Cut to the Bone

The Hidden Cost of Optimising Everything

The Gospel of Less

They told us to trim the fat. We didn’t realise they meant the muscle, too.

Cut the hours. Cut the budgets. Cut the staff. Cut the care.

It was all in the name of efficiency—a word once used to mean clarity of purpose, now twisted to mean absence of friction. Or cost. Or slack. Anything that didn’t serve the spreadsheet was waste. Anything that couldn’t justify its existence in numbers was dead weight.

We made gods of the margins. Sharpened every system until it bled. Called it discipline.

When Lean Turns to Brittle

Efficiency became more than a value—it became a law. Not the slow, deliberate kind etched into civic life, but the kind you feel in your bones when you work a shift alone that should be covered by three. When your train is cancelled because the backup driver was made redundant. When your kid’s school has one teaching assistant for the entire year group, and a spreadsheet that says it’s enough.

We didn’t notice the moment it flipped. When lean turned into brittle. When fast became fragile. When "just-in-time" became "one-step-too-late."

This isn’t failure—it’s design. The systems did exactly what they were optimised to do. The question is: who were they optimised for?

The Moral Mirage of Optimisation

There’s a certain kind of story we’ve learned to tell. One where optimisation is neutral, inevitable, even moral. It saves money. It saves time. It saves us from the chaos of human inconsistency. But the more we saved, the more we lost.

We lost the buffer zones and breather spaces—the margins where people used to catch each other.

We lost the rituals that gave shape to care, because they took too long.

We lost the apprenticeships, the slow learning, the mess and magic of emergence.

We lost the slack that made systems resilient—because it didn’t make them rich.

In a world obsessed with efficiency, even meaning gets deemed inefficient.

Efficiency as Dogma

Efficiency was once a tool. Now it’s a theology. And like all theologies wielded without reflection, it begins to demand sacrifice.

So we sacrifice the social worker’s extra visit. The second librarian. The person who used to take the time to show you how things worked instead of pointing you to a help page. The lunch break. The pause. The breath.

And then we’re shocked when things break. Or burn. Or vanish altogether.

We call them crises. But really, they’re reckonings.

The Weave Reframing

In The Weave, we speak of suboptimal proxies—a phrase we've borrowed and inverted. Originally, it referred to poor substitutes for complex goals. GDP as a proxy for wellbeing. Clicks as a proxy for value. Efficiency, too, was once a proxy. But now it's the goal itself.

The Weave’s version of suboptimal proxies points the other way. Toward rituals that don’t maximise speed but create meaning. Toward steps that are deliberately slow, intentionally tangled, and gloriously human. Toward systems that choose breath over speed and depth over metrics.

We don’t kill efficiency. We just put it back in its place.

Because not everything worth doing can be done quickly. Not everything precious can be measured in throughput.

Some things need space. Some things need slack. Some things need time.

The Last Cut

And if we cut too deep, we won’t get lean. We’ll bleed out.

The first cut was efficiency. The next one is yours to resist.