getting the basics right.

For a long time, I assumed this was simply how television evolved. Audiences become accustomed to yesterday’s surprises, so producers naturally search for bigger ones tomorrow. Then I started noticing the same pattern outside the kitchen. Patients described jobs demanding ever greater productivity while somehow leaving everyone feeling busier and less accomplished. Smartphones accumulated cameras, sensors, and features that no one realized they needed until the next product launch. Pickup trucks became so enormous they barely fit into suburban garages. Restaurant portions quietly expanded until an entrée designed for one person could comfortably feed two. Every new product promised to be “revolutionary.” Every election became “the most important of our lifetime.” Every political victory was “the greatest,” “historic,” or “the likes of which have never been seen before.” The details differed, but the direction never seemed to change. Bigger. Faster. Stronger. Louder. More.

The strange thing was that I spend much of my professional life rooting for optimization. One of my patients develops increasingly efficient actuators at the University of Colorado. Another, an organic chemist, once told me about an advisor who devoted nearly twenty years to discovering a less expensive way to manufacture ethylene, reducing waste while lowering costs across an enormous industry. Medicine itself is one long exercise in optimization. We search for safer operations, more effective medications, fewer side effects, and better outcomes because those improvements genuinely make people’s lives better. Civilization advances because people keep discovering better ways to solve difficult problems.²

It slowly dawned on me that optimization wasn’t the problem at all.

The problem was forgetting to ask what we were optimizing.

Businesses optimize for profits. Engineers optimize for efficiency. Politicians often optimize for attention. Social media companies optimize for engagement. Physicians optimize for health. Evolution optimized us to survive long enough to reproduce, not necessarily to be happy. Every system optimizes for something, but those goals are not always the same, and they are not always compatible. Looking back, I don’t think my instructor was simply teaching us how to roast a chicken. I think he was teaching us that excellence and excess are not synonyms.

• Markets optimize for demand.
• Public health optimizes for outcomes.
• Evolution optimizes for survival.
• Human flourishing may be an entirely different project.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always loved something Jerry Garcia once said about the Grateful Dead: “We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”³ It’s one of the most quietly confident observations I’ve ever heard. Garcia wasn’t trying to become everything to everyone. He wasn’t chasing the largest audience, the highest ratings, or the broadest appeal. He understood that excellence sometimes comes from becoming the best version of yourself rather than the biggest version of yourself.

The older I get, the more I think my cooking instructor and Jerry Garcia were talking about exactly the same thing. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking how to become better and started assuming the answer was simply more. I have a feeling those are very different questions.

The Attention Economy

Once I started looking for this pattern, I couldn’t stop seeing it. It was tempting to blame social media, politicians, corporations, or television producers, but that explanation never felt quite right. They all seemed to be playing the same game, responding to the same incentives, and if everyone keeps making similar decisions, it’s usually because the rules reward those decisions. Nobody had to call a meeting and decide that everything should become bigger, louder, faster, or more dramatic. Markets simply have a way of nudging people in the same direction until yesterday’s extravagance quietly becomes today’s baseline.

One of the first people to understand this wasn’t a marketer or politician. It was the economist and psychologist Herbert Simon, who wrote in 1971 that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”¹ At the time, there were no smartphones, no streaming services, no social media influencers filming themselves eating breakfast for millions of strangers. Yet Simon recognized that information was becoming abundant while attention remained finite. If everyone wanted a piece of that limited attention, then attention itself would become one of the world’s most valuable commodities.

Once I read Simon, a great deal of modern life suddenly made more sense. Imagine opening a restaurant where the place across the street advertises “The Best Burger in Boulder.” Calling yours “Pretty Good” probably isn’t much of a business strategy. Before long your sign reads “The Ultimate Burger.” Then someone else offers “The Biggest Burger in Colorado.” Eventually everyone is speaking in superlatives, not necessarily because anyone is lying, but because understatement slowly disappears from a competitive marketplace. Every participant behaves rationally. Collectively, however, they create something that none of them intended.

• Americans encounter thousands of advertisements each day.²
• Human attention has not increased to keep pace.
• Hyperbole has experienced inflation.

