Aoife Henry

I have a bone to pick with self-optimization culture. Biohacking, perfect mourning/evening routines macro-counting, optimized sleep/diet/exercise/workflows. Athletic f**king Greens. Podcasts on how to fine-tune this, that, and the other to the point at which it is infeasible to stuff all of the recommended good habits into a single 24 cycle. This article is a diatribe on why, precisely, I am in opposition of the preoccupation with self-optimization:

1. You, my perfectly imperfect friend, will never be exactly “right”, but the quest for self-optimization implies that you are a project with an end-point. This feeds perfectionism. You are “good” just as you are. There is nothing to necessarily fix or change about yourself in order to earn “goodness”. You have this inherently. You were born “good”.
2. You, my friend, are a beautiful, shiny speck of dust in the vast expanse of space-time. I know you don’t feel that way and that your frame-of-reference is not the universe but your day to day tragedies and triumphs, but you are but one individual in the grand expanse of common humanity. There are more consequential problems to dedicate your energy to than your optimal morning routing. Education, healthcare, food, energy, environmentalism, mass extinction, pandemics, mass migration, racism, speciesism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, the patriarchy, Euro-centrism, homelessness, your sad friend who would appreciate going on a walk and talk, your lonely granny who will remember that you called her until the day she dies, the brother who just had the kidney transplant, the aunt who’s coming out of chemotherapy. These causes, these people, need you. It is most certainly the case that taking care of yourself sufficiently can enable you to better contribute to these causes, but this self-care is not the same as sef-optimization.
3. Although you are a beautiful and shiny speck of dust, I acknowledge, and – as a fellow speck of dust – know, that life does not feel that way. External and internal problems lay on the horizon like an imminent storm and cause you pain and hardship when they break. But behaving “optimally” will not save you from this, this is in fact the illusion that pervades perfectionism. Behaving “optimally” may rather create some problems and persist others, if they involve over-extending yourself and sacrificing rest, play, and community.
4. The implication of full autonomy is an attractive one, but trivially disproved. We humans do not live in our prefrontal cortex. We live in a high-stress environment that is continuously and simultaneously bombarding us with a) the temptation to consume and/or engage in a growing market of drugified dopamine-inducing substances and behaviours, for the right price of course, and b) criticism for not abstaining from all of the distractions and improving our value as a worker to produce the consumables alluded to in part a). If you’ve ever been addicted to anything, you’ll know that you enter a very different state of mind when you feel a craving for something. It is one of intense wanting and painful craving that spurs us to defy all logic in our attempts to quench this wanting and craving. We do not have the full autonomy necessary to make logical decision in this state, and purveyors of the drugified goods and services mentioned above play on this to sell us these things at the expense of our health and wallets. Ba****rds. There are forces at play that act against your efforts to self-optimize, and those same forces try to tell you that you and your lack of willpower are the problem when you fail.
5. Preoccupation with the pursuit of our own perfection is a distraction from the true ingredients of self-acceptance and contentment – doing good work that helps people if you have that liberty of choice, being empathetic and kind to strangers, donating to causes that matter, mitigating the behaviours and consumption that are burning up the only planet our children will have to live on, even just doing the “unproductive” and unscheduled and unoptimized things that make you smile, like a slow coffee with friends on a Saturday morning.
6. Pursuit of the optimal or perfect gets in the way of settling for “good enough” and moving onward and upward with your work and play. Your imperfections demand your attention such that Shame can berate you into doing better next time (spoiler – self-shaming is unlikely to facilitate you to do better next time).

This may, at first glance, appear to be a cynical one friends, but I think it more hopeful. There is potential for a wonderful life beyond the fences that you have erected in your relentless pursuit of perfection