on worms and optimization
Why efficiency might be the thing ruining you
There’s a folder on someone’s phone right now – perhaps yours – titled ‘inspiration’ or ‘goals’ or just ‘maybe,’ and it’s full of other people’s mornings. Other people’s bookshelves. Other people’s explanations for the mysteries of our day-to-day life.
It is both fascinating and disappointing to think of these images as our modern-day idols. To think that such obsessions can lead to psychological torment and relationship trauma and self-hate. They may not take physical, spiritual form as they used to, but idols are ever-present in digital life – entire economies built around singular celebrity figures. The singularity of our beliefs, our worship, our imitation of such figures is at once astonishing and self-evident.
As Amanda Montell puts it:
“After all, how inefficient would it be to need all week to appraise a potential mentor, or to assemble a whole panel of perfectly qualified specialists – one for career insights, one for creative inspiration, another for fashion advice? To choose a sole role model for everything, based on hasty but overall sound generalizations, is simply a superior use of one’s tight psychological budget.”
To see the flaws in idolizing a sole figure in your life, whether it be a social media megastar or a sleeper-businessman laying around in billions of dollars, is evident. We are immediately confronted with generalizations and biases that lead to entirely warped perceptions not only of the idol, but of the qualities we are trying to mimic of them.
However, if I were to become a social media megastar, a wide variety of idols, of role models come to mind for inspiration and visualization: a talent manager for my career insights, a chronically online student for trend pulse-checking, an agent for brand partnerships, an unemployed neighbor for camera work – the list of experts, or prospective, help grows on and on. The resources available to one who can free themselves from this individuality is seemingly evergrowing.
But it is not efficient. The early bird who siphons between one worm for nourishment, another for taste, and another for its proximity to its nest, is no longer considered a catchy anecdote.
Children have developed this optimization for seemingly random aspects of life in its most primal form – they’ll eat only the center of the sandwich. Not because the crust tastes bad but because they’ve decided, before the grand age of six, that the middle is the best part so why waste time on anything else? They’ll learn and they’ll grow and they’ll change, we think, but what if they don’t? The point is that the middle tastes good and they like it and that, we think, is enough.
Only a tolerance for inefficiency, a return to the instinct that knew eating the middle was, indeed, not enough, a channeling of that early bird who has developed a system for three wildly different worms can define one’s character in an overoptimized world. Those who can read without needing the summaries, those who can work without a third or fourth sense of stimulation, those who can drive simply with two hands instead of the primal urge to just use one.
Some mornings are just mornings, the ones we use to sift through other people’s folders, their images, our idolatry, yes, but they are just mornings. Slow and particular and belonging to no one but the person living inside them. And the worm, if it comes, comes.