"To optimise something is to tune it toward a goal you are already holding fixed" - this is a very powerful sentence from this essay. Holding something fixed and having that which is fixed dominate your everyday life takes away something that is an essential part of being human, namely spontaneity. Being human is being present, but more than that, it is being contemporary. Being contemporary means that we are not just present in the present moment, but that we view each present moment as a chance of becoming and acting anew. It is a moment full of possibilities.
This is Hannah Arendt's concept of natality, which I think is an even better fit than Stoic philosophy.
Rodney, thanks for the great essay. A lot here to examine. That tiny, single assumption that you lay out - our need to manage all parts of our life - clearly has devastating effects. How exhausting!
That’s why I’ve always been so compelled by humor, goofiness, playfulness - whatever you want to call it. You know that feeling when you’re around someone who’s presence is so light, so secure, full of such love for life that you feel uniquely seen? This kind of person is different from someone who is merely “easygoing” or idle, someone without opinions, who prides themselves on how little they care. To me, the lightness is born out of examination. It comes from looking closely enough at life to marvel at the mystery of existence.
In fact, these people are so full of wonder and awe, so grateful simply to be living within the mystery, that they make life more bearable for those who cannot see what they see. They are the gentle, curious, deathly funny people, who understand how to laugh at the boss and the laborer and therefore themselves — and then get on with things.
While I certainly do appreciate and admire goofiness, playfulness and humour, I also think people who appear melancholic and 'moody' can suffer the same plight - being so plunged in examination that the mystery of existence becomes too much to comprehend. Wonder, awe and gratitude can equally make a person appear constantly tuned inwards (too stunned to speak if you may), making it harder for them to exhibit lightness or playfulness.
I think of the thinness you describe as an inherited identity field. Optimization comes up with goals before the person has the opportunity to choose them. Once those goals integrate into identity, the self ends up performing a life rather than living one.
I love the notion of life as mystery and the observation that we flatten mysteries into problems that no one has been clever enough to crack yet.
An unlived, optimized life is one lived on autopilot, dysregulated, and in survival. All the antidotes require regulation - attention, presence, wonder, reverence for mystery rather than intolerance for uncertainty. The over-optimization and constant management are attempts to control rather than allow. They stem from cultures of survival that disconnect us from our bodies, wisdom, and ability to be with.
There is no satisfaction in this, it is thin AF. And, I think the dissatisfaction of it keeps people optimizing more to try to crack the code, to perform their way into more meaning.
Lately I've been feeling lost and goalless in life and I had thought that maybe if I thought about it enough and philosophised enough I would find the answer or the next goal that I wanted to work towards. I didn't realise that in doing so I had attempted to fall back into the optimisation mentality that I had shed unwillingly after a period where my body reminded me of my mortality.
To someone who has been so used to productionising their life, examination of their own life feels idle and directionless but it doesn't mean it is meaningless.
“Thin” is the perfect word to capture the optimised life. And I think it’s apt to link it, at least in part, to an unexamined/unresolved fear of death. It’s like Tolkein said of Bilbo who, after years of using his own ring to delay death, felt stretched thin “like butter spread over too much bread”. I don’t think that ring tracked his sleep score but the analogy still works! Anyway, thank you for writing this.
Thank you for this beautiful essay. I never understood why I felt so miserable at the peak of my optimization obsession. To see the source of that hollowness articulated so artfully is a true pleasure.
"Philosophy as a way of life": I love this! And it's what I've always said when someone asked me in disbelief: "You study philosophy?! What will you do with it?". Philosophy is a way of life.
I often feel that when I am not measuring myself or optimising my life for a goal, I am more in tune with my body and soul and that itself is the prize to behold and do everything with.
