We've reached peak 'optimization.' What comes next?

I really knew that we had kind of reached the point of no return when I saw eyeball whitening drops. And I was like, whoa. Yeah. And like you and I grew up in the era of like women's magazines. And those were themselves like quite extreme in their expectations of what women should do to their bodies. And that we even have the capacity to be like, hold on a second. This is an insecurity I didn't know I was supposed to have. You're making things up now. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Optimization. It sounds so technical, but it's the idea that things can constantly be improved. And in our social media age, it's everywhere. Your hair, your skin, your house, your career, even your teeth can be tweaked, prodded into perfection. And people are sick of it. But how did we even get there? To understand this trend, we're talking with Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer Amanda Ball, who wrote an article called The Optimization Backlash Has Begun. She's going to help us understand optimization and why some people are trying to get away from it. Amanda, welcome back to It's Been a Minute. Thank you so much. This is big excitement because I've been reading you for a long time, especially on shopping and like consumer trends. So I am very excited to discuss. A recent piece that you wrote for Bloomberg Business, it was about our shifting attitudes toward the idea of optimization. Optimization is everywhere. But I think that people have always been trying to like improve their appearance, their homes, their lives, their finances. That's not new. None of this is new. But when would you say this current era of optimization began and what makes it unique? Well, you're exactly right. In that there's always been like beauty standards, domestic standards, lifestyle standards, financial standards, like none of this is new in the dynamics that we're talking about. But I would say about 15 years ago, if you want to look at like the full long tail of this trend, you get the launch of Instagram, you get Pinterest becoming more popular back in the early 2010s. We are just inundated with a lot more faces, a lot more videos, a lot more photos, a lot more the interiors of other people's homes than we used to be. And it's sort of constant now in the platforms and technologies that made that constant, I think, are sort of the beginning of this era that I'm talking about. So you so it's about 15 years, which is a normal sort of like arc for a trend cycle. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, also to like, it's also pretty clear that the platforms that kind of I guess that we're all living in, that is influencing all these beauty standards and exacerbating all these beauty standards, home standards, all these things. They also like, very savvily found ways to profit off of our anxieties around these things as well. There's an opportunity to be sold through these apps all the time, which I feel like creates a market that has all these other people that have interest, vested interest in our obsession with optimization as well. Right. The process of commerce used to be more geographically constrained. It used to be more constrained in like, who were the buyers and who were the sellers. Because like, even when I was a kid, I'm 40 years old. So when I was a kid, if if I wanted to go and peruse the clothing available to me as like a middle schooler, or a high schooler, I had to get someone to drive me to the mall. Right, right. And, and, you know, I had magazines and TV at home, but those were sort of limited in their scope of all the different things they could show you because they were bound by the technologies that created them. So I got one magazine a month instead of just a constant stream of photos every day. And quarterly catalog. Right, right. And, and the relationships between individuals and the companies that were selling them things was just a little bit more clear. You know, deceptive advertising has been a thing for a very long time. But it used to come in spaces where you were expecting to be advertised to. So you know, types of media, billboards, things like that. Now it comes more and more often it comes from other individuals who are, you know, marketing themselves as relatable or just like you or just some girl or, you know, just another TikTok user who's like trying to help you out with this like great thing that she learned about. So you get these this sort of breakdown in in the knowable connections you have to commerce. And you get a lot more people trying to sell you something the advent of a affiliate marketing, the advent of, of TikTok shop and social commerce, sort of makes sales people of us all or, or of, you know, an enormous number of us. And, and that sort of embeds the sales interaction in into an extraordinarily high amount of the media and just the interpersonal communication that we consume on a daily basis, which used to not be so suffused with sales pitches. I feel like in the past few years, maybe past three to five years, it's been like exacerbated, which makes sense, right? As a trend is sort of reaching its endpoint, like everything starts to kind of like, collide and, and just continue to pick up speed. I wonder what was the cultural moment? Or is there a cultural moment that you can think of that made it clear to you that optimization had like fully taken hold? Well, I think that you're right to peg this as a phenomenon of like the last five years or so