In Defense of the Unoptimized Life

At the start of the new year, I feel guilt-tripped by Twitter threads. Whenever I scroll some guy is telling me to optimize life so I can “be productive.” Thought leaders argue in the replies that overheating in saunas—wait, scratch that, it’s now freezing to death in ice baths—will unlock eternal life. Life coaches say that I must talk through every emotion in therapy, or actually, the better thing to do is to not talk at all, on a silent meditation retreat. Diets are a mess, too. Meat only! No, just snort kale juice! There is a relentless pursuit of optimization.

Self-improvement is great and productivity is wonderful, but something about this vein of thought feels off. When I try to follow this advice, I may temporarily get more stuff done, but it comes at the expense of my soul. I feel like an obsessive-compulsive lumberjack, hyper-focused on marginal improvements in my sawing technique—until one day, as I finish my labors, I realize I accidentally clear-cut the forest for the trees. The little things we do to make ourselves better may end up draining us dry. 

Instead, I would argue for the unoptimized life.

Life, abundant

My argument for an unoptimized life is a little subtle, so give it room to breathe. 

When we focus too hard on being a little better every day, we destroy the ability to be inspired.

When I first started writing online, I felt a lot of pressure to do things the “right” way: tweet the threads, create a newsletter “product,” etc. I studied people more successful than me and tried to emulate their style. The business results were fine, but I got burned out to the point where I had to take a few weeks off from writing anything at all. 

Now, I run this newsletter poorly. There is no rhyme or reason behind my topic selection; my tweets are riddled with spelling errors; the courses I teach are challenging to find. I don’t do podcast interviews, and just the thought of attending an event to “network” makes me break out in hives. If I schedule more than five or six meetings a week, I start canceling them, regardless of their importance. (Sorry if you’re one of the people I’ve canceled on and are just finding out the real reason right now). Despite that (or for the sake of my argument, because of it), my work was read over 1 million times last year.