Unoptimized
Resisting the urge to flatten that which makes us human
Birthdays make me grateful. They also make me reflective.
I’ve had some of these thoughts rattling around for a while—and last week, a friend’s post on LinkedIn and another here on Substack finally booped me to get them out.
Motherhood has also made me slow down.
And somehow, between the two, I’ve landed on a meditation about “efficiency”, labor, and the everyday tradeoffs we’re all making (and may want to unmake).
It’s a tad long and windy on purpose. A’la Ovid.
I hope you find it worth the ride, Turtle. So let’s do this… ✊🏻
Happy birthday to (taur)us.
With a little pomp… and in the midst of wild macro circumstances… I celebrated my 43rd birthday at the beginning of May. A week later, my daughter turned two.
“Walk, mama. M‘ria walk.”
“Scoot, mama. M‘ria turn, scoot.”
She’s mostly over her stroller and wants to use her scooter and / or legs more and more (that big girlie life!)
Sometimes we are in a rush to get somewhere (like when I had 11 minutes to get her to swimming and Google said it would take me 15 minutes, at an adult stride… you know ya girl put on the fire boosters and made it in 9!)
Sometimes it’s not safe (big city life… cars, bikes, electric things, dogs).
But a lot of the time, doing the most inefficient thing on paper has been more meaningful.
Yes she’s slow, but she’s learning! and if we only use the stroller all the time, she won’t get the exercise, practice, and confidence doing something else. (I’m learning that this is the case for everything- she needs to learn it all, practice it all, go slow with it all…🥹).
Knocking the (convenience) hustle.
This moment with my daughter echoed something a close friend said a while back—shared in response to the constant drive by companies to gain an ‘edge’… (paraphrased):
Why is everyone in such a hurry to remove the friction out of every task, every aspect of human life? For much of life, it’s the friction that keeps it interesting.
When I first got into the digital product game, the words “optimize,” “convenience,” and “outsource” felt like magic…propositions that promised real value. And admittedly, in most of my roles over the past 20+ years, I helped shape the very language and many of the products that sold those promises. Maybe you did, too?
Clients would hire my team to surface unmet or underserved needs. We’d prototype a solution, and bam—we’d meet those needs with something that inevitably gave you better, faster, cheaper, more time back, etc.
Time is valuable. And yes, we’ve gained leverage from these advances. But I’m no longer willing to overlook the downsides for the sake of convenience (which itself isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either). There is always a catch.
And so I give you:
7 Myths of Optimization.
I am writing for my own growth, for my daughter as she grows up in this world, and maybe for you, too?
1. We risk learning less, growing less & losing depth.
The more we outsource, the less the experience moves through our fingers, our minds. The more “strollers” we use, the less we develop and nurture essential components of our intelligence. Discernment. Judgment. Motor skills. A T T E N T I O N S P A N S. Being confused so we can eventually find meaning. Doing things “wrong” so we can feel our way to what is “right”.
In big and small ways we are relinquishing hands-on experience and getting further away from holding on to an understanding of how and why. We are losing critical experience we could pass on to our teams, to our children, and to future generations.
AI has only accelerated this shift—making the risks feel more imminent and extractive. Ugh.
2. We’re becoming shut-ins & hermits.
I like my alone “shell” time as much as the next turtle. But I’ve found my limit.
My breaking point of optimizing everything (body, mind, schedule, career) came after the pandemic paused my oh-so-busy life in March 2020… one I’d been optimizing to the heavens since the late aughts when I would blow dry my hair out a cab window while managing projects and taking calls in DC when I had a 9-to-5 and a 5-to-9 (at a supernova ag3ncy).
Then the pandemic happened and I was no longer on planes or in cabs.
I was home.
Almost entirely available to do all the things I used to pay other people to do.
And what started as a pandemic necessity became something much cooler:
An excuse to (re)connect… with things I may have never touched again had it not been for everything changing in 2020.
This includes but is not limited to:
Cooking with my partner through the pandemic, and now with our daughter? Priceless.
Passing down family recipes and connecting her to where food comes from—as the granddaughter of farmers on both sides? Life-giving.
