Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Friedman

Friedman’s line lands like a business memo that accidentally confesses a moral crisis. “Flattening of the world” is his signature globalization shorthand, but the real bite is the pivot: efficiency isn’t just reorganizing supply chains; it’s reorganizing human experience. By calling what gets removed “fat,” he borrows the language of lean management and diet culture, smuggling in an assumption that what’s being cut was indulgent, unnecessary, maybe even shameful. Then he quietly mourns it anyway.

The intent is diagnostic, not lyrical: to frame globalization and digitization as a double-action force, where the same logic that makes commerce frictionless also makes daily life thinner. “Relentless quest” casts efficiency as a compulsion rather than a choice, hinting at a system that no one fully governs. The subtext is that we’ve made speed and optimization into default virtues, and we’re surprised when they start eating the things that don’t justify themselves on a spreadsheet: idle time, local quirks, redundancy, patience, craftsmanship, even the small social rituals that make work and community tolerable.

Context matters. Friedman is writing out of the late-1990s/2000s triumphalist era of global integration: outsourcing, just-in-time logistics, broadband, and the managerial dream of seamless coordination. Post-9/11 anxiety and post-2008 precarity sharpen the warning: when life is “lean,” it’s also brittle. Cut too much “fat” and you don’t get a healthier organism; you get one with no cushion for shocks, no room for error, and less space for the parts of living that can’t be optimized without being diminished.