The same thing happens to language. Every new smartphone is “revolutionary.” Every streaming series is “the event of the year.” Every weather system is “historic.” Every election becomes “the most important of our lifetime.” Politicians have become especially fluent in this dialect. Donald Trump, for example, rarely describes anything as merely good. It is “the greatest,” “the biggest,” or “the likes of which have never been seen before.” Love him or hate him, he understands the marketplace in which he competes. In a culture saturated with information, ordinary statements are almost invisible. Hyperbole doesn’t simply attract attention. It survives.

This isn’t unique to politics. Walk through any airport bookstore and count how many covers promise life-changing secrets, revolutionary discoveries, or habits that will transform your future. Scroll through social media and every productivity app claims to optimize your life, every supplement promises peak performance, and every podcast advertises conversations you “can’t afford to miss.” The language itself begins behaving like an auction in which everyone keeps bidding higher because standing still feels indistinguishable from falling behind.

The comedian George Carlin once observed, “If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.”³ Confidence sells. Certainty sells. Conviction sells. Nuance usually doesn’t. “This might help under certain circumstances” is rarely as compelling as “This changes everything.”

• Moderation rarely trends.
• “Limited time only” has become a permanent business model.
• Every election can’t be the most important in history.
• Apparently, they all are.

Psychologists call another part of this process hedonic adaptation.⁴ Human beings become accustomed to improvements remarkably quickly. The first smartphone felt miraculous. The tenth felt expected. Yesterday’s luxury becomes today’s necessity, which means tomorrow’s innovation has to become even more impressive just to produce the same emotional reaction. Before long, every industry finds itself participating in the same competition. More features. More speed. More horsepower. More followers. More outrage. More spectacle.

Nobody intended to create an arms race.

Once the race begins, however, nobody wants to finish last.

When Markets Meet Biology

About forty years ago, I read an article in Harper’s Magazine that has stayed with me ever since. I wish I could remember the author’s name because the central idea has become even more relevant over time. The article described how fast-food chains increasingly expanded into lower-income neighborhoods, places where full-service grocery stores were scarce and inexpensive, calorie-dense food was abundant. Today we often call these communities “food deserts,” although many researchers now point out that the problem isn’t simply the absence of healthy food. It’s the overwhelming presence of inexpensive, heavily marketed, highly processed alternatives.⁵

The more I thought about that article, the more I realized it wasn’t really about hamburgers. It was about optimization.

Imagine you’re the CEO of a fast-food company. Your responsibility isn’t to improve public health. Your responsibility is to build a successful business. You compete on convenience, consistency, taste, and price. If the restaurant across the street offers a thousand calories for five dollars, there is enormous pressure to offer eleven hundred calories for the same price. If your competitor invents a larger soda, you introduce one that’s even larger. Nobody has to wake up in the morning thinking, “How can I make America fatter?” They simply ask, “How can I persuade more people to choose my restaurant instead of someone else’s?”

Individually, those decisions are rational. Collectively, they become something else entirely.

• The cheapest calories are often the most processed.
• Portion sizes grew long before our stomachs did.
• Markets reward value. Biology keeps the receipts.

One of the great lessons of public health is that populations rarely become unhealthy because millions of people simultaneously decide to make terrible choices. More often, the environment quietly changes what counts as a reasonable choice. If fresh produce is expensive while highly processed food is inexpensive, if one meal contains twice as many calories for the same price, if every competitor increases portion sizes, then yesterday’s excess gradually becomes today’s normal. Nobody notices the shift because it happens one french fry at a time.

This is one of the reasons obesity has never made much sense to explain as a simple failure of willpower. Human beings evolved during hundreds of thousands of years when calories were difficult to obtain. Under those conditions, finding calorie-dense food was an extraordinary advantage. Our ancestors who eagerly consumed those calories were more likely to survive periods of famine than those who casually pushed away dinner. Evolution did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Unfortunately, evolution has terrible timing.

It prepared us for a world that barely exists anymore.

• Evolution optimizes for survival.
• Businesses optimize for profit.
• Public health optimizes for outcomes.
• Those goals occasionally overlap.
• They often don’t.

Once I began thinking this way, I found myself becoming less interested in assigning blame and more interested in understanding incentives. Businesses generally do exactly what we ask them to do. They compete. They innovate. They optimize. The difficulty arises when one system optimizes for quarterly earnings while another, namely the human body, continues operating under rules written during the Ice Age. Neither system is malfunctioning. They’re simply solving different problems.

