Against Efficiency

Productivity is great, but some inefficiency is essential for the good life.

Written by Bo Winegard.

“I bought a movie I already own on DVD on iTunes, just so I wouldn’t have to get out of bed.”

So joked comedian Gary Gullman, mocking our technology-induced indolence. The insight isn’t new, even if the line is. Technology makes life easier, and in making it easier, it makes us lazier. It eliminates the frictions, inconveniences, inefficiencies and delays that once structured (one might say “burdened”) our days. Order online, date online, work online. Everything one needs just a few clicks away.

This efficiency brings real advantages. Whatever romance we may attach to the past, daily life only a few centuries ago involved exhausting drudgery. Simply fetching water meant hauling buckets from a well or stream, often for hours. In 2025, we simply turn the tap. And we can have hot water or ice in mere seconds. Many who fantasize about medieval village life, imagining in it a more communal and organic existence, would flee in despair after a few days. The work, the pests, the stench would overwhelm them.

And yet, laments against modernity and its obsession with efficiency are not without merit. Humans evolved in a world where struggle was inevitable. Food, water, shelter, community were never secure and thus were cherished. A meal of honey and roasted meat was a gift from the gods, not a delivery from Uber Eats.

When a coveted good becomes too easily accessible, its delight often thins. What was once a source of deep joy becomes an empty pleasure. Abundance dulls sensation, causing boredom and even a suffocating ennui.

Thus efficiency does not simply change how we obtain things; it changes how we value them. Struggle and scarcity deepen meaning, while convenience often hollows it. The very obstacles technology eliminates are often the ones that give life its depth. For without challenge, without resistance, the once-revered trophy becomes a worthless bauble. We may dislike friction, but our minds need it just as much as our muscles. And without it, our spirit atrophies.

Even in the realm of sport, efficiency smooths away the quirks and surprises that make life delightful. Like a song played in flawless metronomic rhythm, competition becomes robotic. The optimal strategy is discovered, the equilibrium reached, and soon every competitor seeks desperately to eliminate that tenth of a percent of inefficiency, that grain of dust slightly slowing the gears. The result is hyper-specialization, often technically astonishing, but alienating to the casual fan. Efficiency thus sharpens performance even as it dulls the experience.

Commitment. The potential corrosiveness of efficiency is perhaps most evident in our social commitments. In earlier eras, friendships were forged over years of proximity, shared labor and shared sacrifice. Marriages demanded patience in courtship and endurance in life together, and were sustained not only by affection but by mutual dependence in the daily burdens of work, child-rearing and household maintenance. Professional ties, too, were bound by loyalty and necessity. Just as important, such relationships were difficult to leave or replace. The man who fought battles beside you could not simply pack up for another city. Nor could he, after reading Thoreau or Kerouac, wander off into the woods or the streets to live alone. For better and for worse, you were stuck with one another.

Today, in a world of quick travel, anonymous cities, and online networks, efficiency has radically altered the logic of commitment. Courtship itself is streamlined. Online dating dramatically reduces the potential search cost for a spouse, offering a cornucopia of potential partners in minutes. What is more, such relationships, once entered, can be easily abandoned. Raising children and maintaining the household, once arduous tasks that required the devotion of husband and wife, have largely been replaced by machines that wash clothes, cook meals and clean floors. Even sex can be simulated or outsourced to pornography or AI chatbots. Bonds that once grew slowly, nourished by dependence, struggle and sacrifice, can now erode with little cost to either partner.

Of course, it still hurts when a relationship ends, just as it hurts to be alone. But the anticipation of temporary pain is a fragile way to maintain a bond. Without the dependencies that once held friendships and romantic relationships together, they often fail. Efficiency promises liberation from tedium but ultimately liberates us from each other. Frictionless relationships are precarious and are often sustained only so long as they remain easy.

And since relationships are rarely easy, fewer people are learning how to form them, giving rise to a painful paradox: it has never been easier to meet people but never harder to create enduring friendships and marriages. The chatbot and the anonymous social media avatar are so much simpler, so much more willing to compromise. Thus like a horde of lizards sunning on a rock, impervious to each other, millions of people online are alone together.

Community. If efficiency corrodes individual commitments, it may corrode community commitments even more. Real communities are often incredibly inefficient and therefore annoying. They impose upon us. They require meandering conversations, long-lasting meals, irksome obligations, and the friction of dealing with obnoxious others one cannot mute or block. Community gatherings require effort to attend, distract from Call of Duty or college football, and invariably last longer than is enjoyable. A church potluck demands time, cooking, cleanup. A town meeting stretches long into the night. Even a visit to the local grocery store requires interacting with others, which is a source of anxiety and irritation. None of this is efficient and much of it seems burdensome. Why not stay home, order online, and binge The Sopranos for the third time this year?

