I bought a bag of lettuce today.

I like to live dangerously.

The lettuce industry is having one of its periodic moments where it tries to kill us. This time it’s a parasitic infection called cyclosporiasis. I bought the bag anyway, because I don’t mind flirting with a gruesome food-borne illness.

While eating my potentially fatal salad, I watched a TikTok that introduced me to one of the most useful concepts I’ve encountered in years.

The creator calls herself, Tess the Human, which already sounds like someone Philip K. Dick might have invented.

She was participating in a month-long creator bootcamp on AI safety with the wonderfully reassuring title “Please Don’t Kill Us.”

That was the actual name.

Not a headline I invented.

A month-long program bringing creators together to think seriously about AI safety, named after a plea usually directed at Colossus.

She wasn’t giving a lecture.

She wasn’t standing behind a podium.

She was doing a “get ready with me” video, putting on makeup while explaining Goodhart’s Law.

That detail matters.

TikTok has trained us to expect certain forms of intimacy. A woman applying eyeliner while discussing existential risk no longer feels strange. It feels normal.

The irony wasn’t lost on Tess. She was explaining Goodhart’s Law — a principle about what happens when measures become targets — through one of the most optimized communication formats ever created.

She understood exactly what she was doing.

And that was the moment the idea escaped economics or AI and started looking like the alienation of modern life.

Goodhart’s Law is deceptively simple:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The classic example involves the British colonial government offering rewards for dead cobras in India. The goal was simple: reduce the cobra population.

People responded by breeding cobras.

The number improved.

Reality got worse.

The system wasn’t malfunctioning.

It was functioning exactly as designed.

As I listened to Tess, I realized I was wrestling with my own tiny version of the same problem.

I write here on Substack.

Substack has its own measurements.

Views.

Subscribers.

Recommendations.

Open rates.

Likes.

None of those things are bad. Writers have always wanted readers. Newspapers cared about circulation long before dashboards existed.

But I catch myself wondering things like:

“Should I mention Substack in this essay?”

“The algorithm likes it when people talk about Substack.”

“Maybe I should move AI into the first paragraph.”

“Would a different title get more clicks?”

The strange part is that I’m thinking these thoughts while writing an essay about optimization.

This paragraph may itself be an optimization strategy.

I know mentioning Substack may help the algorithm understand what I’m writing.

I know AI is a popular subject.

I’m hoping Goodhart’s Law has just enough novelty to make people curious.

I’m writing about optimization while optimizing the writing.

I don’t think that’s hypocrisy.

I think it’s simply the condition we now inhabit.

This is where Goodhart’s Law stops being an economic principle and starts looking like a theory of modern life.

Maybe that is why so many people feel that everything is getting worse. Everything is a scam. Everything feels fake. Everything feels like a performance. Those complaints are everywhere now.

But I wonder if part of the problem is that we are experiencing social forces for which we still lack a vocabulary.

Before Freud, people experienced anxiety, compulsions, irrational behavior, and self-sabotage. Freud did not invent those things. He named them. He provided a language for understanding experiences that people already had.

Maybe Goodhart’s Law is one of those concepts. Maybe it explains a small piece of what people are feeling.

Erich Fromm saw part of this decades ago. Fromm argued that modern society increasingly encouraged a “marketing orientation.” People began to experience themselves as commodities. The central question shifted from:

“Who am I?”

to:

“How am I being received?” “How valuable am I?” “How do I compare?”

Fromm was writing before social media. Before influencers. Before engagement analytics. Before follower counts. Before recommendation engines.

But what happens when a marketing personality meets an optimization machine?

The answer seems obvious. The marketplace moves inside the self. The self becomes something continuously adjusted. A profile. A brand. A score. A performance.

This is where I think Goodhart’s Law and alienation intersect. The problem is not measurement. The problem is when the measurement becomes more real than the thing being measured. When the profile replaces the person. When the score replaces the achievement. When the performance replaces the self.

I think about this when I use AI.

Over the past year I’ve had long conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI systems while working on my notebook about alienation. A few days ago I realized what the experience reminded me of.

Mr. Spock.

Not because AI is Spock.

Because of how Spock used the Enterprise computer.

He didn’t ask the computer to think for him.

He asked it to calculate possibilities.

Compare evidence.

Test hypotheses.

Refine questions.

Otherwise, why have Spock at all?

Why have a crew?

That always struck me as the real science fiction.

Not a machine replacing human judgment.

A machine extending it.

A person can now watch a TikTok explaining Goodhart’s Law, spend an afternoon discussing it with several AI systems, connect it to Freud, Fromm, Marx, and their own work on alienation, and end up writing an essay like this.

Younger readers may find that perfectly ordinary.

I still think it’s astonishing.

But even here the same question returns.

Am I using AI to deepen my thinking?

Or merely to optimize it?

Those aren’t the same thing.

Because some of the most valuable human experiences resist optimization.

Friendship.

Conversation.

Love.

Curiosity.

Changing your mind halfway through writing an essay.

Those things contain friction.

And perhaps friction isn’t a flaw in the system.

Perhaps it’s one of the conditions that allows us to remain human.