That distinction turns out to matter far beyond hamburgers.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Living in Colorado has given me a front-row seat to another remarkable experiment in optimization. Long before legalization, marijuana was generally discussed as though it were a single, relatively stable product. In reality, it has changed dramatically over the past several decades. Through selective breeding, growers steadily increased THC concentrations, applying the same basic principles of genetics that transformed corn, tomatoes, and countless other agricultural products.⁶ Once concentrates became widely available, oils, waxes, shatter, resin, and vape cartridges pushed THC concentrations even higher. From the perspective of the marketplace, the progression was almost inevitable. If consumers enjoyed one level of potency, someone would eventually offer something stronger.

That strategy would have made perfect sense to my patient who designs actuators. Better performance is exactly what engineers are supposed to achieve. It would have made perfect sense to my patient’s advisor who spent two decades developing a more efficient method of manufacturing ethylene. Chemists, engineers, and entrepreneurs all solve problems by making things work better. The difficulty is that human biology doesn’t always define “better” the same way markets do.

One of the strangest consequences has been the growing recognition of Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome, a condition characterized by severe, recurrent nausea and vomiting in some heavy cannabis users.⁷ Had someone described this diagnosis to me in medical school, I probably would have assumed they had confused marijuana with another drug. Cannabis was famous for giving people “the munchies.” It was prescribed to help cancer patients tolerate chemotherapy, maintain their appetite, and reduce nausea. The idea that the same substance could eventually produce relentless vomiting sounded almost absurd.

Except biology never promised that more THC would simply amplify the original effects.

Biology almost never works that way.

• The dose matters.
• The duration matters.
• Potency matters.
• Biology always gets the final vote.

Medicine teaches this lesson repeatedly. Antibiotics save lives until they’re overused and resistance develops. Sunlight is essential until it contributes to skin cancer. Exercise improves nearly every aspect of health until injuries replace fitness. Even water, perhaps the most benign substance imaginable, becomes dangerous when consumed in sufficiently large quantities. Physicians spend much of their professional lives searching for what pharmacologists call the therapeutic window, the range where benefits are maximized and harms minimized. We aren’t trying to prescribe the largest dose. We’re trying to prescribe the right dose.⁸

The same principle quietly governs almost every biological system. Too little sleep is harmful, but sleeping fourteen hours every day isn’t generally a recipe for flourishing. Stress sharpens performance until it becomes chronic. Confidence attracts people until it hardens into arrogance. Evolution rarely rewards extremes. More often, it rewards balance.

That is why optimization becomes so fascinating. Engineers naturally search for maximum efficiency because machines generally tolerate being pushed toward their physical limits. Human beings are different. We are not machines. Our brains, immune systems, cardiovascular systems, and digestive systems are built around tradeoffs, feedback loops, and diminishing returns. Push almost any biological system too far in either direction, or eventually it pushes back.

• Maximum is an engineering word.
• Optimum is a biological word.
• Confusing the two has become surprisingly expensive.

The more I considered it, the more I realized this wasn’t really an article about food or cannabis.

It was becoming an article about us.

Optimizing Ourselves

It would be comforting if optimization stopped at fast food, smartphones, or cannabis dispensaries. It doesn’t. Eventually, the same logic finds its way into the mirror.

Not long ago, I came across the relatively new term looksmaxxing, an online movement devoted largely to helping young men become as physically attractive as possible. Skin-care routines, orthodontics, weight training, hair transplants, jawline exercises, fashion advice, supplements, cosmetic procedures, even detailed discussions about facial symmetry have become part of an elaborate strategy for becoming the most desirable version of oneself. At first glance it seems like a distinctly modern phenomenon, but of course it isn’t. Women have been encouraged to optimize their appearance for generations through makeup, dieting, fashion, hair styling, cosmetic surgery, and an endless parade of products promising youth, beauty, and confidence. The internet didn’t invent self-improvement. It industrialized it.⁹

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to look your best. There is nothing wrong with exercising, eating well, dressing thoughtfully, or taking pride in your appearance. The problem begins when optimization quietly replaces identity. Somewhere along the way, improving ourselves becomes managing ourselves, and managing ourselves becomes measuring ourselves.

