The Cost and The Reward

There was quite an overwhelming response to the way in which people have felt optimized out of networks, relationships, and friendships, and the pain was palpable in words such as, “It’s a cruel experience that strips a person of their dignity and humanity.” This is the cost of optimization. When relationships are optimized, there is always a cost-reward equation, and unlike the mathematical elegance of linear algebra, this equation rarely resolves neatly. In linear algebra the computations are dispassionate, the numbers form an arc that intersects neatly showing the optimum point after eliminating the unwanted to make space for the new. In the arc of life, it is life destroyed by the disappearance of acknowledgment and by actions that state: I do not have time for you. The cost occurs first for the chooser who discards a time-tested friend. There is a loss to that chooser, even if they refuse to admit it, because what is jettisoned is not just a human being, but the shared history that carried some worth, however small. The moments of companionship, once needed and cherished, are erased from the equation and a new reality emerges that is remorseless of the act. Because the lure of optimization whispers that baggage is being unloaded, and with it comes the reward of reclaimed time and energy that was once being bled away by someone now undesirable. What is eventually optimized is time – where the choice is made about who to call when there is a free hour. The variable eliminated does not beckon a call, the variable retained receives the call. The chooser convinces themselves that this is efficiency, that this is rational, and in some ways even merciful. Because the one optimized out should not be burdened with undue expectations and once eliminated from the equation it should disappear forever, until. Yet, for the one who is cast aside, the cost is sharper, immediate, and unfiltered. It is the sting of rejection, the sudden knowledge that optimization has identified them as redundant, a burden no longer worth the variables of attention and care. The wound of the jettisoned is not superficial, because rejection undermines a basic human need for belonging, a need that Baumeister and Leary long ago argued is fundamental to human motivation (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). The pain is social, yet it registers in the body like physical pain, as Eisenberger and colleagues demonstrated in their work on social exclusion where brain scans revealed activation in the same neural pathways that register physical injury (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003). Simply put, being optimized out feels like an amputation of recognition, a removal not just from someone else’s time but from the narrative in which one once belonged. That is why those who are jettisoned often describe the experience in terms of dehumanization, because as Levinas (1969) argued, to no longer be seen in the face of the other is to be stripped of ethical recognition. Over time, the supposed reward arrives even for the one who is cast out. In sheer regret, they come to see that the hours and emotions given to the relationship were wasted, but after the abandonment, thankfully, the time bleed has finally stopped, that in being jettisoned they are strangely freed. The investment has mercifully been terminated without return or principle, but at least there is no need to invest any further because they have been released from that responsibility. But that recognition does not erase the damage; it only reframes it. Because the wound still throbs with memory, it heals not into smooth skin but into scar tissue, a reminder of the optimization’s cruelty. And so, it is not a win-win situation, no matter how the chooser tries to spin it. Often in an attempt to hedge the bets of optimization, the chooser weighs the risks and may sometime try to err on the safer side, and retain an illusion when indeed the removal is complete. Because life is not mathematics, and there are grey areas where the variable eliminated from the optimization is still held on to by a soothing illusion. The chooser may attempt placation, offering hollow gestures of kindness or words of reassurance in the hope that the jettisoned will see symmetry in the equation. But optimization is a cruel process: once it declares a variable redundant, the meaning is already erased, and by then the wound is already inflicted. In the end the one who has been abandoned can find peace in the song of Simon and Garfunkel, declaring: "And a rock feels no pain/And an island never cries"