Champagne, Supermodels, and the Quest for What We Actually Want
Let’s set the scene: it’s the mid-90s, the heyday of high-speed rail innovation, and British and French engineers have just proposed something spectacularly ambitious and absurdly costly, to the tune of six billion pounds, which, when you consider inflation and how much the world has changed since then, was even more of a cosmic sum back then than it sounds now (imagine trying to stuff a small country’s GDP into a train tunnel). The problem they were attempting to solve was simple: reduce the Eurostar journey between London and Paris from three hours to two and a half.
So they started tearing up blueprints, spinning up CAD models, hurling money at tunneling and track upgrades. Their solution was elegant, numerical, and intensely focused. This is what we’ll call an “engineering solution,” a clean, quantifiable approach reducing a problem to its skeleton and then carves away at the bone. To engineers, this makes sense in the way raw meat makes sense to a hungry wolf. They saw the issue as Time, and thus they devoted themselves to slaying Time itself, or at least taking a few big bites out of it.
But then, right in the middle of all this sterile, mechanistic planning, in comes this marketer—let’s call him something like Basil, because he feels like a “Basil,” the kind of person who somehow has a permanent tan and is maybe 80% charm, and he throws something audacious and a little bit insane into the mix. He proposes, rather than spending six billion pounds on reducing the travel time, they could use a mere fraction to install Wi-Fi on the train, which would make the time pass quickly enough passengers wouldn’t even notice it (as anyone who has lost a weekend to the internet can attest). But he doesn’t stop there. No, Basil goes further. He suggests taking a cool billion pounds (saving five billion pounds) and hiring supermodels—the world’s top, most impossibly attractive supermodels—to roam the aisles, pouring free glasses of Chateau Pétrus, so passengers wouldn’t just enjoy the journey; they’d even be asking to slow the train down.
Basil’s suggestion, absurd as it sounds (because let’s be honest, it’s basically a cartoon of human desire) taps into a truth that’s so obvious we tend to miss it: the journey didn’t need to be faster. It needed to be enjoyable. What he understood was the problem was never Time itself, but our experience of time. People weren’t complaining about the length of the journey because of some universal distaste for three hours; they were complaining because the three hours they spent were boring, uncomfortable, and wasted. What people wanted, in other words, was not efficiency but pleasure.
This is the whole idea behind what we’ll call the “psychological solution,” and it’s one that almost always lurks below the surface of any problem that can’t be solved with mere metrics. Because there’s a profound, undeniable difference between solving something to make it go away and solving something to make it worthwhile.
The Engineering Solution: Crisp, Tidy, and Stubbornly Insensitive to What People Actually Want
Engineering solutions have a kind of cold, glittering allure. They promise progress, in the bold, arrogant way only data and metrics and blueprints really can. It’s the same logic telling you to optimize your inbox (as if responding to emails was a race against the clock) or to save yourself three minutes on your morning commute by taking the “fastest” route (never mind it’s also a deeply ugly route involving dodging multiple potholes and maybe some roadkill). The engineering mindset is "if you’ve managed to cut time or costs, you’ve improved things," end of story. If the train takes three hours, let’s make it take two and a half, and we’re done.
The hilarious catch, the thing that keeps happening and no one seems willing to learn from: most people, when confronted with an “engineering fix,” don’t actually feel satisfied. The hedonic treadmill—which, incidentally, sounds less like a psychological theory and more like a medieval torture device—is basically the special kind of human amnesia kicking in every time you get something you once desperately wanted (a 10% raise, say, or a slightly faster car), only to discover it’s barely six months later and you’re already craving something newer, shinier, better. Imagine a treadmill speeding up every time you think you’re keeping pace, so you’re constantly struggling just to stay on the surface of your own life, chasing a goal subtly getting farther and farther away, even as the people around you tell you how much progress you’re making.
And this, I’d argue, is why engineering solutions are so tempting but so inadequate. They’re simple, they’re measurable, they give you the thrilling illusion of progress—but they fail spectacularly to touch the messy, irrational, human reality of what people actually want, which, most often, is simply to be a little happier in their experience of the moment. The engineering solution makes sense on paper but doesn’t satisfy the soul. It’s getting your car waxed when what you really wanted was the new car smell back. Sure, it’s shiny, but it’s also completely missing the point.
The Psychological Solution: Messy, Fuzzy, and Shockingly, What Actually Works
And here’s where Basil’s supermodel-and-wine solution becomes, strangely enough, a work of genius. Because he understands satisfaction isn’t necessarily about getting somewhere faster; it’s about making the journey itself worth remembering. The psychological solution doesn’t shave time off; it makes the time feel full. This is where things get beautifully murky, where hard numbers give way to something so fuzzy and unquantifiable it makes data scientists break out in a rash. Basil is proposing a solution that looks at the heart of the complaint and says, “Wait, do people even want faster?”