• Sleep score.
• Step count.
• Body fat percentage.
• Resting heart rate.
• VO₂ max.
• Followers.
• Likes.
• Screen time.
• Productivity apps.
• Somehow we’re still exhausted.

As a psychiatrist, I hear echoes of this every day. Patients don’t simply want to sleep better. They want to achieve the perfect sleep score on their smartwatch. They don’t simply want to exercise. They wonder whether they’re exercising enough, taking enough “steps”, eating enough protein, taking the right supplements, tracking the right biomarkers, and optimizing the perfect morning routine they saw online three days ago. Parents worry that one extracurricular activity won’t be enough for college admissions. Then two doesn’t seem like enough. Then three becomes normal. Somewhere between piano lessons, robotics club, travel soccer, volunteer work, debate team, Mandarin tutoring, and summer internships, childhood quietly becomes another optimization project.

The strange thing is that the finish line never seems to move closer.

Psychologists have long recognized that human beings adapt remarkably quickly to improvements. Yesterday’s accomplishment becomes today’s expectation, which becomes tomorrow’s starting point. We buy a larger house, receive a promotion, lose twenty pounds, or achieve another goal, only to discover that satisfaction has an unexpectedly short half-life. The goalposts quietly move again.¹⁰

• Enough is difficult to monetize.
• Dissatisfaction is a renewable resource.
• Self-improvement has become a trillion-dollar industry.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. Companies don’t sell contentment particularly well. They sell possibility. Every advertisement quietly suggests that a slightly better version of yourself is just one purchase away. A new watch. A better mattress. A different diet. Another supplement. Another app. Another course. Another productivity system. Another skin-care routine. Most of those products aren’t fraudulent. Many genuinely help. But taken together they create the unmistakable impression that who you are today is merely the rough draft of who you ought to become tomorrow.

The philosopher Alain de Botton once observed, “There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”¹¹ I suspect something similar is true of optimization. Improvement is healthy. Obsession rarely is. Somewhere between neglecting ourselves and endlessly trying to perfect ourselves lies a quieter place that biology seems to prefer.

• Maximum confidence becomes arrogance.
• Maximum productivity becomes burnout.
• Maximum vigilance becomes anxiety.
• Maximum optimization eventually stops feeling like progress.

The older I get, the less interested I become in maximizing everything. I’m becoming much more interested in finding enough.

Choosing What Matters

One of the unexpected benefits of writing this article has been realizing that optimization itself is neither good nor bad. It’s simply a process. Every engineer, physician, entrepreneur, politician, athlete, scientist, and software designer spends part of their life trying to make something work better. The difficult question isn’t whether we should optimize. The difficult question is what we choose to optimize and what we are willing to sacrifice along the way.

Engineers understand this instinctively. Make an airplane lighter and it becomes more fuel efficient, but only up to a point. Increase an engine’s horsepower and new stresses appear elsewhere in the machine. Every design involves tradeoffs. Good engineers don’t maximize everything. They optimize within constraints. Medicine works exactly the same way. Every treatment has benefits, risks, side effects, costs, and unintended consequences. Physicians aren’t looking for the largest dose or the most aggressive treatment. We’re searching for the point where the patient is most likely to benefit. In other words, we’re searching for the optimum, not the maximum.¹²

The longer I’ve practiced psychiatry, the more convinced I’ve become that mental health follows the same rules. Confidence is healthy until it becomes arrogance. Conscientiousness is admirable until it becomes perfectionism. Vigilance protects us until it turns into anxiety. Ambition builds careers until it crowds out families, friendships, and sleep. Many of the traits we admire are simply virtues that haven’t yet wandered too far from the middle.

• Courage without judgment becomes recklessness.
• Confidence without humility becomes narcissism.
• Efficiency without compassion becomes bureaucracy.
• Optimization without purpose becomes obsession.

The same principle extends far beyond individual psychology. Businesses optimize for quarterly earnings because that’s often how success is measured. Social media platforms optimize for engagement because attention drives advertising revenue. Politicians optimize for votes because elections determine who governs. None of those goals are inherently unreasonable. Problems arise when the metric quietly becomes the mission. If a company measures only profits, profits begin crowding out everything else. If a politician measures only attention, attention eventually becomes more valuable than truth. If social media measures only engagement, outrage becomes remarkably profitable.

