“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” wrote Voltaire, usually translated to “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and more often rendered in the imperative as “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” The quote rang in my head recently while on a journalistic junket that had me flying business class to Dubai, which is not how or where I usually fly. We hit some turbulence somewhere over Europe while I passed through the Emirates A380’s spacious bar area on the way to take a piss, so I was asked sternly by the bartender to sit down and buckle up on the couch along with two other guys until the plane stopped bucking, trapped in a modern technological miracle of luxury as well as an awkward social situation. One of them was a sinister-looking, Russian-accented guy with the affect of a businessman or politician. He actually turned out to be really nice. The other was a chubby, underemployed thirtysomething hipster from New York, like me. He wore fine robin’s-egg-blue linen shorts, a matching button-down linen top and designer sneakers. He cut into the conversation I was having with my new friend about my incredulity that I could have a nonalcoholic gin and tonic made for me at 600 mph in an open bar in the sky to ask if we were sitting in business or first. Business, he scoffed? He told us he no longer thinks of business as anything but a sort of inconvenience, even a torture. The sleep is poor. The cabins are so rarely updated. He only flies first.
I asked him what takes him abroad. He looked at me like I was stupid. He had just told me: Flying First Class. He explained that he would be spending three nights in Dubai at a favorite hotel, part of a chain where he has status with the loyalty scheme, before carrying on with his first-class trip to the Maldives. If he departed any sooner, he’d have to fly in a lower class.
He rattled off a list of places he has flown first to recently, and I thought I’d better not mention how most of them are noted sex-tourism destinations. He had booked this flight through a complex system of points “redemptions”—exchanging one credit card’s points for another airline’s loyalty-program points and then using them to book tickets on still another, partnered airline’s flights, after buying a small number more points when he was notified that a special offer became momentarily available—and obsessive checking for when the airlines “open up” the unbooked first-class cabin reservations at the last minute. He follows specialized blogs. He uses specialized software. He has all the cards, and knows just how to make the most of them. He pities the gormless normies like me who couldn’t tell you whether you should swipe your Amex Gold at the restaurant or your Chase Sapphire Reserve at the gas station. I was talking to a Points Guy.
I was so excited. I would now fix a minor but nagging issue in my life, I thought. I have always felt, you see, that I am not getting much out of my points. Though none of them is as elite as my couchmate on Emirates, I have some points guys in my life, as I am sure you do. They will mention offhandedly that some recent air travel was paid for in airline miles they accrued over a month, and then I will go check how many points it would cost me to fly my small family somewhere and find that it costs about a million points to buy decent seats in coach for three to a not particularly far-off place, and all my spending for the year has only got me a small fraction of that. 122,000, I think when I hear this kind of tale of free, lie-flat transcontinental aviation, checking my Amex app glumly. That used to mean something. I coulda been somebody.
Points Guy explained to me, after some questioning, what I have been doing wrong all these years. He said that, unless you rack up the miles by being flown around on your employer’s expense, the key to flying first class for free all the time is that, as well as making great investments of your time into understanding how credit-card company and airline company schemes work—“Using Premium Credit-Card Rewards Is Becoming a Part-Time Job,” went one recent Wall Street Journal headline—you have to not really care about where exactly you fly, and whether you fly on one day or another. You just have to care how many points it takes, and you have to spend huge reserves of your own hours and mental space worrying over how to maximize your, as he called it, “spend.” As an employed, married father, this is not really practicable for me. So I felt spared, if not from economy class, at least from the guilt over not being able to figure something out.
What I had learned was more valuable than how to get free flights. I had learned that getting free flights would involve learning how to optimize my use of credit cards and airlines and websites, and putting some amount of my limited capacity for analytic rigor to work in service of something I find fundamentally boring and unpleasant. This is what distinguishes me from Points Guy, and from the points guys in my life: optimization costs me joy.
Take my two favorite points guys as examples:
Robert, who lives nearby, became a friend over the past couple years. A great guy and a deep reader, Robert nonetheless especially lights up when he gets to discuss how he has gamed the system for ordering a product for 10 percent off, or how he determined that it would be more cost-effective to lease than to buy a second car, because the warranty something something. For Robert, analyticity is a wellspring. It bubbles up from within, seeping out of his every seam. I like this, not being uninterested in him as a person and not being uninterested in the things he has analyzed. (Plus, he used to live in my house, and he has usually already thought through problems I am just beginning to notice.)
