Member-only story
Algorithmic Marginal Utility: Why AI Makes Everything Cheaper and Less Fun
It’s 2025, and we live in a world where artificial intelligence has optimized nearly everything. Music, movies, dating, workouts, grocery shopping, therapy — if there’s a process, an algorithm is working behind the scenes to make it faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
And yet, somehow, life feels… flatter.
Where’s the thrill? The magic? The messy serendipity that used to make things worth doing?
We’ve entered what I call the era of Algorithmic Marginal Utility — a world where every aspect of our experience is so optimized that the difference between good and great has become vanishingly small. It’s like music on shuffle forever: no skips, but also no bangers that hit you in the chest.
So the question is: If everything gets better, why does it feel worse?
What Is Algorithmic Marginal Utility?
In classical economics, marginal utility is the added satisfaction from consuming one more unit of a good or service. The more you have of something, the less you feel its impact.
Now apply that idea to your digital life. AI recommendation engines flood you with hyper-relevant content: the next perfect video, the next perfect song, the next perfect snack…
