When I was young, old enough to drink coffee but not really an adult, I had a drip coffeemaker called Mr. Coffee. I scooped pre-ground coffee from a big red can while I’d sing “the best part of waking up… is Folgers in your cup”. I later graduated to a French press, then pourovers, and then a Nespresso – which honestly felt like a step backwards from the pourovers, but it was faster and I was busy.

Now my older, more sophisticated self uses a fancy-dancy espresso machine. I have a single-dose burr grinder and I buy my beans from a guy named Hunter who roasts them in his coffee shop down the street from me. I still hum “the best part of waking up…” every morning when I make my espresso because it makes me happy and my boutique beans tolerate it.

When I first got my machine I went on a mission to git gud at making espresso. When I visit a new city, I always look up whatever the top-rated third-wave coffee shops are and order an espresso with a small cup of sparkling water. I smell it, pretend the tasting notes mean something, and savor it; cultivating my palate I call it.

For over a year, I tried different settings to get the best flavors out of my espresso. My machine is completely programmable, so you can do things like bloom your espresso shot before you pull it, similar to what you do with pourovers. I bought a tiny tool with needles to rake the grounds like it was a zen garden. I have a little metal screen that I put on top of the grounds after tamping to prevent channeling.

I love making espresso because it is so fiddly. I’ve been a min-maxer my entire life, since I first played red box Dungeons & Dragons in the 80s. Maybe espresso, min-maxing, optimization, data science all spring from the same causal origin. A desire to create meaning where there is none – layering complexity until the nothingness is hidden from view.

Just getting the grind settings perfect took me months of trial and error; too fine and it tastes bitter, too coarse and it’s too sour. By the time I finished dialing in a bag to get something drinkable I was on to a new bag and the adventure restarted. I created a log of each shot I pulled; the beans I used; the grind setting; the pressure profile; the resulting outputs (primarily flow rate); and, finally, my tasting notes. My tasting notes could be biased, so I enlisted my children to conduct a proper experiment. I would pull multiple shots with different settings, have my kids label one A and another B, and then write my tasting notes without knowing which shot was which. I got pretty wired in my pursuit of statistical significance.

Espresso is serious business to get right. When I finally perfected my espresso I pulled a shot for a friend we’ll call Bill (his real name starts with a J; he knows who he is). Bill said “wow, this is a bit too sour for me. Do you mind making it into an Americano instead?” Sure! But the real kicker… he added that he preferred the Nespresso and asked if I could bring it back out. Bill’s no longer invited over.

The bright side of betrayal is when it leads to reflection. I spent a career working with data, optimization, and improving decision-making. Fiddling around with my machine is a natural extension of those instincts. Corporate Lucas says the Nespresso is the clear winner. It’s a good enough product (better if you listen to Bill), it’s more consistent, it pulls shots faster, it’s cheaper, and it requires thirty seconds of training. I imagine a kaizen consultant emerging from the shadows and yelling muda, muda! Are they wrong? Nespresso is measurably better on every axis; a warning about the perils of letting engineers over-optimize.

I was a more joyful min-maxer when I was younger. It was a puzzle only I could solve. I’d pore over the Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks and discover the ideal combinations. Now, we have tier lists. Endlessly accessible information has outsourced what it means to be the best from personal discovery to looking it up. I would spend hours as a kid playing and replaying the same games to try to get a little better. Now, I look up a guide online, do it the decreed best way, get bored half-way through, and give up. Optimization has changed from endless exploration to claustrophobic rails.

I often felt alone as an optimizer; now it feels like society has caught up and surpassed me. Past me often felt I had to optimize for easy-to-measure and easy-to-justify; in other words, the short term and trivial. And when I prioritized for the long term and what mattered, but immeasurable, I felt subversive. The worst part is, this pressure was always more internal than external; I became trapped by my own standards of what felt defensible. How can you optimize what you can’t measure?

Yet, I still use my espresso machine. I no longer rigorously collect data. I don’t regret doing so though — I learned what I needed to learn and built intuition. I can dial in a new bag of beans to my liking within a single shot these days; partly because I’ve gotten better, and partly because I’m less persnickety. I still hum “the best part of waking up” when I make my espresso. Sometimes, and only sometimes, my shots are pretty darn good. Bill would probably disagree; I don’t care, I’m making it for myself. I even appreciate the inconsistency; too much sameness gets boring. More importantly, it gives me a different relationship to my coffee. It romanticizes it. I like raking my freshly ground beans; it feels zen. It helps me feel present. The ritual has all these little externalities that are hard to measure but add up to joy.

When I make my coffee it is a tiny rebellion that only I know about. The transcendence of craft is something I simply don’t have the energy to justify anymore. I no longer want to create something measurably good but immeasurably soulless.