Josh, one of my best friends, is a pretty serious points guy. He is a consultant (strike one) who went to Yale (strike two) and he got a joint MBA/JD. He makes way more money than he spends a year, and he will inherit plenty more than he will ever need to sustain the lifestyle he lives. Money is, though, a game for Josh, and telling him not to find ways to use it efficiently would be like telling a basketball player to stop playing because he has a solid lead. It’s bad sportsmanship. For him, even if it takes hours that he could use to do other things, it is fun to think about how to get “free” stuff, or to analyze how to make sure that the product he buys is the best possible one in the category. It fires him up, the way crossword puzzles fire him (and me) up. Figuring out the cheapest way to buy a car or a flight to DCA from SFO gives him the same thrill that drives some people to visit escape rooms. He once told me about cancelling his car insurance for a month while he was away travelling. “That’s equity I will have forever,” he told me, proudly.
He is also a terrific guy who has a sense of humor about this, and I have loved him deeply for two decades, so I don’t balk too much when he describes things as “suboptimal.” Or at least I don’t anymore. I used to perform a big groan every time he used that nonword when he first started, which happened when he began working at one of the Big Three consulting companies making “decks.” (“Deck” is consultant-speak for a PowerPoint presentation, which is usually the “deliverable” for a consultant’s client.)
All of this is a long way to say that the real difference between points guys and the rest of us is not just one of specific knowledge of habits, but one of mindset. The pointillism, so to speak, of the modern upper bourgeois expresses a way of thinking. It is an exercise in analysis aimed at optimizing life. The field of business, as well as the process of college admissions, has encouraged a certain class, and a certain personality type, to think from adolescence that there is an almost moral vice in not getting as much as one can, priming them to focus on the quantifiable and only the quantifiable, or to imagine things to be quantifiable that aren’t.
And the great interlocking systems of online booking and loyalty clubs are just sitting there, waiting to be gamed. Match made in heaven. There is no real lesson or ethical problem here, besides that Josh and the guy I met on the Emirates flight should probably continue to approach travel their way. And I, a person who has twice shown up at the airport only to find out that I actually booked a ticket for that date in a different month, should continue to approach it my way, which is to not think about it very much at all, and to accept that I am probably spending more money than is strictly necessary, or, under a certain understanding, optimal. Each expresses our own values: how much they enjoy the thrill of beating the system, and how much I detest looking at a chart or a login screen.
But there are areas of life where the optimizer mindset really is corrosive.
Take my own hobby. I buy, sell, drive, sometimes race and generally fart around with vintage cars. I own a handful at any given time, sometimes a sixties Alfa Romeo, sometimes an eighties Mustang, what have you. This is a world with its types of guy, and especially as the car collectors start owning things worth lots of money, they start forgetting to drive or enjoy their prized automobiles rather than memorize facts about them and think through how to manage their service costs efficiently given their predicted percent appreciation per annum. Think of Ferris Bueller’s friend Cameron, who tells him his dad never drives his Ferrari, he “just rubs it with a diaper.” There’s a lot of this. There’s even a derisive term among car guys for the babied prized possession that gets obsessively cared for but never taken out—gasp—on the road, where there are rock chips and the possibility of rain: a “garage queen.” This is, I think, something genuinely aesthetically evil. The car doesn’t know what it did wrong to become worth a hundred thousand or five million dollars. It wants to be driven, it is built to be driven, and, crucially, if it is not driven its owner could have achieved the same thing by never buying a car at all. My Alfa has rock chips. It looks cooler that way.
“People think that sex is supposed to be magical,” Aella, the internet-celebrity public intellectual and sex researcher, wrote last October:
and that if you approach it with too much analysis that you’re ruining something. I don’t think this is true! If you are actually trying to optimize sex, then you will be taking vibes into account too, and strategically figuring out why and when analysis seems to ruin sex, and how to avoid this. I am not satisfied with surrendering ourselves to sex as mythology. Sex is a science, and we can iterate and test our theories until one of us is screaming for god.
This comes from a manifesto for a conference she held, Slutcon, where attendees explored how to optimize seduction, sex and romance. I cannot argue with her or prove her wrong, though if I were to try I might point out that “taking into account” something is not enough to negate it. Have you ever met someone who tries to deflate criticisms of his or her behavior by “owning” or “acknowledging” it rather than actually changing? Her argument is compellingly phrased and curious-minded. I still think it is wrong, though, for reasons ineffably hard to put down. It’s unwise, imprudent. I once had her mindset, and I have a different one now, and I have better sex now. (Yes, yes, N=1.) And this gets to why I think the entire project of optimization is, at best, one that we should take care with.
We should definitely try to optimize certain things, in certain areas of life. Within certain largely exogenously imposed ethical and legal limitations, corporations should try to optimize profitability; the agricultural sector should try to optimize food output. But how we live as ethical people and behave and think wisely is not something to optimize, or, crucially, to even let ourselves think about in this way.
