As a former national merit scholar with a STEM masters who's currently stuck doing manual labor in a medium-sized metro, here's hoping I can make some of that frictionlessness work better for me. I was just thinking to myself last night (yes, on Sunday night), while hammering together some outdoor timber steps that I'd seriously underbid, what a great deal the client was getting given that he couldn't have found anybody else both smart enough to do the job this well and dumb enough to do it this cheap.
Without going full Girard, I think this efficiency also leads us to target our desires more to what the market has made measurable, and limits discoverability of greater personal upsides in the course of removing risks of aggregate downside. The scope narrows for being pleasantly surprised in ways you may not even have known you could be surprised. Tinderella may actually have been much happier with a particular Mr. 5'8" for illegible Tinderella-specific factors, and now she'll never know because she's set the same 6'1" filter as everyone else without even really knowing how much it matters to her. Even if average outcomes are better, maybe some of the best outcomes have been closed off because they only aligned with desires that were particular to us, perhaps unknown to us, certainly not known to the market at large, and which the market is actually leading us to downplay in ourselves.
These are half-formed thoughts and I could write a whole essay on this but I have to go hang a gate on some frozen posts.
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As a former national merit scholar with a STEM masters who's currently stuck doing manual labor in a medium-sized metro, here's hoping I can make some of that frictionlessness work better for me. I was just thinking to myself last night (yes, on Sunday night), while hammering together some outdoor timber steps that I'd seriously underbid, what a great deal the client was getting given that he couldn't have found anybody else both smart enough to do the job this well and dumb enough to do it this cheap.
Without going full Girard, I think this efficiency also leads us to target our desires more to what the market has made measurable, and limits discoverability of greater personal upsides in the course of removing risks of aggregate downside. The scope narrows for being pleasantly surprised in ways you may not even have known you could be surprised. Tinderella may actually have been much happier with a particular Mr. 5'8" for illegible Tinderella-specific factors, and now she'll never know because she's set the same 6'1" filter as everyone else without even really knowing how much it matters to her. Even if average outcomes are better, maybe some of the best outcomes have been closed off because they only aligned with desires that were particular to us, perhaps unknown to us, certainly not known to the market at large, and which the market is actually leading us to downplay in ourselves.
These are half-formed thoughts and I could write a whole essay on this but I have to go hang a gate on some frozen posts.
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