Stepping away from my WFH computer zone to do laundry in our building’s shared room—and striking up conversations with neighbors as we all move from washer to dryer to folding table? Life-affirming.
Taking a bike or the subway, being a part of the rhythm and blooms of a city and not multitasking every second of my life? Lovely, actually.
As simplistic as it sounds (and as late to the slow-foods movement as I am), I actually think a lot of our crisis-of-community could be solved if we all just decided on a few days a week where we’d stop using apps and do things, together, “the old fashioned way”.
3. The jig is up: we optimized lots, we enjoyed less.
At a certain point, it all started to feel like a trap.
Articles and thought pieces about: Strategy. Optimization. Productivity hacks.
TBH, it now feels like a hamster wheel dressed up as self-improvement.
Lord knows I’ve prayed at the altar of biohacking and proselytized their gospels (and the Step Counters and Macro Followers said: amen!)… I don’t reject all of it, but I do think way more critically and am consciously moving away from how I was moving through life.
As
put it beautifully this week over on The Wild Way:“…it feels like all of life has become a problem to solve and not an experience to live.”
4. The case for going slow and steady.
For most of my adult life, I had been measuring, and optimizing, and strategizing, and outsourcing, and Google Doc’ing so much that by the time I turned 40, I felt a bit scrambled. Like I had a thousand browser tabs open and an equal number of spreadsheets tabulating it all.
We’re told to plan our lives with the precision of a product launch (careers, family planning, etc.). To optimize every routine, habit-stack every “atomic” task, and have some sort of real or imagined dashboard to track it all. But for what? As
commented on Shawna’s post above:“The goal of the strategy is usually optimization, not enjoyment or fulfillment.”
Because here’s the truth: behind every request for speed lies the physics of first going slow. I wrote about that in 2022 when I was just beginning to untangle how much I’d internalized urgency as a measure of importance.
Slowness felt inefficient and everyone around me was asking for faster!
But slowness, I’ve since learned, is a kind of secret weapon.
It’s something I bust out as I focus in. It also helps me make sure that when it is time to speed up that I am going in the right direction.
5. If the jig is up, so too is the gig.
If you zoom out, it’s clear: a lot of the so-called “advancements” we’ve made in the name of convenience or innovation are just new wrappers on old systems of exploitation (see also from the TRTL archives: The Chosen).
Tech didn’t invent the gig economy—but it did give it branding. And venture capital. And billboards that made precarity look aspirational. Be your own boss! Set your own hours! Work from anywhere! Right… as long as you don’t need healthcare, paid leave, or the security of a paycheck that doesn’t fluctuate with an algorithm.
I’ll never forget being told during the pandemic by an executive how great it was that he was “leveraging the flexible workforce model” to deliver on some of his largest—and growing—contracts. I know he meant it to sound strategic, but it left me feeling a certain way.
No healthcare. No parental leave. No paid leave. No 401k plan.
Instead, they have to self-fund and self-manage it… more burdens as your own boss, without any IPO or exit upsides of a company owner.
We’ve effectively privatized the social safety net and informalized entire sectors, while pretending it's to be celebrated as flexibility.
6. Yes, but…
I say all this not as someone above it, but as someone who once did the exact same thing when it came to our creative labor-force. From 2006 to 2012, I co-founded and ran strategy, client services, and operations at j3, a creative agency that thrived during the rise of the gig economy.
Our model was largely contractor-driven and easy to support thanks to sites like Behance, Cargo Collective, Dribbble, and even Flickr and Blogspot. We scaled quickly, worked globally, and relied on a vast bench of freelance talent.
While we bonused people often and did everything we could to bring folks on full time with benefits once we had the footing, I still feel like if I were doing it all over again knowing what I know now, I’d build it differently.
What felt innovative then—fast, lean, decentralized—now feels incomplete.
We created beautiful work, but we didn’t build enough long-term security and upside into the system for the people who made it possible.
My hindsight makes it impossible to ignore:
What started as a creative workaround became a corporate playbook for disposability.
Flexibility got rebranded as freedom.