this sort of like logical extreme of optimization, because what you know, there's, there's so many things that you can point to the pandemic as an acceleration point. And, and this, this like sort of constant, widespread consumption of social video, I think is like sort of the underlying factor and how this got so extreme in the past few years. And it was really the pandemic and being inside and having this novel, you know, option in TikTok that got us all watching social video at a rate that was frankly not present in 2019. And then you get Instagram launching reels and YouTube launching shorts. And suddenly there is just this enormous catalog of constantly updated short form video, you know, when you have an incredibly like saturated market for, for videos of this type, that sort of naturally pushes to more and more extremes. Because that is something that algorithmic recommendation platforms really like, like, once there's a bunch of videos about, you know, about like dealing with discoloration or hyperpigmentation on your face, like, yeah, you know, everybody's been served all the videos about that, that they probably want to see. So we need to find other areas of the world that seem a little bit ridiculous, or a little bit like shocking. So you get like underarm hyper hyperpigmentation, and you get like, groin hyperpigmentation, and things like that. The two places where everyone's constantly looking. Yes, right, right. The two places where where you can't help but be, but be beset by information about your own body, like, you know, so you have to you look for like, content creators look for like the next step in getting ahead of the So, and that pushes people to weird spots, it pushes people to make videos about how you can change the color of your armpits. And I'll say that for me, I, I really knew that we had kind of reached the point of no return when I saw eyeball whitening drops. Yeah, I was like, I never even thought to look at anybody's eyeballs. Like, it really not occurred to me. Yeah. And like, you and I grew up in the era of like women's magazines in the in the early aughts of like, and those were themselves like quite extreme in their expectations of what what women should do to their bodies. And that we even have the capacity to be like, hold on a second, I this is an insecurity I didn't know I was supposed to have you're making things up now. Like, I think that that's a good demonstration of how much more extreme and how much more like, like, you know, we're picking out smaller and smaller things about people's bodies and how they dress in order to tell them that those are not like good enough. But as soon as that thing is perfect, they have to find something else to sell you products about. I wonder, like, like, what is all this optimization response to like, like, you know, as you pointed out, there's different like, people have always sort of wanted to, everyone always, I think, has a natural inclination toward wanting to feel better, look better, live better. But we have had this acceleration in the past 15 years, especially in the past, like five to six years, we've had this acceleration in the past 15 years, six years. What is all of this, like a response to like, what are people working out, I guess, when they're engaging in this optimization? Well, I think that part of this is a product of the agita created by being in a much more visual culture than we used to be. Like the fact that we are on camera recording a podcast is, I think, like, a good example of that this is something that everybody in media, you know, has to think about. And I appreciate your staff for being here. And I appreciate you for being here. putting video in the subject line when you reached out to me. because some people spring that on you and you don't have makeup on. Oh, yes. Yes, I've been there before. But I think that, you know, we, the technology platforms that we use now are so video based, like Zoom is a big part of being at work now. So so appearing, you know, camera ready is a big part of jobs that have nothing to do with being public facing, even. And then social media, Instagram, in particular, has made our sort of private spaces and private lives like the source of content. And there's also a difference between like, experiencing. I mean, this goes for like food plating, this goes for like presentation, this goes for home decor goes for makeup, goes for just the way people and things look in general. There's like a way that people and things can look great in person, and you're experiencing them. And it's like, oh, it's great. It's fab. And then there's this other way that people and things look magnificent on camera. And then it's like shifting to this whole other, it's not just like looking good or feeling good. It's like, everything must be telegenic or photogenic. That's totally different matrix. Yeah, absolutely. That this is something that I think sort of fundamentally alters people's relationships to their face to their home. To the food that they cook to basically to the vacations they take to basically everything they do, because we are more and more seeing ourselves in our lives through the logic of photography. And, you know, photos and videos do look different than your perception of something in real time. You know, you can catch a bad angle, you can catch, you know, an awkward moment. And more than more so than even that it changes, like, how you think about lighting, like something that something that looks absolutely beautiful in in person, even