A few years ago, the writer Jia Tolentino described the “ideal woman” as “always optimizing.” To maintain the appearance of “indeterminate age but resolutely youthful presentation,” she “takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself.” Of course, Tolentino notes, “figuring out how to ‘get better’ at being a woman is a ridiculous project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.”
A recent blog post by Brian Klaas expands Tolentino’s frame of reference. The “spirit of capitalism,” he contends, now demands much more of all its disciples—their gender notwithstanding—than it did when Max Weber popularized the phrase in 1905. “These days, it’s not enough to work hard,” Klaas writes. “To get ahead, you have to work smart. Maximize your output. Minimize your inefficiency. Optimize your life. YouTube influencers, ‘smart thinking’ guru authors, overnight TikTok celebrities are all cashing in on a seemingly unquenchable thirst for slaying our perceived mortal enemy: ‘unproductive’ time.»
Optimization promises a kind of safety. It values efficiency, predictability, comfort, and even conformity as absolute goods. It dreads and resists randomness, risk, and uncertainty—but so much of life happens in these places! As far back as 1944, the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek warned that “citizen-consumers willing to forfeit the burden of making choices in favor of the comforts of certainty” would be “the authors of the return to serfdom.” Whether Hayek envisioned Tolentino’s Instagram curators or Klaas’s TikTok celebrities among these «serfs» I cannot say, but I can point to data from one of capitalism’s most familiar embodiments—the stock market—to support Hayek’s argument against the “comforts of certainty.” The green line in the graph below depicts S&P 500 growth with dividends reinvested from 2010 to 2020. The red line depicts the diminished growth that occurs when the top 25 highest-performing trading days—a mere 1% of the 10-year total—are excluded.
The graph reveals the outsize impact of only a handful of “unicorn” growth events over an extended period. Less obvious is the extent to which very few if any of these events were predictable in advance of their occasion. Most followed several days or even weeks of disappointing results. To optimize in such circumstances is to pull back—to minimize risk, to flee discomfort, to eschew uncertainty—and engage again when signs of stability return. As the yawning disparity between the green and red lines illustrates, though, the long-term opportunity costs of this instinct for safety are profound. Yes, I am talking about childhood and adolescence, about learning and growth, about the hard work of growing up. You were probably wondering when I would get around to that.
What Klaas derides as “optimizing,” Nassim Taleb derides as “fragilizing” in his 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. “We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything,” he writes, by “suppressing randomness and volatility.” Taleb prefers “antifragilizing”: promoting growth through challenge, resistance, risk-taking, and struggle. Meaningful learning is an antifragile experience, and it so often occurs—like a banner day in the stock market—when we least expect it.
Antifragilizing conditions should have their limits, of course, and frequently the instincts of parents to protect their children from adversity at school are warranted. At MICDS, our faculty and staff are committed in such cases to engaging in appropriate partnership and determining constructive outcomes with families. At the same time that I underscore this commitment, however, I should also highlight the inverse relationship that has developed over the last three decades between the percentage of students victimized at United States schools in general, which has declined precipitously, and the frequency of use of the word “bullying,” which has increased more than tenfold—which is simply to observe that, at least at a societal level, overestimation of the danger of school environments may well be having unintended fragilizing effects on students.
Antifragility applies in the classroom as well. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Jenny Anderson recalled a presentation by an English teacher at her daughter’s school that showed “a cartoon ditch with a kid at the bottom.” The teacher described this picture as “the shape that learning takes”—the Learning Pit. “The high ground, before the ditch, is the excitement and spark of a new idea,” Anderson explains. “Immediately after comes the false belief that you understand it. Then comes the descent into realizing you don’t really understand it: falling into the pit. Over time, very gradually, you figure it out; you climb out of the pit.”
The teacher cautioned the parents in attendance: “Don’t worry about the grades and don’t rescue them. Let them know the goal is not getting the right answer but grappling with the problem. As they wrestled with the work, they would get more comfortable with the discomfort. They would develop strategies to manage it. They would find ways to climb out of the pit. In a word, they would build resilience.” I think this teacher would get along swimmingly with Brian Klaas, to whom I will give the last word:
There’s a direct trade-off between optimization and resilience…. The attempted assertion of perfect control over an uncontrollable world isn’t just a fool’s errand that will always end in disappointment; it’s also a blueprint for a miserable life. Hartmut Rosa, the German sociologist who focuses on malaise created by the “social acceleration” demanded by modern life, implores us to focus less on asserting control and more on resonance, those moments when checklists are obliterated from our minds and we feel, in Rosa’s language, like a “vibrating wire,” resonating with our world. “It is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.”
Always reason, always compassion, always courage. I wish you and your loved ones much resonance of your own, and much joy, this February weekend.
Jay Rainey
Head of School
This week’s addition to the “Refrains for Rams” playlist: Only One Way by Cymande, featuring Celeste (Apple Music / Spotify)