The effective altruism movement makes brilliant arguments about how to think about charitable giving, animal welfare and more. Many if not most of these arguments I either personally buy or else have no particularly good reply to. But it also sends its adherents down perverse rabbit holes and into absurdity. Shrimp farming, for example, is a special bugbear of the EA types, because so many more individual shrimp are killed for human consumption than any other animal, and because despite their non-central nervous systems the act of killing each one probably does, according to our best understanding of their biology, produce some unfathomably drawn out and painful sensation. What is bad about torture and killing is not, of course, just how sophisticated a life you snuff out, but the simple fact of suffering, something every human being who has ever tried to perform any feat of higher cognition while experiencing extreme physical pain knows. QED, we should focus on saving shrimp life, or at least instituting more humane slaughter practices, to optimize our ethical impact. Or, following another EA chain of reasoning, since artificial intelligence could destroy literally everything, and [whatever it is you value] is part of literally everything, then nothing is more important than AI. A similar chain of reasoning led the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had earlier been imprisoned for opposing the first World War (often misdescribed as a pacifist in general), to advocate threatening preemptive atomic war on Russia in the late Forties. After all, once two countries got nuclear arms, no one could disarm the other without provoking an exchange, and further proliferation was all but guaranteed, and thus anything was justified to interrupt the process that logically implied an eventual apocalypse. QED, nuke Moscow.
In this sense, thinking at all about optimizing certain things—what people you are friends with, morality, or how to seek love or sex, or even how often to use a precious and beautiful object—is a mistake described by George Orwell in his essay about Gandhi. Like the effective altruists, Gandhi was a staunch ethical vegan who had to be pressured to admit that eating animals might be better than letting humans die, even if this is unholy, un-Hindu or “speciesist”:
There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which—I think—most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.
Unlike many critics of effective altruism or polyamory or racking up credit-card points, I really do allow that their proponents have the better of the arguments they take part in. The problem is not with the premise-by-premise arguments, it is with the mindset. What you lose in optimizing morality is the same thing you lose in maximizing your airline-mile spend. In other words, nothing quantifiable—but precisely the chance to escape quantification, to orient toward something that cannot be counted, predicted, analyzed. Such things exist, even if they can’t always be captured in words and numbers. If alternative mindsets were easier to imaginatively inhabit, perhaps we could harness FOMO to greater ends—fear of missing healthier mindset. “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” wrote Voltaire, usually translated to “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and more often rendered in the imperative as “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” The quote rang in my head recently while on a journalistic junket that had me flying business class to Dubai, which is not how or where I usually fly. We hit some turbulence somewhere over Europe while I passed through the Emirates A380’s spacious bar area on the way to take a piss, so I was asked sternly by the bartender to sit down and buckle up on the couch along with two other guys until the plane stopped bucking, trapped in a modern technological miracle of luxury as well as an awkward social situation. One of them was a sinister-looking, Russian-accented guy with the affect of a businessman or politician. He actually turned out to be really nice. The other was a chubby, underemployed thirtysomething hipster from New York, like me. He wore fine robin’s-egg-blue linen shorts, a matching button-down linen top and designer sneakers. He cut into the conversation I was having with my new friend about my incredulity that I could have a nonalcoholic gin and tonic made for me at 600 mph in an open bar in the sky to ask if we were sitting in business or first. Business, he scoffed? He told us he no longer thinks of business as anything but a sort of inconvenience, even a torture. The sleep is poor. The cabins are so rarely updated. He only flies first.
I asked him what takes him abroad. He looked at me like I was stupid. He had just told me: Flying First Class. He explained that he would be spending three nights in Dubai at a favorite hotel, part of a chain where he has status with the loyalty scheme, before carrying on with his first-class trip to the Maldives. If he departed any sooner, he’d have to fly in a lower class.
He rattled off a list of places he has flown first to recently, and I thought I’d better not mention how most of them are noted sex-tourism destinations. He had booked this flight through a complex system of points “redemptions”—exchanging one credit card’s points for another airline’s loyalty-program points and then using them to book tickets on still another, partnered airline’s flights, after buying a small number more points when he was notified that a special offer became momentarily available—and obsessive checking for when the airlines “open up” the unbooked first-class cabin reservations at the last minute. He follows specialized blogs. He uses specialized software. He has all the cards, and knows just how to make the most of them. He pities the gormless normies like me who couldn’t tell you whether you should swipe your Amex Gold at the restaurant or your Chase Sapphire Reserve at the gas station. I was talking to a Points Guy.
