“You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may you have three.”1
Last week I read a thought provoking article by Erik Hoel, which inspired this post. Erik says we can only choose two of these three competing goods: career, family and community. He’s right. You can’t have three, you must choose two.
As he explains in his post, he chose career and family. I believe this is by far the most common choice men make. I’ve linked his article below. You should read the whole thing.
There’s one line in particular that I’d like to focus on, where Erik identifies why perhaps we all make this choice and neglect community; why community and deep friendship seem impossible for adults like him… adults like all of us:
“I am conscious of being too late into optimization to move along another dimension and become best friends as an adult.”
What is Optimization & Why Does It Hate All Your Friends?
Optimizing means making something as good as possible. In this context, optimization is making our life as good as possible for ourselves, attuning our circumstances and daily choices to match our preferences, routines and comforts. On its face, this is not a bad thing. It’s a perfectly sensible thing to do.
But in a modern, mobile, technologically advanced, consumer oriented society so many optimizations are now available to us that this good thing has become very costly in ways most people haven’t fully woken up to yet. We can and easily do optimize deep friendship and community right out of our lives.
It’s optimal to order groceries through Instacart, but you’ll never run into friends like you would at the store.
It’s optimal to text while you’re doing other tasks, but you have a much smaller incentive to actually meet up in person later.
It’s optimal to work with a big bank and within its apps and automation, but they don’t know you and don’t care about you at all.
It’s optimal to come home and immediately begin a consumption routine of our favorite shows and food and only come up for air when it's time to sleep. But are you happy?
Thousands upon thousands of optimizations of all kinds make life more convenient and more personalized but not necessarily better.
I understand Erik to be saying essentially (and speaking for all of us) “I’m so far into the process of making my life as convenient, smooth and as good as possible for myself and my family that to create deep friendships with other adults seems impossible. And other adults are themselves so far into this process, they experience the same challenge.”
Whether a man is single or has a large family, he can be a victim of optimization. I see optimization like a tariff, a tax on another person’s ability to get to know you. Because you are no longer just you, but you are you PLUS a thousand and one preferences, experiences and settings that another person has to wade through and match up with to have a chance at friendship or companionship. And, ugh, what a burden and disappointment if they can only match up to 500 of them!
Again this was likely true of previous generations to an extent but the sheer number of optimizations available to us now is the very essence of loneliness.
Human connection, in the eyes of far too many, whether it be romantic, social or communal, seems impossible or simply not worth the effort.
![Haven't found a soul mate yet? - iFunny | Infp personality, Infp, Infp personality type Haven't found a soul mate yet? - iFunny | Infp personality, Infp, Infp personality type](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F06999937-9dea-4a72-8420-ed8ce8f205f5_736x672.jpeg)
Types of Optimization
Using a highly rigorous, scientific methodology2, I’ve categorized optimization into the following three types.
As a family man, at times I look at the optimizations that lie between my family and others and they seem to be as vast and as deep as the ocean. And two or more families who could and should work together communally, who could or should build a village together instead treat each other like ships passing in the night.
Choice Maxing: Optimizations meant to prioritize only our individual or family consumer and lifestyle preferences. The intuitive version of this is the family that is consumed by what they consume. Children or adults can sequester themselves into online micro niches and never be heard from again. But whole families can also fall into this by filling their schedules to the brim with atomized and individual activities and lessons for their kids. When a family is choice maxing, they’d love to get together but they just don’t have a lot of time. Which eventually leads into…
Commitment Avoiding: Optimizations meant to maximize independence from social obligation and commitment. Once we’ve choice-maxed and can do most things we want to do without involving other people, it’s all too easy to turn the driveways and sidewalks of suburbia into a no man’s land. The less you have to rely on someone, the harder it is to trust anyone. The less practice you have with virtues like communication, negotiation, patience, and forgiveness, the more difficult it is to see virtue in them. When a family is commitment avoiding, golly gee wiz, they’d love to help, but they just don’t know how and is it really their place to get involved? This eventually leads into…
Comfort Zone Policing: Optimizations meant to maintain a life within a narrow and lonely, but fully optimized comfort zone. I don’t think I really have to describe this in detail. This is a common reality of family life today. At this stage, it’s easy for whole families together to seal themselves away within an airtight comfort zone of their own making and not advance out of it. An invitation outside of that comfort zone can be met with anxiety or fear. It can be seen as an unwelcome intrusion or as butting in. Interaction with others can even be seen as a competition (keeping up with the Jones’ countertops or their new SUV). “Third places”3 and neutral ground is met with suspicion; mediating institutions, like churches or local clubs or other places which used to facilitate connection are not attuned to the specifics of our comfort zones and so they whither away and die.
Optimize or “Community-ize”?
I read a book a couple of years ago called “The Comfort Crisis”. Long story short a guy goes on an extreme arctic hunting expedition and learns his life is too comfortable, too optimized. Maybe so optimized, it’s a little bit fake. It helped me understand that the continual optimization of my life was actually a narrowing of human experiences, a narrowing of what I was capable of doing and a narrowing of the people who could help me.
Contrary to our modern experience, adults are capable of building deep friendships and community with each other. Adults do not have to be lonely. Men can have friends. We are capable of finding interest in what others do. We can get a long with others, forgive them, communicate about hard things and unite to offer the next generation meaningful and essential communal experiences.
But it does require us to choose.
Do we want that? Do we want community and meaning? Or do we want the benefits of full optimization?
We can only have one.
From the poem, “You Want a Social Life With Friends”, By Kenneth Koch
I just made it up.
Someplace other than your home or work, where you can be with or meet people.
I agree with everything you say about optimization. I disagree with the premise of the article you are responding to, that we can only choose two of the three values, however.
I think family, career, and community can all work in harmony, but don’t in the present because of technology.
My mother recently discovered a giant treasure trove of home videos from her childhood. As we watched them, it struck me just how many people and events there were in each video. I had to frequently interrupt to ask questions like, “Who is that?” and “What are you guys doing?”
She would reply something like, “That’s my cousin’s wife’s daughter’s friend’s birthday.” Or, “That’s the bowling league of factory workers your grandfather was a part of for my entire childhood.” And, “That’s a tea party my mom would host for all the women in the neighborhood once a month.”
It was amazing to see how family and coworkers and community all created and reinforced one another during that time-period. The more videos I watched, and the more questions I asked, the more clear the web of social bonds connecting all three areas of life into one giant community became. It also laid bare the stunning lack of community in my own life.
Each of those areas of my life is not nearly as rich as they were for my parents, let alone interconnected. And I don’t doubt for a second that it is because technology has allowed us, at each level--work, family, community (friends)--to cloister ourselves away into isolation under the guise of optimization.
Thanks, Michael. My wife and I are really feeling this one right now. While we’ve tried to pursue community, it wasn’t where we had thought we’d find it. The next step will be to downgrade on optimization and truly put community first.
The same also with finding families to bind together. We do seem to just pass each other like ships in the night! We look for families with similar values, but they also have autonomous households, effectively. We need, instead, to bind together with people who truly want to put community over optimization, and with the natural community of extended family.
Thanks for writing this!