Embrace the Self-Improving Society by Rejecting Pizza Optimization

For almost 10 years now, when I consider the subject of our society and the state of the world today, I keep coming back to a single concept: why isn't everyone in the world working to improve it? This is obviously an extremely difficult and complex question to answer. It's tied to the history of the Earth we inhabit and who we are as creatures. But I keep asking this question nonetheless because it affects all aspects of our lives, and I find what we're doing today to be insane. I would love to see a virtuous cycle instead, where our society improves itself in some manner and that improvement then leads society to be able to more easily make subsequent improvements. But this is in stark contrast with the world that we inhabit today.

The vast majority of people in the world are primarily focused on accumulating resources, and given our system today, oddly they're not even accumulating the resources directly themselves. They're accumulating points in the form of money, which allows them to get those resources when they choose. Our society has developed to the point where we find ourselves in the very odd situation that when you "succeed" at life, or win the game so to speak, we usually mean you have managed to accumulate an unusually large amount of money, aka resource points.

How did you succeed? How did you accumulate that large amount of resources? Well, that's likely due to the fact that you were particularly good at helping to increase the volume of products or services that your employer or your company produces or offers. Because what do we do when you help to increase the scale at which an organization operates? We reward you with an increased share of the earth's resources. With this increased access to resources, you are likely able to improve your ability to help with the extraction and application of further material resources and human labor. In turn, you receive an even greater share of the resources to be used per your personal discretion. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle, causing those who are most adept at increasing the scale of production and services offered by any organization to accumulate the largest amounts of resources, and therefore wealth, in our society. This means that people who are skilled at and focused on increasing accumulation will gain outsized power. What are those people likely to do with it? They're quite likely to perpetuate the system that gave them the power in the first place leading to a society that's dominated by people with this maximize-accumulation mentality. It's like when lawyers become politicians. You think they're gonna make the language of new laws more accessible? Fat chance.

There's a glaring issue with this. Just because you are good at increasing the scale of production and services doesn't mean that you are similarly skilled at deciding how and where our effort as a species should be directed. In fact, you now have a much greater incentive to do this poorly because you were rewarded for developing knowledge in very specific areas of production and services, and the more resources that are available within this very specific branch of human activity, the more you stand to gain from operating within it. So you are incentivized not to build a firm understanding of how and where we should be spending our effort as a society, as a species, for any sort of larger goal, but to attempt to direct as many resources as possible to your specific area of expertise and to anything that, in your opinion, improves your own life. To varying degrees, people who do accumulate large amounts of resources choose to give away some of those resources to others, but with the way our society currently exists, we are extremely dependent on a small number of wealthy individuals to redistribute resources appropriately for the good of not just our species, but the planet.

When you take time to think this through, you begin to see how odd the situation is. When viewed fresh without the shackles of our past, it's quite arbitrary that we reward people in this way, perpetuating one of the many forms society could take. This mechanism of reward and society's form is of course the result of a continual evolution throughout time, partially influenced by efforts to exacerbate the extremeness and inefficiency. These efforts themselves were part of the vicious cycle that we've been in for hundreds of years, which we've occasionally taken a shot at breaking through revolution and reform. What we're facing now is simply the accumulation of thousands of years of a particular way to view the world and our lives. This situation has resulted in a society that seeks to maximize the volume and amount of its current activities without much thought as to their consequences.

Let's take a moment to think about how strange this conclusion is by applying this mode of thinking to our own lives.

Let's pick a very specific activity that some of us may engage in at times. Pizza's my favorite food, so let's go with making pizza. Imagine if you structured your entire life around making as many pizzas as possible. I'm not even saying making good pizza. The pizza just has to be not awful. So if we think about our lives, we have varied lives that contain a variety of activities to support our overall well-being and fulfillment. But now, let's start imagining all the times throughout the day where instead of participating in those various activities, we could be making pizza if that was our goal.

Let's say we wake up at 7 o'clock, typically that way, we have a couple hours before we actually have to start work at nine. Well, during that time we actually could probably condense a lot of our work preparation activities to 45 minutes or less, so right there that's an hour and 15 minutes of pizza making. If you think about our workday, there are a lot of times where we're just chatting or goofing around with coworkers, so when it comes to desk work, maybe we're actually only doing 3 to 4 hours of desk work a day. There's a lot of overhead that's probably avoidable. Working from home allows us two hours to make pizza throughout the workday. That brings us into the evening where of course we normally have to eat dinner so we're going to cook anyway for 45 minutes, and we'll be making some more pizza. Then after dinner, normally you might relax and watch a show or read a book or maybe even exercise before or after dinner, but instead, we're going to be making pizza. So I would guess you'd have at least an extra three hours of pizza making in there.

So adding up all of that time, we've now freed up seven hours total for pizza making during our day. What an accomplishment. But this is only the beginning because it's not just the time, it's the way we're using resources. As I said, we're not trying to make the most amazing pizza we've ever had. It just needs to be palatable; otherwise, we are simply attempting to maximize the number of pizzas we can make. That means all ingredients will be frozen. Frozen dough, frozen toppings, and pre-shredded cheese. We can buy everything in bulk to get significant discounts, install a couple more ovens in our kitchen, and assuming we can make one pizza every five minutes, that gives us 420 pizzas a day. They're not good pizzas, but they're edible. And we have a lot of them, littering the kitchen, most of them destined to go bad.

Of course, this is a gross oversimplification of what occurs in our world, but the reality isn't far from it. We as individuals care about so many different things in our lives. We have so many different needs and desires, and it's well established what kinds of activities result in higher well-being and life fulfillment. We would never behave like this manic pizza maker. Sometimes people do develop obsessive-compulsive behavior like this, and in that case, we have great compassion for that person and immediately understand that they need significant help to get their lives back on track. If that's how we're thinking for individuals, then why on earth are we allowing ourselves to think so differently when it comes to our society, which is simply the sum of us all?

It's only through a patchwork of laws passed by governments at varying levels and sizes that we've been able to control some of these activities, directing some of our overall effort towards larger goals on which we can all agree. This includes things like clean air and water, ensuring that everyone has something to eat, that people have better access to healthcare, that our resources are in small ways protected, so that future generations may also benefit from them. But these are very much the exceptions to the rule. And even in spite of these kinds of protections, in spite of past concentrated efforts to try to fix our society in specific ways, the core vicious cycle of Produce -> Gain Resources -> Produce More still exists.

When describing resource allocation in our society earlier, I used the word "inefficient" because if we think that our society should be working towards something other than simply increasing the amount of our activity, then the way we're currently distributing resources is extremely poor. We're neglecting so much of what we care about and emphasizing so much of the things that we don't. But we can break this cycle for good and create a virtuous cycle of Make Improvement -> Live Better Lives -> Make More Improvements in its place. We can right the ship and focus not on making and doing more, but on the huge variety of activities that will allow all of us to live wonderful lives on this unbelievable planet that has been gifted to us as our home.