On the beauty of things that don't scale
Field Note · Culture
“In an age of optimised everything, the most subversive act is something that cannot be mass-produced - like paying full attention to a single afternoon.”
In the startup world, there's a famous saying by Paul Graham: "Do things that don't scale." He was talking about business strategy: give your first customers ridiculous amounts of personal attention to figure out what they actually need. Pour yourself into the unglamorous work before you build the system that replaces your manual work. But I want to steal this quote and apply it somewhere Graham probably never intended: your inner life.
The silent cost of optimising everything
Somewhere along the way, we started running ourselves like well-oiled machines: optimise your sleep, track your nutrition, journal your thoughts and emotions and build this into structured frameworks. Rely on the latest behavioural algorithms to build your habits and make sure you don’t waste your life. Even relationships quietly shifted from people whose company you genuinely enjoyed into something called networking, because connections are optimised for future returns. This looks like growth, but it can also be draining. Let me get it straight: building the systems is not wrong. Quite the opposite, they definitely help. The problem isn't the tools or optimisation, but what gets quietly deprioritised in the gaps between all the systems and the tools we use on a daily basis. There is a part of you that exists outside of any system. It cannot (and shouldn’t!) be measured, which means it cannot be improved, which means, in the logic of optimisation, it tends to get ignored until it almost disappears. But this exact part is not a flaw in your productivity setup, but this is the core of you.
What can't be replicated
Consider the things that genuinely do not scale: a 30-minute walk with no destination, no podcast, no fitness watch counting your steps. A handwritten letter to someone you've been meaning to write to for months. Following a recipe you found tucked inside your grandmother's cookbook, maybe even with her handwriting in the margins, the measurements slightly off, the whole thing taking twice as long as it should. Or just sitting with your child and being bored together. None of these can be delegated to an app. None of them will survive being turned into a habit or a morning routine because there’s no routine here: you are just doing something mundane in the given moment. But this is the entire point - you are doing them, inefficiently, in a specific body, on a specific afternoon that will not come again.
"Our inner world cannot be optimised. It can only be inhabited."
The garden, not the factory
There are different ways of producing outputs. For example, a factory must run efficiently and reduce any potential waste to have the highest gains. This is probably how your calendar already runs, and that’s appropriate - some parts of your life genuinely benefit from being managed and optimised. But then we also have gardens that produce things where the logic is entirely different. We tend it, we notice what’s happening: which plants are struggling, which need more light or water, which are doing something unexpected in a corner you’d almost forgotten about. You actually have to respond to its needs, but you are not monitoring the garden because you have a relationship with your plants first. It’s all good if our external lives are a replication of the factory, but your inner life needs to be a garden. When you run a garden like a factory, you may still get outputs, but you lose the soul of the gardener.
Because the catch is that the things that don't scale are the things that make you irreplaceable. And I don’t mean in an external world, although that also might be the case, but to yourself and to the people who love you. The experience of being alive in a particular body, in a particular place, on a particular afternoon, of course, that will never scale. It will never be optimised. It will never be reproduced at a lower cost with better margins. It will simply happen once, leave a trace in someone's (and mostly yours) memory, and be gone. But don’t take it as a limitation of your life, take it as the main feature of living.
The lab experiment
Find one thing in your week that is really inefficient and serves no measurable purpose. Something you do (or used to do) simply because it feels like you when you do it. Protect it this week with the same seriousness as you would protect the most important meeting. It won’t make you more productive, it won’t make you ‘‘better version of yourself’’, you will simply live that moment.