I was so excited. I would now fix a minor but nagging issue in my life, I thought. I have always felt, you see, that I am not getting much out of my points. Though none of them is as elite as my couchmate on Emirates, I have some points guys in my life, as I am sure you do. They will mention offhandedly that some recent air travel was paid for in airline miles they accrued over a month, and then I will go check how many points it would cost me to fly my small family somewhere and find that it costs about a million points to buy decent seats in coach for three to a not particularly far-off place, and all my spending for the year has only got me a small fraction of that. 122,000, I think when I hear this kind of tale of free, lie-flat transcontinental aviation, checking my Amex app glumly. That used to mean something. I coulda been somebody.
Points Guy explained to me, after some questioning, what I have been doing wrong all these years. He said that, unless you rack up the miles by being flown around on your employer’s expense, the key to flying first class for free all the time is that, as well as making great investments of your time into understanding how credit-card company and airline company schemes work—“Using Premium Credit-Card Rewards Is Becoming a Part-Time Job,” went one recent Wall Street Journal headline—you have to not really care about where exactly you fly, and whether you fly on one day or another. You just have to care how many points it takes, and you have to spend huge reserves of your own hours and mental space worrying over how to maximize your, as he called it, “spend.” As an employed, married father, this is not really practicable for me. So I felt spared, if not from economy class, at least from the guilt over not being able to figure something out.
What I had learned was more valuable than how to get free flights. I had learned that getting free flights would involve learning how to optimize my use of credit cards and airlines and websites, and putting some amount of my limited capacity for analytic rigor to work in service of something I find fundamentally boring and unpleasant. This is what distinguishes me from Points Guy, and from the points guys in my life: optimization costs me joy.
Take my two favorite points guys as examples:
Robert, who lives nearby, became a friend over the past couple years. A great guy and a deep reader, Robert nonetheless especially lights up when he gets to discuss how he has gamed the system for ordering a product for 10 percent off, or how he determined that it would be more cost-effective to lease than to buy a second car, because the warranty something something. For Robert, analyticity is a wellspring. It bubbles up from within, seeping out of his every seam. I like this, not being uninterested in him as a person and not being uninterested in the things he has analyzed. (Plus, he used to live in my house, and he has usually already thought through problems I am just beginning to notice.)
Josh, one of my best friends, is a pretty serious points guy. He is a consultant (strike one) who went to Yale (strike two) and he got a joint MBA/JD. He makes way more money than he spends a year, and he will inherit plenty more than he will ever need to sustain the lifestyle he lives. Money is, though, a game for Josh, and telling him not to find ways to use it efficiently would be like telling a basketball player to stop playing because he has a solid lead. It’s bad sportsmanship. For him, even if it takes hours that he could use to do other things, it is fun to think about how to get “free” stuff, or to analyze how to make sure that the product he buys is the best possible one in the category. It fires him up, the way crossword puzzles fire him (and me) up. Figuring out the cheapest way to buy a car or a flight to DCA from SFO gives him the same thrill that drives some people to visit escape rooms. He once told me about cancelling his car insurance for a month while he was away travelling. “That’s equity I will have forever,” he told me, proudly.
He is also a terrific guy who has a sense of humor about this, and I have loved him deeply for two decades, so I don’t balk too much when he describes things as “suboptimal.” Or at least I don’t anymore. I used to perform a big groan every time he used that nonword when he first started, which happened when he began working at one of the Big Three consulting companies making “decks.” (“Deck” is consultant-speak for a PowerPoint presentation, which is usually the “deliverable” for a consultant’s client.)
All of this is a long way to say that the real difference between points guys and the rest of us is not just one of specific knowledge of habits, but one of mindset. The pointillism, so to speak, of the modern upper bourgeois expresses a way of thinking. It is an exercise in analysis aimed at optimizing life. The field of business, as well as the process of college admissions, has encouraged a certain class, and a certain personality type, to think from adolescence that there is an almost moral vice in not getting as much as one can, priming them to focus on the quantifiable and only the quantifiable, or to imagine things to be quantifiable that aren’t.
And the great interlocking systems of online booking and loyalty clubs are just sitting there, waiting to be gamed. Match made in heaven. There is no real lesson or ethical problem here, besides that Josh and the guy I met on the Emirates flight should probably continue to approach travel their way. And I, a person who has twice shown up at the airport only to find out that I actually booked a ticket for that date in a different month, should continue to approach it my way, which is to not think about it very much at all, and to accept that I am probably spending more money than is strictly necessary, or, under a certain understanding, optimal. Each expresses our own values: how much they enjoy the thrill of beating the system, and how much I detest looking at a chart or a login screen.