The model may scale, but the heart is missing—and the overhead (invoicing, quarterly taxes, benefits) lands squarely on the individual, most of whom are hobbling along with a patchwork of solutions, at best.
And to be fair—not all independent work is broken. Plenty of freelancers do thrive. There are folks who genuinely choose this path and find autonomy, purpose, and creative joy. I think I might be one of them?
Yes, but… the problem is when “choice” becomes a cover story for systemic risk transfer—a way to strip out safety nets, avoid long-term investment in people, and keep power squarely with platforms and employers.
7. Same playbook, new tools.
We’ve all seen the shift: fewer full-time employees, more contractors, freelancers, and gig workers. Permalancing, as it’s come to be known (aka temp-to-never-FTE-hire).
Even the way we talk about “optionality” and building a “portfolio life,” as I did here back in November, reflects the new normal we’re all navigating.
That shift didn’t stop at job titles or employment types. It’s now shaping how entire industries think about labor itself. Plus, with AI entering the chat, some execs act like replacing labor is inevitable. As
pointed out in her recent commentary on Klarna and Duolingo’s AI stumbles:“It doesn’t matter what the industry is, or what decade it is… There is a group of people who want to accumulate all the wealth… They don’t want to pay you.”
And the tools just keep evolving to serve the same old aim. First it was temp work. Then it was TaskRabbit. Now it’s AI support agents and Uber-style customer service setups—where companies like Klarna can advertise “human support” while quietly replacing salaried roles with a rotating cast of 1099s.
But this isn’t new. It’s just the latest chapter in a very old playbook—one that began with piece-rate textile labor, evolved into Fordist assembly lines, reemerged through post-1980s neoliberal deregulation, and now thrives in today’s algorithmic gig platforms. The through-line is clear: maximize output, minimize obligation.
But tbh, companies are doing what the system tells them to do: cut costs, boost returns, stay competitive. This isn’t always a moral failing—it’s often the rational outcome of a system that rewards short-term margins over long-term investment in people.
It feels like “optimization” isn’t just about efficiency. It is instead becoming a tool for labor arbitrage. For control. For subtly shifting more risk onto the people doing the work.
And that’s the part we have to name. Because once you see how easily optimization slides into exploitation, it’s hard to unsee. Especially when it’s all happening at scale, across industries, across decades.
It’s all one machine: deregulation, disconnection, tax avoidance, wage suppression. Efficiency, yes. But for whom? And at what true cost?
And to be clear, I don’t want to go all the way and say efficiency is inherently bad. But efficiency that extracts value from labor while hoarding gains at the top isn’t innovation… it’s bad economics. Bad ethics. And short-sighted. If we can optimize for shareholder value, we can optimize for worker upside, too✊🏻
I think about all of this. A LOT. As both a past participant and pioneer; as a current portfolio life’r; as a mother and as a mentor. And, as the saying goes: once you know better, you must do better.
🐢Slow & Steady: For the week ahead
Okay turtles, let’s do like we used to do more regularly… let’s land this flying saucer!
A few questions I’m sitting with and I invite you to do the same:
What have I inadvertently “flattened” in the name of optimization?
What do I want to do inefficiently next week?
Who benefits from what I optimize?
What would it take to build an economy that values slowness, security, and shared upside?
If you’re bringing back some friction, let me know what shape it’s taking.
Author’s note:
How AI was used in this post: tightening a few sentences throughout, helping me brainstorm section headers (that I mostly hated and edited a bunch), and generally guiding me to connect some dots more explicitly that were otherwise floating 💛 beep, boop, beep.
Great piece Leslie, reminds me of a saying a friend of mine used consistently “Slow down to go further”
Cooking, gardening, and raising kids teach me patience every day. I still look for the occasional shortcut, but many things have to be done the slow way to reap the best rewards.
I started The Overachiever's Club because society at large rewards my efficiency and productivity -- making them hard habits to break. But the battle for time never ends; I just fill the time I saved with more things! A hamster wheel, indeed.
My eternal life battle will be to do less.... Without feeling too much like I am doing less😝
Always have to know that I am not the only one!