Imagine: you board a train, expecting a few dreary hours of sitting and maybe some cramped legroom, and instead you’re handed a glass of wine by a supermodel. Suddenly, you’re not just “getting from A to B”—you’re enjoying an experience. The time itself becomes something precious, and rather than wanting the trip to be shorter, you find yourself lingering over your wine, noticing the landscapes, even—let’s be honest—watching the other passengers and feeling a sense of connection, however brief and superficial, to this shared experience.
Think about listening to a song you love (and I don’t mean those top-40 tracks engineered to get in and out of your dopamine center in three minutes flat). I mean one of those lush, wandering songs that seem to stop and take in every note along the way. You don’t listen to that song because you’re desperate to reach the end as quickly as possible, any more than you take a walk in the park just to reach the far side and leave. You listen because the song itself is the point—the whole experience wrapped up in the way it unwinds in real time. It’s an experience designed to be felt, not just completed. And what Basil understood—what engineers so often miss—is maybe this is what we want in our journeys, too. The whole concept of “time well spent” gets flipped on its head, and you start to realize maybe the point wasn’t speed at all.
This is what the psychological solution is about: it doesn’t reduce the journey to mere logistics; it treats it as a space for experience. And to make this work requires empathy, imagination, and, frankly, a kind of bravery to defy the cold logic of efficiency and ask what might actually make people feel happy or at peace or even just vaguely human. Because isn’t that what we’re after? To feel, even in the smallest ways, that the moments of our lives are worthwhile?
How We Miss the Point So Often
The tragedy here—though I’m aware it sounds overly dramatic to call it that, but hear me out—is we keep going for the engineering fix not because it’s the best but because it’s the easiest. It’s measurable, it’s finite, it’s gloriously rational. It doesn’t ask uncomfortable questions about what people actually want or feel. It doesn’t require introspection, or empathy, or any of those “soft” qualities that tend to make metrics people squirm. It just asks: how can we get there faster? How can we shave off some time, some effort, some friction?
And because of this, we miss the point. We solve a problem no one asked us to solve. Take customer service, for instance. If people complain about long wait times, we automatically assume the fix is to shorten those times. But what if—imagine this—we asked a different question? What if the real issue isn’t wait time, but a lack of connection? What if people just want to feel like they’re being listened to, their concerns are being heard? A quicker response doesn’t solve this; it might even make it worse, because now they’re talking to a bot or being shuttled through a call center performing protocols that feel even more alienating.
Or think about productivity in the workplace. People are burned out? Simple: add productivity software. Streamline the workflow. Automate the tasks. And yet, if you dig just an inch below the surface, you might find the issue isn’t about speed at all; it’s about meaning. People are exhausted not because they’re inefficient but because they’re alienated. What they really need isn’t faster tools—it’s a sense of purpose, or maybe just a chance to breathe.
Practicing the Psychological Solution: A Few Absurdly Simple Applications
So let’s talk about how to actually use the psychological solution without necessarily hiring a fleet of supermodels. The psychological fix isn’t about glitzy distractions; it’s about connecting with what people actually want, even when they’re not entirely sure of it themselves. Here’s a starting place:
- Seek Enjoyment, Not Just Efficiency
Find one small, daily task you always rush through—making coffee, say, or tidying up your desk. Try asking yourself not how to make it faster but how to make it enjoyable. Make your coffee slowly, savor the smell, actually sit with it. Suddenly, the task becomes more than a means to an end; it’s a small ritual, a pause in the day, an experience. - Redefine Success as Satisfaction, Not Speed
When you’re working on a project, or even planning something mundane like a meeting, try shifting your focus from speed to quality of experience. Ask yourself: Did it feel worthwhile? Was it engaging? This shift may feel trivial, but it’s transformative. You stop measuring by the stopwatch and start thinking about the human experience. Can you even imagine leaving a meeting and feeling like it was worthwhile and engaging? - Embrace Slowness as Value
This sounds like heresy, I know, but sometimes slowness isn’t the enemy; it’s the solution. If you’re talking to someone who needs help, take the time to listen. Don’t rush to fix. You might find the “problem” isn’t about efficiency at all but about making someone feel genuinely seen.
What We’re Actually After
The difference between an engineering fix and a psychological solution isn’t just technical; it’s philosophical. It’s the difference between solving for the task and solving for the experience. The former makes things faster, maybe even “better,” in a cold, clinical way that has nothing to do with how we actually feel. But the latter, the psychological solution, asks what it means for time to be worthwhile, for experience to feel rich, for life itself to feel, if not always thrilling, at least vaguely satisfying.
Sometimes, the answer isn’t in shaving off minutes. Sometimes, it’s in making those minutes into something people actually want to live through, something that doesn’t need a stopwatch or a metric to justify itself. So maybe next time you’re facing a problem that seems to scream faster or cheaper or sleeker, stop yourself for a second. Ask what might actually make this time matter in a way people will feel—not just observe or clock but experience.
Most of us don’t need another half hour saved we’ll barely notice. We need moments we want to savor—like a song you keep playing to its last echoing note, or a glass of wine you sip just a bit slower than usual, or, maybe, a three-hour train ride to Paris you’ll remember not for how quickly it passed but for the fact you almost didn’t want it to end at all.