if it's like a still, you know, a room where nothing is moving a photograph of it might look terrible and like dark and muddy, because it's it's lit to be lived in, it's not lit to be photographed. And those anybody who, you know, deals with with photographers knows that those are very, very different things. So it you know, the ring light industry, and ring in front of them right now. I wrote something during the pandemic, about like the sort of takeoff in like ring light sales, because suddenly everybody was looking at themselves through a camera, the pandemic just put a lot of us in front of cameras in a way that even though more and more social media was becoming visual, like we hadn't, most of us hadn't been on video that much in our lives, and suddenly we were. Don't go anywhere. I think that the the role of influencers and the role of these platforms, to sort of like, badger you into being concerned about new things that you then spend money to fix, is wearing on people quite significantly, even if they're still spending. We've got more coming up after the break. I sometimes wonder if like trying to fix these smaller, quote unquote problems, right? Like the wrong kind of shadow, and like not enough direct sunlight. Or like your living room not following the rule of thirds. Like, I wonder if that is a response to feeling really helpless, right? Like, like, you can sort of fix these smaller problems in your life appearance, if you feel that way, your home, whatever. Because that's something you kind of have agency over. Whereas like larger issues like health care, or education or housing, things that really came to the forefront during that time, especially, are so sort of big and unwieldy that, that it's hard to feel like you have agency there. Like, so you might as well like fuss over your face or your body or your home, because these are things that are within your grasp. Right. I think that that's absolutely true. And the, the concept of like consumer agency is something that has come up again, and again, in my work over the years that this is how American society is sort of structured for regular people to to assert their agency in life, mostly by choosing what they do and do not buy. And that is that is how most of us interact with our own personal sense of power on a daily basis, more so than other types of agency we might have. And then the pandemic hit, and there was this, like, almost this crisis of agency. And you see that play out in a lot of different ways, a lot of people trying to, to rest individual control of more things into their power, I think that this is like, you know, an underlying factor in light in, and, you know, rises in anti vaxxer sentiment, things like that. But it's also an underlying factor in in how people interact with lots of different decisions they make during the day. And you're right that that, you know, there's a lot of ambient anxiety, I think, in in the sort of American populace. And one thing though, yeah, yeah. And one thing that it does feel like we have been given more and more ability to control is our appearance. You know, part of that is because, there has been a lot of expansion in sort of cause cosmetic, aesthetic medical technology, there are better injectables, there are more effective surface treatments, there are better lasers, better micro needling machines, like that technology has come a long way, because it is profitable to develop it. People are out there willing to pay cash. After the pandemic, thousands of new Medi spas opened across the country. Yeah. And in Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, I'm really processing what you're saying. Thousands. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I see them. Yeah. Yeah, they're everywhere. Like, I think the number, and I haven't seen it, like today, but I think it was between four and 5000 new Medi spas between 2019 and 2023, I believe. So probably even more now. It is something that that the availability of these things has really expanded. They've gotten a lot less expensive. You know, you can drop 200 bucks on some on some Botox and look meaningfully different in the day. And it's, it feels extremely available. It's extremely effective. Like, you know, this stuff works, whatever you think of the results, like it does what it says on the tin. So I think that the sort of the availability of of these sort of optimization products, like we haven't even gotten into like peptides and, you know, the sort of enormous, enormous e commerce operations that put things in your home super quickly, super easily without you really having to think about it. Yeah. You know, that is that is a way that a lot of people are choosing to sort of like assert their ability to control their everyday lives. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. So so your piece is all about how people are starting to push back on this. The backlash, the optimization backlash is beginning. And in your piece, you mentioned Travis Scott's big, perfect veneered teeth in the Odyssey as a cultural tipping point toward the end of this optimization era. For those of you who have not seen the Odyssey, at the beginning, this is not spoiling anything. Basically, like the rapper Travis Scott is playing like a bard. He's like, he's just he's kind of like, he's kind of like spitting some poetry out to this group. He's like, he's kind of like spitting some poetry out to this group of people. And, and I, I'll say his cheekbones were popped. His hair looks good. But I agree. The teeth were like, I don't know if people had teeth this white and straight. I'm like, I don't know if they came that straight, that perfect, right? I don't know. Why do you think that his veneers are just veneers in general have become this lightning rod against our optimization era? Yeah, I think that the thing about his veneers is sort of funny, because I mean, I don't know, like, I don't know, like, I don't know, like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. The sort of incongruous nature of having like, just really perfect teeth in a movie about antiquity is is something that that I think just really, like sort of struck people in a way. And I think that in general, they weren't people, it's probably partly because they weren't expecting Travis Scott to pop up in that spot. Like the first person you see in the film? Yeah, possibly that. Yeah. And it's as I was watching the rest of the movie, it struck me that it seemed like they had some like older actors, some, you know, middle aged and slightly aging through middle aged actors in that movie, you know, and Matt Damon and Hathaway, Charlize Theron, and it seemed like they had told all of them to hold off on the Botox a little bit for this movie, because you can, you know, some of them are somewhat immovable when you when you see them on a red carpet. Yeah, you know, I won't name any names. But we all know. And, but all of their foreheads were moving, all of their smile lines were moving. But so Botox is one of those things that if you try it, and it's a little you get it too much, then wait three or four months, and you're back to basically normal. But veneers are permanent. And they are the veneers are like a very extreme, very expensive, just to like, it's most supposed to be like an incremental improvement. But then people started putting them on all of their teeth as a sort of like end run around having to get braces or do Invisalign or have like more, more extensive dental work that would take time and provide sort of incremental returns instead of just, I went to the dentist, I came out with perfect teeth. Oh, I mean, I've seen people on social media with no dentistry training to speak of who quote unquote do veneers yeah um i've that that's there have been people who've been like caught out there you know saying that they do veneers when they have no dentistry training or credentials it's it's it can get real dark-sided yeah it can get real weird out there um and this is a this is an issue across all kinds of optimization treatments across all kinds of like medispa things cosmetic dentistry um peptides you get in the mail random stuff like you you get a lot of sort of shady practitioners who are responding to the huge demand for these like sort of quick fix um cosmetic enhancements um among people who can't afford or don't want to pay to go to a licensed practitioner um everything can get off the rails so quick like so quick and it can also get very expensive to actually have someone who's licensed actually fix that issue i mean you could easily go into debt over dental issues if not something much worse than that and it does take a lot of effort resources to even just care for them at a base level um let alone like doing the sort of cosmetic dentistry we're talking about like teeth are signifiers of class um i understand why someone would want to obtain a conventionally attractive smile or have you know very even in a cookie cutter way beautiful teeth quote-unquote um but i like why are some people like rejecting this now like what is it about the teeth that are making people be like we've got to put an end to this optimization stuff i think that it's the ubiquity of it across like both celebrities and influencers the you know it's become so common in england um that people there refer to like big like chiclet white turkey tea teeth is turkey teeth yes because there's so many love island there was like turkey tea yes yeah yes um so many love island contestants have turkey teeth um it's become so common that people will travel to turkey to get um sort of like discount low priced um dental work um like that that that it is an entire cultural phenomenon with its own name and when you really have like the entire population sort of participating in something like this at a certain level i think you trigger a level of pushback um especially when it's you know reality show contestants it's it's easier to ridicule reality show contestants and um and influencers than it is like traditional celebrities and i think it matters in this context that travis scott is a rapper um yes it does um because the the other people in the movie are mostly like uh not just actors but like yeah enormously famous actors um who have probably uh you know uh experimented with lots of different types of cosmetic treatments and have probably decided them are not looking the same as they were 20 years ago no many of them but it's true they are all enhanced um but they they have gotten the types of enhancements that still allow them to play like a variety of types of movie characters because these are these are like very very fancy actors they're not even just like traditional actors they are like a list lifetime um so they have like their face is their is their bread and butter and they have um had an opportunity to dial that in in a way that allows them to be in a movie about antiquity whereas travis scott is um you know has some acting experience but he comes from a um line of work where being ostentatious being