It feels like there should be emerging "optimized solutions" to certain problems that are widely accepted, but rather instead it seems like people just keep re-doing things that I thought we would have already "solved" and moved on past
For example, if you simply want to consume the cheapest caffeine source, I thought someone figured out it was powdered caffeine... versus paying maybe like 100x more for a coffee from a "coffee chain store". Now, granted the experience and maybe the same antioxidants or chemical makeup may not be the same in caffeine powder versus coffee, but the point is I feel like a lot of problems aren't "solved for optimization" which would enable us to make progress on some other unoptimized problem in society
I guess this "reinvention of the wheel" feels like a "vanity activity" to me?