Yet it is precisely these repetitions and rituals, these burdensome activities, that bind people together. And it is community that ultimately makes life meaningful and sustains the civic culture necessary for the preservation of the republic. De Tocqueville famously saw this in the 1830s and he celebrated the American enthusiasm for forming associations:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small … In America I encountered sorts of associations of which, I confess, I had no idea, and I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely.

These organizations, de Tocqueville contended, were a vital part of the democratic experiment. By the end of the twentieth century, however, things had changed, as documented in Robert Putnam’s justly famous and immensely depressing Bowling Alone. The rise of television, of suburbanization, and now the of internet and smartphones has ravaged civic life.

Today, efficiency offers frictionless substitutes for the very practices by which communities are sustained. We no longer need to ask our neighbors for this or that since Amazon delivers by the evening. We no longer rely on churches or civic groups for companions since social media supplies imaginary communities with fewer costs. The result is that people are strangers in their own neighborhoods and communities are disconnected. Efficiency brings freedom from inconveniences, but those inconveniences are often what compelled and maintained our relationships. Without them, real community becomes tedious and superfluous, something to be replaced by the more efficient even if ultimately illusory community online.

Sports/competition. Judged by today’s standards, Paul Morphy’s brilliant nineteenth-century chess often looks naïve. His scintillating attacks and sacrificial combinations have long since been refuted. Many of his exciting lines were objectively unsound. Yet most spectators would prefer to watch him unleash a daring King’s Gambit blitzkrieg than to watch Magnus Carlsen slowly strangle an opponent in a nearly drawn endgame, winning with a kind of precision that only a computer can understand and appreciate. Elite efficiency has irrevocably changed chess, making it less exciting but more accurate. Players and analysts have recognized this, with some, including Carlsen, advocating for different forms of chess that are less well understood and analyzed. They want to make the games less efficient, less precise.¹

The same dynamic appears in other sports, perhaps most notably in baseball. Once a game of eccentric managers and improbable heroes (star players who looked like mechanics and plumbers), baseball is now governed by analytics. Players are positioned precisely in the field; lineups are optimized by algorithms; managerial decisions are based on a priori computer analysis. Quirky small-ball tactics, the steal, the hit and run, the sacrifice bunt, are mostly antiquated.² Strike outs and walks prevail. Swing for the fences. Pitch for the punch out. The result is undoubtedly more efficient baseball, but less fun, less dramatic, less idiosyncratic. Basketball also emphasizes efficiency. The game is about pace and space, about threes and free throws. Every player movement is tracked with a GPS. Every play’s expected value calculated. Every inefficiency snuffed out.

This is the paradox of efficiency in sport. Athletes and teams get better, but the product gets worse. The enchantment of surprise, of imperfect humanity, is replaced by sophisticated computer analysis. Guesses, hunches, intuitions are supplanted by calculations and precise predictions. What remains is strategically optimal and often technically virtuosic but increasingly alien to a casual fan. Elite sports have become more of a science than a drama of human competition.

Meaning. Efficiency thus restructures our communities and commitments and, in doing so, reshapes our sense of meaning itself. Meaning arises not from ease but from resistance, from relationships that demand loyalty, from obstacles that require endurance. A pilgrimage is powerful because it is slow and arduous; a mountain climb because it is dangerous; a novel because it is vast. The labor and the resistance are not burdens to be eradicated but the very conditions of meaning. If the pilgrimage or the climb were reduced to an instant, they would lose their power. If Anna Karenina could be downloaded into the brain in twenty seconds, it would cease to matter.

Thus another painful paradox. Efficiency saves time even as it robs time of value. By reducing struggle and sacrifice, it makes life less worthy of struggle and sacrifice. The arduous challenge that once instilled pride becomes an inconvenience to be eliminated. The ritual that once bound communities across time and space becomes a bore to be skipped. The novel gives way to the film; the film to the YouTube clip; the YouTube clip to the TikTok scroll. Each step is more concentrated, more efficient and less meaningful.

Consider the extreme. Suppose we achieve a paradise of abundance, where every desire is granted at once. Think it and you have it. What follows? Likely not lasting elation, but pervasive ennui. Millions trying to numb their despair with drugs and distractions. Hedonism leading into nihilism. Efficiency into misery.

This is what Nietzsche foresaw in the figure of the last man. Obsessed with comfort, allergic to passion, incapable of creation or defiance, he lingers on the earth in a kind of bland tranquility. He cannot suffer, and so he cannot grow. He lives, bland and mediocre, and passes away peacefully, having never truly lived at all. He cannot give birth to a star because he has tamed the chaos inside and outside of his soul.

We, like him, now walk through a more efficient world, one so online that many of us would rather play a game that simulates life than actually live it.

Bo Winegard is an Editor of Aporia.

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1. This, inter alia, explains the appeal of shorter time controls in chess. The games are less precise, more full of exciting attacks and blunders.

2. Stolen bases did increase with rule changes, including bigger bases, in 2023. But no modern team resembles the 1976 Athletics, which had six players with 30 or more steals, including three with over 50!