flashy being and also being very current like looking like now looking like today is very important out front with the the choices you're making with your money out front with um how you've adjusted your appearance how you've adjusted your lifestyle is like a big part of that and the yeah in congruity of the aesthetic choices that you might make as a rapper um showing up in um this sort of like rarefied um artistic space that um that people just see differently people see as requiring different aesthetic choices um is i think part of that um incongruity um that made people go okay hold on a second yeah yeah no i mean i think you're absolutely right there's like there's it's like there's a lot of work being done across all of the sorts of like across across every sort of like pot of famous people you know i can't help but notice i have to say i can't help but notice that this push back to this optimization is hitting at a time where many of us are feeling like economically stretched how do you see those two things as related you know that one's a little bit tricky um my editor and i actually went back and forth about this because um it's hard to tell exactly how much of an effect that people's feelings about the economy are having on this because like the economic data we have is like inherently sort of backward looking and some of these industries don't release reports on like um sales or things like that every year some of them release every like two years or three years so it's hard to know exactly what's happening like right now as we speak um but i think that you know it is just like really complicated because consumers have like kept spending even though everybody feels terrible about the economy um it's it's we've all everybody who covers consumer behavior has been sort of waiting for the past year and a half for people to stop buying stuff that they don't need and we haven't and we haven't really um the the most recent print on retail sales that came out last week shows like sort of a leveling off which is like the which everybody reacted to like oh it's here like uh because even like a leveling off in like retail sales growth is big because the consumers have just like kept buying things and especially consumers at the sort of uh you know top end of the the income uh spectrum have just kept buying things and that's overwhelmingly who is spending on this stuff um but i think that like it is perhaps even if people are still spending on these things it is which i think that they are it is perhaps coloring people's attitudes about being like pushed to spend more push to spend more on new things push to try new things push to feel some type of way about like a different thing about their bodies or their lifestyles i think that um it can affect sentiment even if it doesn't affect sales immediately and i do think that you know as everything gets more expensive as you know since 2019 um the cost of feeding yourself at home has risen like 33 which is an enormous amount of uh of you know uh additional expenditure in that short period of time um for something that is not um negotiable and i i think that the the role of influencers and the role of these platforms to sort of like badger you into being concerned about new things that you then spend money to fix um is wearing on people quite significantly even if they're still spending yeah i mean i gave up on manicures this past year um just to the expense and also because i find getting my nails done to be very very very boring but i spent some time you know convincing myself that like i was sticking it to big optimization in my own way um by not trying to improve my natural nails but for me both things are true like i needed to cut back on expenses nails were getting way too expensive i'm talking about no design 140 and i'm bored um but also i also got sick of keeping up with the expectation to have perfect nails like i i could see why you and your editor went back and forth on it but but like also like i imagine that for a lot of people it's kind of like a both and thing like to your point like you said a lot of people especially at the the upper income level are continuing to spend a lot anyway um but uh i think that like um i imagine i mean i'll say it's not i mean the money that i'm saving on nails i'm probably spending on something else let's be real and i think that you bring up sort of a good point in that like it is to be expected that people who have tried a lot of these optimizations in the past few years as like millions of of americans have it is it is expected that some of them would do this for a few years and be like i'm not really that into this actually like i like i've learned that i'm not like actually that into getting my nails done or getting my or getting eyelash extensions or um getting botox or getting filler or you know my filler has you know i got a little lip filler and it stuck around longer than i expected so i don't need that ever again maybe um or like we'll revisit it in a few years so i think that it is natural that some of the people who are like okay i'm we're out of we're out of lockdown we're um vaccinated we're safe we're out there again um i'm gonna get botox i'm gonna um you know dye my hair i'm gonna do all these things that to like reassert my um agency in everyday life like some of course some of them are sort of like i've done it i've done it for a few years i'm gonna do something else now don't go anywhere i think that it's a mistake to think of perfection in the pursuit of