But there are areas of life where the optimizer mindset really is corrosive.
Take my own hobby. I buy, sell, drive, sometimes race and generally fart around with vintage cars. I own a handful at any given time, sometimes a sixties Alfa Romeo, sometimes an eighties Mustang, what have you. This is a world with its types of guy, and especially as the car collectors start owning things worth lots of money, they start forgetting to drive or enjoy their prized automobiles rather than memorize facts about them and think through how to manage their service costs efficiently given their predicted percent appreciation per annum. Think of Ferris Bueller’s friend Cameron, who tells him his dad never drives his Ferrari, he “just rubs it with a diaper.” There’s a lot of this. There’s even a derisive term among car guys for the babied prized possession that gets obsessively cared for but never taken out—gasp—on the road, where there are rock chips and the possibility of rain: a “garage queen.” This is, I think, something genuinely aesthetically evil. The car doesn’t know what it did wrong to become worth a hundred thousand or five million dollars. It wants to be driven, it is built to be driven, and, crucially, if it is not driven its owner could have achieved the same thing by never buying a car at all. My Alfa has rock chips. It looks cooler that way.
“People think that sex is supposed to be magical,” Aella, the internet-celebrity public intellectual and sex researcher, wrote last October:
This comes from a manifesto for a conference she held, Slutcon, where attendees explored how to optimize seduction, sex and romance. I cannot argue with her or prove her wrong, though if I were to try I might point out that “taking into account” something is not enough to negate it. Have you ever met someone who tries to deflate criticisms of his or her behavior by “owning” or “acknowledging” it rather than actually changing? Her argument is compellingly phrased and curious-minded. I still think it is wrong, though, for reasons ineffably hard to put down. It’s unwise, imprudent. I once had her mindset, and I have a different one now, and I have better sex now. (Yes, yes, N=1.) And this gets to why I think the entire project of optimization is, at best, one that we should take care with.
We should definitely try to optimize certain things, in certain areas of life. Within certain largely exogenously imposed ethical and legal limitations, corporations should try to optimize profitability; the agricultural sector should try to optimize food output. But how we live as ethical people and behave and think wisely is not something to optimize, or, crucially, to even let ourselves think about in this way.
The effective altruism movement makes brilliant arguments about how to think about charitable giving, animal welfare and more. Many if not most of these arguments I either personally buy or else have no particularly good reply to. But it also sends its adherents down perverse rabbit holes and into absurdity. Shrimp farming, for example, is a special bugbear of the EA types, because so many more individual shrimp are killed for human consumption than any other animal, and because despite their non-central nervous systems the act of killing each one probably does, according to our best understanding of their biology, produce some unfathomably drawn out and painful sensation. What is bad about torture and killing is not, of course, just how sophisticated a life you snuff out, but the simple fact of suffering, something every human being who has ever tried to perform any feat of higher cognition while experiencing extreme physical pain knows. QED, we should focus on saving shrimp life, or at least instituting more humane slaughter practices, to optimize our ethical impact. Or, following another EA chain of reasoning, since artificial intelligence could destroy literally everything, and [whatever it is you value] is part of literally everything, then nothing is more important than AI. A similar chain of reasoning led the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had earlier been imprisoned for opposing the first World War (often misdescribed as a pacifist in general), to advocate threatening preemptive atomic war on Russia in the late Forties. After all, once two countries got nuclear arms, no one could disarm the other without provoking an exchange, and further proliferation was all but guaranteed, and thus anything was justified to interrupt the process that logically implied an eventual apocalypse. QED, nuke Moscow.
In this sense, thinking at all about optimizing certain things—what people you are friends with, morality, or how to seek love or sex, or even how often to use a precious and beautiful object—is a mistake described by George Orwell in his essay about Gandhi. Like the effective altruists, Gandhi was a staunch ethical vegan who had to be pressured to admit that eating animals might be better than letting humans die, even if this is unholy, un-Hindu or “speciesist”:
Unlike many critics of effective altruism or polyamory or racking up credit-card points, I really do allow that their proponents have the better of the arguments they take part in. The problem is not with the premise-by-premise arguments, it is with the mindset. What you lose in optimizing morality is the same thing you lose in maximizing your airline-mile spend. In other words, nothing quantifiable—but precisely the chance to escape quantification, to orient toward something that cannot be counted, predicted, analyzed. Such things exist, even if they can’t always be captured in words and numbers. If alternative mindsets were easier to imaginatively inhabit, perhaps we could harness FOMO to greater ends—fear of missing healthier mindset. “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.