As someone with a background in public health, I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that public health asks a fundamentally different question. Businesses naturally ask, “How do we sell more hamburgers?” Public health asks, “What happens if everyone eats them?” Businesses ask how to increase sales of increasingly potent cannabis products. Public health asks what happens when millions of people consume them over decades. Those aren’t opposing questions. They’re simply different optimization problems.

• Markets optimize for demand.
• Public health optimizes for populations.
• Evolution optimizes for survival.
• Human beings still have to decide what kind of society they want to build.

Perhaps that’s why the debates surrounding artificial intelligence have captured my attention so completely. AI engineers are doing exactly what great engineers have always done. They are building systems that are faster, more capable, more efficient, and increasingly powerful. Those are extraordinary achievements. The question isn’t whether they should continue improving these systems. Of course they should. The question is what, exactly, we want those systems to optimize. Speed? Profit? Engagement? Accuracy? Human flourishing? Those objectives overlap sometimes, but not always. Choosing among them may become one of the defining challenges of this century.

When I think back to that instructor at the Culinary Institute of America, I realize he wasn’t telling us to avoid complexity. He wasn’t arguing that innovation was somehow dangerous or that roast chicken represented the pinnacle of civilization. He was reminding us that complexity should serve excellence, not replace it. Adding another ingredient doesn’t necessarily improve a dish. Sometimes it merely makes it harder to notice that the chicken is dry.

The same may be true of modern life.

Choosing Our Objectives

The longer I’ve practiced psychiatry, the more convinced I’ve become that the things people ultimately value are remarkably resistant to optimization. Nobody has ever sat in my office regretting that they failed to answer one more email. No one has wished they had spent more time refreshing social media, accumulated a higher sleep score, or squeezed another productivity app into an already crowded day. Instead, they talk about marriages that drifted apart, children who grew up too quickly, friendships that quietly disappeared, parents they wish they had visited more often, and careers that gradually consumed the parts of life they thought they were working to protect.

Those conversations have made me increasingly suspicious of a culture that treats every problem as though it can be solved by turning another dial a little farther to the right.

• More isn’t the opposite of less.
• More is often the opposite of enough.

Perhaps that’s the real optimization trap. We become so busy maximizing measurable things that we neglect the immeasurable ones. We optimize efficiency while forgetting meaning. We optimize engagement while neglecting attention. We optimize productivity while sacrificing presence. We optimize profits while hoping health somehow takes care of itself. We optimize performance while quietly wondering why so many people feel exhausted.

My instructor at the Culinary Institute wasn’t arguing against ambition. He wasn’t suggesting that chefs should stop learning or that innovation was somehow dangerous. He was teaching something much simpler and much harder. Before you spend your life becoming extraordinarily good at something, make absolutely certain you’ve chosen the right thing to optimize.

That strikes me as good advice for far more than cooking.

One last question before you go:

What do you think we’re optimizing for today that future generations will wonder why we ever valued in the first place?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Notes and Sources

1. Michael Ruhlman. The Making of a Chef. Henry Holt, 1997.

2. Herbert A. Simon. “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” In Martin Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.

3. Jerry Garcia interviews (various).

4. Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

5. Ed Diener, Richard E. Lucas, and Christie Napa Scollon. “Beyond the Hedonic Treadmill: Revising the Adaptation Theory of Well-Being.” American Psychologist. 2006.

6. Sonja Lyubomirsky. The How of Happiness. Penguin Press, 2008.

7. Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson. “The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit Formation.” Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology. 1908.

8. George Carlin. Brain Droppings. Hyperion, 1997.

9. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Food Access Research Atlas.

10. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Healthy Food Environments.

11. National Institute on Drug Abuse. Marijuana Research Reports.

12. Allen JH, de Moore GM, Heddle R, Twartz JC. “Cannabinoid Hyperemesis: Cyclical Hyperemesis in Association with Chronic Cannabis Abuse.” Gut. 2004.

13. Goodman & Gilman’s The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics. 14th Edition.

14. Alain de Botton. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Pantheon, 2009.

15. Barry Schwartz. The Paradox of Choice. Harper Perennial, 2004.