perfection as like the journey toward like some fixed point in the distance um perfection is a moving target perfection is something that is sort of like culturally mediated and always changing we've got more coming up after the break i i wonder i wonder also how much like this has to do with people realizing like the influence that like big tech has on all of us like our algorithms are really optimized and and thus they have the potential to shape like how we want to then optimize our bodies our faces even our homes Like, I imagine a lot of people are sick of that and are regretting how they kind of like succumb to online trends. But they're still living online. Like, is it really possible for people to ever opt out of optimization? Well, I think that it's right that a lot of this can be sort of bundled up under the heading of like a tech backlash. Because it is these tech platforms that have introduced this way of consuming information about life and information about others that has sparked this sort of extreme reaction. We are sort of saturated with influencer content and influencer marketing. And people are more aware than they have been before about the sort of needs of the underlying companies and the way that influencers and their sales pitches sort of serve. And the sort of brewing AI backlash that we have right now, because so much about AI is about optimization. It is about like wringing every last drop of productivity and capability and creativity from, you know, a populace, from workers, from every part of your life. You're supposed to be using AI agents to like pilot your everyday tasks. You're supposed to be using chat GPT to parent your child. You're supposed to be doing all of this and more. And I think that, you know, whether or not these technologies actually work for any of that, which I am skeptical of, the sort of like hard sales pitch that people have gotten from these companies and the ways that often their employers have forced them into using these tools at the behest of these very, very large tech companies, I think leaves a sour taste in people's mouth and makes them perhaps, a little bit more skeptical of the other ways that tech intervenes in their life and the representatives of these companies that they sort of interact with online on a daily basis. And that means going, you know, do I actually need what these platforms are trying to sell me? Do I actually need to feel bad about my forehead or my teeth or my nails or the color of my skin in my armpits? Yeah. Like, what is the purpose of me feeling bad about all of that? What is the purpose of all of us feeling bad about that? Like, who benefits from that? And I think that people sort of being prompted to take a step back and ask those questions about AI has perhaps helped them take a step back and ask those questions about a lot of other elements of the tech economy and how we interact with it. You know, I see ways. In which people want to or maybe already are sort of opting out of certain things, right? I wonder, though, like, on the flip side, is there is it is it a privilege to have to not pursue optimization? Like, does everyone who rejects optimization get treated the same way? Like, does everyone, I guess, have even equal opportunity to be able to opt out? You know, I don't think that whether. Whether you optimize or not, I think that whatever decisions you make, there are other things about you that probably determine how you're going to be treated. So if you if you opt into the optimization engine and adhere to certain, you know, expectations on how you're going to look, how you're going to present yourself, what your hair is like, what your skin is like, how you dress like you are still sort of beholden to the race and class and gender expectations above and beyond whether or not your teeth are like as nice as they could be. I think that people who opt to keep their wrinkles, people who opt to, you know, stop doing their nails, things like that, the that those are probably not the most important decisions that they make. Or not the most important things about them in in how they're treated in everyday life. I think that there are some sort of like immutable things, immutable aspects of of ourselves that probably have more of a role in how we're treated, which is, which is one of those this goes back to the point you made earlier about these interventions being sort of like a grasp at control, like the the fantasy that we can determine how other people see and treat us is. is something that I think helps a lot of people make the decision to pursue these types of optimizations, that you can improve your lot in life if you improve yourself. But I think that these little things sort of function at the margins in a way that like, there are lots of intractable things about how we experience life that we don't have any direct control over. And these optimizations are marketed in part as a way. For us to feel like we are mitigating some of those downsides to whatever else about us is affecting how people treat us or affecting our experiences in life. Hmm, hmm, hmm. You know, someone might be listening to this and thinking, you know, they might be thinking, like, I'm not really online like that. And I was never going to get veneers. Why should I care about this? What would you say to them? I think that it's worthwhile. It's worthwhile to care about this, because even if you're not on the portion of the internet that is trying to get you to get Botox or veneers or to do something or other with