We are born with an internal gauge for whether we feel alight doing what we do, all we need is just to reset enough to up the volume of our internal voice, it's 200% right every time it says you don't need another course to find happiness, just watching a sunrise is enough
That you don't need another healing session, cleaning your room, space and planting trees or caring for your parents will heal you
At the end of the day it's just the internal clock that we need to be in sync with, not a sleep quality measuring device for even a 2 hr sleep after a hard but fulfilling day is worth more than 8 hrs
Thank you for this essay. I feel myself in the trap you describe.
I'm still not convinced of what to do next. When you write this, I am extremely taken aback by it.
> At the centre of nearly all these old exercises sat one discipline, the training of attention, and it is attention above all that the optimised life ruins. The Stoics had a word, prosochē, for a continuous mindfulness of what one was doing and becoming, a steady presence to the moment one was actually in. It is the opposite of the divided, metricised, faintly anxious attention most of us now carry through our days, one eye forever on the screen that will tell us how we are performing. You cannot examine a life you are not present to, and you cannot be present to a life you are perpetually trying to improve, because the improving self is always half-turned toward a future in which things will be better arranged. The harder we work at optimising our experience, the less of it we are ever actually here for.
The people I know who are serious about continuous mindfulness are obsessed with self-improvement and metrics, particularly as applied to meditation practice. Have you had a different experience?
I've encountered a lot of people like this and they all speak the same "health and wellness" language. They're all over instagram. I know a yoga teacher who got "preventative" botox. They have all the books on self-help, meditation and enlightenment so the irony of a supposed "transcended" yogi finding so much imperfection on their face is not lost on me. But I guess that's the human condition
I find our obsession with optimisation increasingly peculiar. We measure sleep, steps, productivity, screen time, protein, probably breathing soon, all in the pursuit of a better life. And yet the things that make life actually feel like one are often spectacularly inefficient. Wandering. Reading something useless. Lingering over dinner. Noticing things. I’m beginning to think inefficiency has been rather unfairly maligned.
"To optimise something is to tune it toward a goal you are already holding fixed" - this is a very powerful sentence from this essay. Holding something fixed and having that which is fixed dominate your everyday life takes away something that is an essential part of being human, namely spontaneity. Being human is being present, but more than that, it is being contemporary. Being contemporary means that we are not just present in the present moment, but that we view each present moment as a chance of becoming and acting anew. It is a moment full of possibilities.
This is Hannah Arendt's concept of natality, which I think is an even better fit than Stoic philosophy.
Wow, what a text! Why don't philosophers write like this anymore? I felt like I was living before the era of the internet again.
Wonderful read
Rodney, thanks for the great essay. A lot here to examine. That tiny, single assumption that you lay out - our need to manage all parts of our life - clearly has devastating effects. How exhausting!
That’s why I’ve always been so compelled by humor, goofiness, playfulness - whatever you want to call it. You know that feeling when you’re around someone who’s presence is so light, so secure, full of such love for life that you feel uniquely seen? This kind of person is different from someone who is merely “easygoing” or idle, someone without opinions, who prides themselves on how little they care. To me, the lightness is born out of examination. It comes from looking closely enough at life to marvel at the mystery of existence.
In fact, these people are so full of wonder and awe, so grateful simply to be living within the mystery, that they make life more bearable for those who cannot see what they see. They are the gentle, curious, deathly funny people, who understand how to laugh at the boss and the laborer and therefore themselves — and then get on with things.
While I certainly do appreciate and admire goofiness, playfulness and humour, I also think people who appear melancholic and 'moody' can suffer the same plight - being so plunged in examination that the mystery of existence becomes too much to comprehend. Wonder, awe and gratitude can equally make a person appear constantly tuned inwards (too stunned to speak if you may), making it harder for them to exhibit lightness or playfulness.
I think of the thinness you describe as an inherited identity field. Optimization comes up with goals before the person has the opportunity to choose them. Once those goals integrate into identity, the self ends up performing a life rather than living one.
This made me wonder how often we measure progress without ever asking what we're progressing toward.
I love the notion of life as mystery and the observation that we flatten mysteries into problems that no one has been clever enough to crack yet.
