I’ve spent a lot of my life obsessed with the “gain.” You know the one—that relentless push to be 1% better every day, optimize the morning routine, and treat my brain like a piece of software that just needs the right patch to finally work.
“This isn’t a failure of optimization, it’s a sign that your productivity systems have become something else entirely: trauma responses disguised as efficiency.”
— The Optimization Trap
That hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought I was being “disciplined,” but really I was just hypervigilant. I wasn’t building a life; I was building a cage made of color-coded calendars.
“We live in an age that worships output… the quiet voice that once said, ‘This is enough,’ gets pushed down by another notification: one more goal, one more metric, one more sprint.”
— The Era of Enough
It’s a weird loop. The more you optimize, the more you feel like you’re failing because there’s always a “better” way to do it. It’s a treadmill that only goes faster.
“The irony should not be lost on us: optimizing and maximizing… are actually resulting in exhaustion and burnout, virtually defeating their intended purpose of increasing productivity.”
— ‘Hustle Culture’ Is Leading Us to Burnout
At some point, you have to realize that the goal isn’t to be a perfectly tuned machine. We aren’t machines. We’re people.
If you’re tired of treating yourself like a project, you might like my thoughts on why your life isn’t a broken toaster.
Maybe the real “optimization” is just learning how to be okay with being unfinished.