your hair, you were on a portion of the internet that is trying to get you to do something. Something. Yes. Because that's what these platforms do. And basically everybody is online in that way in some part of the internet or another. You might be on car Instagram. The car influencers are telling you that you've got to get a vinyl wrap, that you've got to tune up this or that, or that you've got to trade in the two-year-old clunker you got and get something nicer and sportier and faster. The sort of sales engine of the internet comes for us all in one way or another. And this sort of personal optimization of the face, of the home, of the wardrobe is. Is something that focuses its attention on particular people. But whoever you are, there's influencers out there trying to separate you from your money at the behest of tech platforms. The sales engine of the internet comes for us all. You said a word with that. I got one more question. I mean, even though there's like a backlash to this optimization, like you mentioned in your article that the shift to a more realistic standard. Is still kind of curated. And I agree. I mean, I have seen people go from like lash heaviness to sort of like now I feel like we're swinging back toward a natural eyelash. I don't know. Will we ever get back to like a more authentic version of ourselves? I mean, online or even just in life in general? Like, is that even possible? And also, is it even what we want? I think that it's a mistake to. I think that it's a mistake to think of perfection and the pursuit of perfection as like the journey toward like some fixed point in the distance. Perfection is a moving target. Perfection is something that is sort of like culturally mediated and always changing. And, you know, the something that has like fascinated me over my career is the way that trends move through culture. Trends can start at a lot of different places. And a lot of different people are capable of starting trends. But the way that they move through culture. Means that they are sort of always shifting. And the expectations of you are always going to be shifting depending on who you are. So I would say that like the existence of an ideal is itself something that puts pressure on people. If the ideal has been certain types of plastic surgery, certain types of cosmetic enhancement, certain types of injections, certain types of. You know, treatments and things like that. And then, you know, pulling back off of that sort of extreme is still something that, you know, places new expectations on people. Because as you said, we're not. It's not that you're just supposed to roll out of bed now and that's fine. And your boss is going to be fine with that. And that you're not going to be perceived differently at work. But there's a new different target you have to hit. You have to look. Sort of effortlessly optimized, imperfect. We're still optimizing. You know, part of the reason that I sat down to write this in the first place is because I had seen a bunch of articles about like, you know, dermatologists say that their patients are now asking for some wrinkles to be left intact. They're still getting Botox. They're just getting a newly correct amount of Botox. Or that cosmetic dentists, like the highest end ones with the best technique and the best. Access to materials and the richest clients who can pay for new things say that, you know, their clients are still coming in to get veneers. They're still coming in to get. dentistry treatments. They're just getting ones that do a better job of hiding the fact that they've had veneers or had those treatments. So in some ways, this new ideal might be even harder to hit because it is, you know, it's asking people to employ techniques and products and services that are, you know, done at the hands of like very careful, very skilled practitioners. Whereas, you know, getting turkey teeth was pretty easy because you just went to Turkey and there was somebody there to do it for, you know, a couple thousand bucks. But those dentists and, you know, your average MediSpa injector are not going to be as skilled at doing these like very subtle, very carefully placed treatments that people are sort of opting into now. So the overall look may be a more human, more normal, more achievable look. In certain ways, if you if you, you know, have the right hair texture, if you have the right skin color, if you have the right Rolodex of practitioners, if you have, you know, right wallet, the right bank account, yes, the right bank account, ultimately, then then these are probably, you know, a better fit for looking like a human for looking like what you think of as looking like yourself. But I don't think that means they're necessarily any more achievable for normal people who aren't the audience that is supposed to be celebrated in these kinds of cultural norms. Like I think that, you know, that remains as ever, a problem. Oh, my gosh. Well, I guess here's to hoping that one day we can get off of the optimization treadmill. Hopefully, for me, that'll be before I hit retirement age prayerfully. But Amanda, until then, thank you so much for coming on the show. I was just, utterly fascinated by your piece in this conversation. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for having me. And to all of you watching, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Be sure to come back to this feed every Tuesday for a fresh video episode. You can watch these episodes exclusively on Spotify, YouTube, and the NPR app.