Stop Optimising Yourself
Close that goal-tracking app and embrace the imperfect
I see a pattern; in myself, in my friends. Particularly my female friends. It’s admirable, aspirational. Inspirational! It promotes great qualities like growth, perseverance, adaptability, investment, effort. It fills my Instagram. Books on the topic pepper my Goodreads. It’s the flavour of every hit contestant-driven show of recent years: It’s not enough to just show up and answer a few questions, Caroline, you’ve got to bake, sew, … potter. You’ve got to bake like you’ve never baked before!
I’m talking about the goal-trackin’ cult of self-optimisation.
In defence of self-optimisation
Okay, so maybe my headline was a little misleading. I don’t mean don’t seek self-improvement ever. Our adaptability, together with opposable thumbs and the climate-destroying pursuit of wealth at all costs, is what makes us humans so special. Boundaries should be tested, curiosity followed through. Ancient us saw a field of golden wheaty grass and said, “Lemme just grind you up real quick,” and me and my toast addiction thank them heartily for that.
Iterative approaches to growth like “Yoga With Adriene” that promote “enoughness” are wonderful, truly, and have proved a necessary support for many of us during the last twelve months of Lockdownery.
And I suppose this is where I draw the line between a good-for-us and bad-for-us version of the pursuit. There is self-optimisation that recognises improvement as a journey and a choice, and then there is self-optimisation as end-game, and dangerously, as morally correct.
Enough is enough
Inherent in the dogged pursuit of self-optimisation is the trap of thinking we are not enough as we are. We may be tempted to chart a line between the perceived nought of now and the higher value of our future selves: “When I accomplish X, I will be Y.” But guess what: You are that future self, valuable as you are. And while a whole universe of potential lives in you this very moment, you are not obliged to maximise it like a snotty, pin-striped contestant on “The Apprentice.” You’re a person, whole and imperfect, not a pop-up croissant stand in Covent Garden. Resist capitalising on yourself.
In the business of self-optimisation, one self is measured against another imagined one. Measured by which metrics, decided by who and for what?
In an app market which continues to offer new ways to platform ourselves, track ourselves and hack ourselves (which even sounds gruesome), which self are we really aiming to improve and for whose benefit? Who’s collecting the winnings of what increasingly seems less like a hobby and more like work? Maybe our wellbeing isn’t the finish line here. Maybe our wellbeing is the horse.
The appification of improvement
The global personal development industry was worth $38 billion in 2019, and has been forecast to grow by another 5.1% in the next six years. 2019, and the top 10 meditation apps scored a healthy $195 million. Needless to say, there’s a buck or two to be made from our not-enoughness.
If I were trying to convince a largely comfortable population to spend money on stuff they don’t need, I could do worse than make them feel like their failing isn’t what they own, but who they are.
And what better way to spread the gospel of optimisation than through our own networks. After all, if a Tree Pose happens in a forest and no one sees it on your feed, did it really happen?
We use apps to measure sleep, exercise, learning, ovulation, menstruation, mood, food, clout. No doubt they can be great, but how well do they promote balance? Do they allow for the inevitable ups and downs of life? Do they prioritise a number observed by others over the act done by you?
You know what I don’t see talked about so often in the self-optimisation sphere? Kindness. Rest. Calm. Joy. Play. Quiet. Contentment. Things that might better see you sitting on a park bench spending time doing absolutely nothing but existing.
Standing still is being shouldered out of our lives by a perfomative doingness. The benefits of rest and daydreaming are well-studied, and yet, stillness and “stoptimisation” (sorry) are tragically undervalued. Sometimes we have to let ourselves be the couch and not the Tom Cruise jumping on it, you know?
And besides, maybe your stress is less about how many pages you journal and more about how many over hours you work. Just saying. Maybe busyness isn’t the same as fulfilment and we can’t, in fact, tick box our way to happiness.
The limits of optimisation
What do we mean when we say “optimise”? Mirriam-Webster tells us, “To make as perfect, effective, or functional as possible.” Doesn’t that just fill you with the warm and cuddlies? Doesn’t that make you feel alive?
Lying on our death bed, optimised as fuck, we can look into the weeping faces of our equally optimised grand-children and say, “Little Jacqueline, little Steven, don’t cry for me, for I have lived an effective and functional life.”
Is optimising really the thing we most want to be doing with our “self”? I mean, sure, it beats other hyphenated self-activities like -flagellation or -abasement, but it’s not nearly as nice as -love or -acceptance. And on the topic of perfection, I give you George Orwell, who has definitely never been right about anything regarding humanity and our shortcomings:
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection…” — George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945–1950.
Orwell goes on to say that one should be prepared to feel a bit broken up by life; that it’s “the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”
And maybe that’s where self-optimisation ultimately fails us; it doesn’t hold room for the world outside ourselves, the context of things that gives life meaning.
A call to inaction
I am 100% a journal-writing, run-measuring victim of self-optimisation. I once painstakingly drew my run route manually on an app because my phone had died halfway round my actual run. But far from feeling optimal, I often feel… Pressured. Surveyed. Feeling good never felt so bad. I’m going to let go a little. Mess around for a while in the twilight of a sub-optimal, unmeasured existence.
Let’s try a little less should and a little more can. A little less measuring and a little more experiencing. Let’s pursue growth where we can and if we want, and always leave some room for that shortest and most powerful of sentences: I am.
