014: What doesn’t scale
On the quiet value of the human-sized, the handmade, and the irreducibly personal
Not long ago, I was watching a documentary series about emergency rooms in New York City hospitals. Amid the blur of machines, stretchers, and code calls, there was one scene that didn’t last more than a minute. A nurse sat beside an elderly man who was nearing the end of his life. The man’s eyes were closed, he seemed to be transitioning. The machines around him beeped in practiced rhythm. But the nurse wasn’t focused on the chart. She was focused on the man. She leaned in, took his hand, and said his name again and again…gently. Not because it would change the outcome, not because it would show up on a chart or performance review, and probably not because he would hear her, but because it was the right thing to do.
That moment stayed with me. It was a quiet act of humanity tucked inside the mechanics of modern medicine. No one told her to do it. No one measured it. But something sacred passed between them.
Acts that are not efficient. Acts that can’t be optimized. But they matter.
And I realized as I watched that I was craving more of that kind of presence in my own life. Presence that cannot be automated. Attention that doesn’t scale.
That was what prompted me to write this essay.
The religion of scale
In almost every sector of modern life, scale is treated as synonymous with success. We are surrounded by messages that glorify expansion: “Go big or go home,” “10x your output,” “If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter.” Startups chase exponential growth. Nonprofits are pressured to “maximize impact.” Even social platforms reward those whose work reaches the most people, regardless of depth.
To scale is to be seen as serious. But this mindset often comes at the cost of something subtler, and arguably more essential: the integrity of proportion.
The logic is seductive. Scale creates access. It brings down costs. It’s what turns a great idea into an institution, what turns a boutique product into a global name. We admire scale because it is synonymous with impact.
But scale also flattens. In the push to replicate, uniqueness is often sacrificed. Context gets stripped away. People become data points, and relationships become transactions. At some point, the question stops being “Is this good?” and becomes “Can this grow?”
The answer, when it comes to certain things, should be no.
“When an enterprise grows beyond a certain point, it begins to destroy the very thing it sets out to serve.”
— Ivan Illich
The things that don’t scale
There is a whole category of human experience that does not, and should not, scale. These are the things that live in the quiet intervals between transactions, experiences that depend on context, vulnerability, time.
Think of a teacher who notices a student withdrawing and pauses the lesson, not to discipline or redirect, but to check in. That moment won’t make it into any standardized assessment, but it might be the thing the student remembers for years.
Or consider the slowness of preparing a meal by hand for care rather than efficiency per se. There is no batch-processing tenderness. There is no supply chain for trust.
How about the experience of being truly listened to? Not just nodded at, but heard. Or a handwritten letter that arrives unexpectedly, or a corner shop where the owner knows your name and your story, because he’s been there for twenty years and hasn’t needed to franchise to stay afloat.
These are not efficient systems. They are not profitable models in any conventional sense. But they hold something vital that mass production cannot replicate: texture, relationship, memory, place.
So much of what we cherish, like sincerity, nuance, devotion, lives outside of scale.
When I was doing research for this essay, I came across writer Jenny Odell who, in her book How to Do Nothing, warns against the ideology of constant optimization and infinite scalability. “There is a kind of attention that is driven by demand,” she writes, “and a kind that is driven by care.” The latter does not scale. It cannot. And that is precisely its power.