🧩 Don’t “Optimize” Your Life

Notes on how to, and how not to, flourish.

Originally written for UPLIFT in 2017 and previously published on Medium in 2019. The seeds of Humans On The Loop go back at least a decade, and it feels appropriate to share some of this early writing even if it lacks the nuance I’ve developed since. In research for a new sub-series on “being more than a machine”, I dug this piece back up and welcome public feedback that might help me shape the more methodical and detailed follow-ups to come.

For a more scientific version of this argument, I recommend you chase this with my 2023 article, “The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, and Economies of Scale.”

The shortest line between two points is getting assimilated. (Source: Macrovector.)

You cannot optimize your life. Not really. Stop before you hurt yourself.

Sure, you can discipline yourself and wrangle social media distraction to a minimum. In fact, that’s smart. You can, of course, make sure that you’re not eating “empty calories” or bingeing on bad television. Do that. You can tweak your exercise routines to make the most of what few minutes you have free between two other tasks, and seem to squeeze more minutes from a day. Sleep less by scheduling your rest to maximize your restfulness. Save your fingers and type less with speech to text and more abbreviations – we’re all court stenographers and have to type in shorthand, when we’re juggling fifty correspondences and rushing toward as many deadlines.

Or, get into “deep work,” cancel all your social media accounts, and truly focus — after all, that gives you an advantage in this world: a far more “optimized,” productive output.

Admittedly, it’s good to feel like you can get more done in less time and be in better shape with shorter workouts. But by the time you’re coasting on the free-and-clear of “four-hour workweeks” and effective smoothie diets, you might be able to pause long enough to notice how this “working smart, not hard” just tunes a human being for a life within the huge machine society’s become.

We do not value “productivity” because it makes our days more meaningful. We value it because we’re running on a treadmill and that treadmill’s always speeding up. As Douglas Rushkoff notes in his book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, we used to live in cities where one central church clock kept the time. The clocks weren’t very accurate, and consequently people weren’t concerned about arriving to a meeting minutes late. These days, though, society depends on high-speed trading algorithms that move faster than our brains work. We can’t keep up with the insane rapidity of our new digital environment, but that won’t stop us from distorting everything in our attempts to do so. In an age when more and more of us are losing jobs to automation, you are forgiven for believing that becoming a machine will save your livelihood. Like, maybe we can stay on top of this if we just make ourselves as brutally efficient as a robot factory. Absorbed in flow and integrating information faster than your conscious mind can handle, you’ll be perfect for The Workplace of Tomorrow.

We’re obsessed with “optimizing” everything in modern society because it is the obvious response from our anxiety to all the overwhelming change. We have adapted, to environments that suit machines much better than they suit the human being. So we are free to choose what really matters to us in the modern world, but rarely challenge our assumptions and imported values, because it seems like if I “optimized” for free time, or contentment, or the simple satisfying presence of a mindful moment, we might slip off the treadmill. (And wealth is even more unevenly distributed today than it was in the 18th Century, when none of us were optimizing anything.)

Another thing: success is such a complex issue, and it’s tempting to oversimplify, reducing “health” (for instance) to blood pressure, or cholesterol — some number that we use as shorthand, even if it doesn’t really mean what we pretend it does. (Does GDP equate to happiness? Of course not. Why do we all act as if, by optimizing our society for profit, we improve our lives? The answer is, it’s “easier” to think this way.)

Of course, just as with multiple intelligences, aptitudes, and values, there are as many “bottom lines” as there are wants. There’s an infinity of mutually exclusive ways to “optimize” your life — and even though we almost always mean “productivity” or “profitability” when we say this, that isn’t how the evolutionary process works.

Creativity is messy. Whether it’s the evolution of new traits or innovation of new cultural technologies, one “good idea” emerges from a process optimized for rapid, massive failure — think about how many seeds exist in just one apple, and how many apple trees will grow from that; or all those baby turtles that don’t even make it to the sea before they’re eaten. This is not efficient in the way we’re used to thinking of it — it’s unimaginably wasteful when you think of things in terms of “time is money” — but it works, because real value is created when you have a stroke of insight on a walk, or in a dream, or after catastrophic breakups. If you don’t let yourself get bored or loose, or daydream, or vacation, you will not be prone to useful innovations. You can’t do away with sleep in your crusade for optimal efficiency, because your brain requires sleep to function. No amount of Adderall or nicotine will “fix” the wisdom of your body.

We’re not smarter than four billion years of evolution, and thinking that we are tends to produce disasters — like the millions thrown into asylums, burned at stakes, or disowned by their families for being “different.” Like the damage public school has done to human culture since it was invented to prepare kids for a life in factories. Like maximizing profits in the market while destroying the ecologies we need to live. No matter what you optimize, you’re leaving something out, and chances are that thing will seem essential in your 20/20 hindsight.

Even in a charitable, casual sense, “optimizing” life — the goal of living more, and fully, and embracing all of your potential — ignores the valuable lessons grief and hardship bring, the necessary dissonances in your symphony of being. There’s no Star Wars Trilogy without The Empire Strikes Back, and we can’t improve that story by preventing any of the horrible things our protagonists endured. Confinement via prison, slavery, or illness figures heavily into the hero myths of every culture; we are not equipped to judge when life experience is “optimal” or not, or when the circumstances of our lives are optimized for ends we can’t foresee or even understand.

But if you are attached to optimizing life, remember that self-mastery is not the highest aim to which a human can aspire. Most successful people realize at some point that having everything you want won’t make you happy. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which starts with sleep, air, food, and shelter, and climbs “up” through social recognition and belonging to “self-actualized” living, has one more rung: self-transformation. When you’ve mastered everything in your domain, the game is either over or you yield to greater forces and begin a life-long process of continual self-rediscovery. Self-mastery is not the final waypoint on your journey but the means to making yourself prone to waking up in ways you can’t intend directly.

Optimized lives are just platforms for transcendence. The mastery of mind and body needed for a meditation practice aren’t the goal; they’re just to get you ready to surrender to that greater thing, beyond your limited ideas, that wants to live through you. To optimize for ladder-climbing will not help you when it’s time to fly.

And in that sense, enlightenment, or happiness, is not a thing that you can work toward. It’s an accident that happens to the “accident prone” who give enough time to meditation, daydreaming, long walks, and other acts that enrich us as human beings. But it’s precisely these hard-to-quantify and economically-invisible activities that are too frequently abandoned in pursuit of optimizing daily life.

So do not try to optimize your life. You’ll either oversimplify it, seeking easy ways to measure progress and ignoring something vital, or you’ll play into somebody else’s values system and become a slave, and lose sight of what really matters to you in the quest to match external standards of success.

Don’t be a robot; that’s why we have robots.

Be a human in the messy, complicated, beautiful, surprising way you are.

(If you must optimize, then optimize for how much joy you bring to other people’s lives. You might be shocked at how it all improves at once by doing this.)