An unlived, optimized life is one lived on autopilot, dysregulated, and in survival. All the antidotes require regulation - attention, presence, wonder, reverence for mystery rather than intolerance for uncertainty. The over-optimization and constant management are attempts to control rather than allow. They stem from cultures of survival that disconnect us from our bodies, wisdom, and ability to be with.
There is no satisfaction in this, it is thin AF. And, I think the dissatisfaction of it keeps people optimizing more to try to crack the code, to perform their way into more meaning.
That doesn't work.
The mystery is the way.
Lately I've been feeling lost and goalless in life and I had thought that maybe if I thought about it enough and philosophised enough I would find the answer or the next goal that I wanted to work towards. I didn't realise that in doing so I had attempted to fall back into the optimisation mentality that I had shed unwillingly after a period where my body reminded me of my mortality.
To someone who has been so used to productionising their life, examination of their own life feels idle and directionless but it doesn't mean it is meaningless.
“Thin” is the perfect word to capture the optimised life. And I think it’s apt to link it, at least in part, to an unexamined/unresolved fear of death. It’s like Tolkein said of Bilbo who, after years of using his own ring to delay death, felt stretched thin “like butter spread over too much bread”. I don’t think that ring tracked his sleep score but the analogy still works! Anyway, thank you for writing this.
This was most beautifully written. “Thin” is the best way to describe this feeling.
Thank you for this beautiful essay. I never understood why I felt so miserable at the peak of my optimization obsession. To see the source of that hollowness articulated so artfully is a true pleasure.
"Philosophy as a way of life": I love this! And it's what I've always said when someone asked me in disbelief: "You study philosophy?! What will you do with it?". Philosophy is a way of life.
I often feel that when I am not measuring myself or optimising my life for a goal, I am more in tune with my body and soul and that itself is the prize to behold and do everything with.
We are born with an internal gauge for whether we feel alight doing what we do, all we need is just to reset enough to up the volume of our internal voice, it's 200% right every time it says you don't need another course to find happiness, just watching a sunrise is enough
That you don't need another healing session, cleaning your room, space and planting trees or caring for your parents will heal you
At the end of the day it's just the internal clock that we need to be in sync with, not a sleep quality measuring device for even a 2 hr sleep after a hard but fulfilling day is worth more than 8 hrs
Thank you for this essay. I feel myself in the trap you describe.
I'm still not convinced of what to do next. When you write this, I am extremely taken aback by it.
> At the centre of nearly all these old exercises sat one discipline, the training of attention, and it is attention above all that the optimised life ruins. The Stoics had a word, prosochē, for a continuous mindfulness of what one was doing and becoming, a steady presence to the moment one was actually in. It is the opposite of the divided, metricised, faintly anxious attention most of us now carry through our days, one eye forever on the screen that will tell us how we are performing. You cannot examine a life you are not present to, and you cannot be present to a life you are perpetually trying to improve, because the improving self is always half-turned toward a future in which things will be better arranged. The harder we work at optimising our experience, the less of it we are ever actually here for.
The people I know who are serious about continuous mindfulness are obsessed with self-improvement and metrics, particularly as applied to meditation practice. Have you had a different experience?
Best regards!
Eric Kernfeld
I've encountered a lot of people like this and they all speak the same "health and wellness" language. They're all over instagram. I know a yoga teacher who got "preventative" botox. They have all the books on self-help, meditation and enlightenment so the irony of a supposed "transcended" yogi finding so much imperfection on their face is not lost on me. But I guess that's the human condition
I find our obsession with optimisation increasingly peculiar. We measure sleep, steps, productivity, screen time, protein, probably breathing soon, all in the pursuit of a better life. And yet the things that make life actually feel like one are often spectacularly inefficient. Wandering. Reading something useless. Lingering over dinner. Noticing things. I’m beginning to think inefficiency has been rather unfairly maligned.
One of the best essays I have read on Substack. Thank you