“I had a couple of glasses of wine. Didn’t get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect,” Stephen Barlett of Diary of CEO podcast
The Huel mogul lamented on a show that pulls 50 million listeners a month globally that he wasn’t able to perform at the gym as well as usual, his sleep was disrupted, he wasn’t able to work as effectively, etc., after drinking two glasses of wine.
There stands a man who clearly has never had children or any other caring responsibilities, which include taking care of a house and garden, talking out of his over-privileged arse about over-optimising his life, like the rest of us have that luxury.
Here’s my hot take:
Have a couple of glasses of wine, have the whole bottle, maybe even a tequila chaser or two if you want, because life isn’t about optimisation. Life happens in the messy bits in between.
This mania to over-optimise everything has to stop.
We’re living in an identikit, homogenised world that’s knocked the excitement and interest out of everything.
Up until the 2010s, product design was colourful, unique and interesting.
I used to play a game with my dad when I could identify the make and model of a car just from its headlights or taillights. I can’t do that anymore; a Tesla in the dark could be a Skoda.
We’ve been told that colour is tacky, so our glittery and shimmery accident-in-a-paint-factory Christmas decorations have been replaced with warm lights and monochrome matte. Our souvenir and hand-me-down homes turned into Ikea showrooms.
Ironically, a block, standard design in black and white is very cheap to produce, yet we’re told anything other than this is “working class” and “tasteless”.
The reason for this is over-optimisation of the design process to make things you 100% know will sell, and the over-optimisation of the production line, so organisations can lower costs but profit high.
This has been detrimental, not only because the past was far more futuristic than the present in terms of product design, but also in architectural design
Everything has become so boring and samey.
And for us content architects, it’s the same.
We cannot write meaningful, relevant articles because we need to follow the algorithm set by Google (even though Google has been screaming “write useful content for humans, not me, motherfuckers” for years).
We cannot join the journey in a single omnichannel experience because all teams are siloed by channel and get measured on vanity metrics like impressions and likes, so you get fractured messaging across the whole product journey that impacts brand and product integrity.
We need to stop pandering to the bean counters in finance, who need cold, hard data to justify spending. Just give teams budget and empowerment, see what happens.
We need to stop worshipping at the altar of the data scientists and the testers; their information is only as good as the info they have, and that might not be an accurate picture.
After all, how many tests have you done on emails only to find that you only get a definitive answer if you look at a median?
And catering for the average means you’re catering for no one.
Creativity and innovation did not come from punching numbers in the spreadsheet and finding the optimum one, which is why we have enshittification of nearly everything.
Products, services, journeys and design were better when people were allowed to be different, not an optimal version of what already exists.
When designers and writers had a licence to use their intuition and instincts to tap into the human psyche to bring joy to the end user, even if it was a casual passer-by on the street.
It was not about hitting those high numbers; it was about creating a feeling.
