The optimized self and the life that got away

A Scottish author named Samuel Smiles is arguably responsible for the self-help-hellscape. In the 1800’s, he published a book literally called Self-Help, which went through dozens of editions, was taken awfully seriously by statesmen across Europe, and became one of the bestselling books of the Victorian era.

Its central argument was that moral character could be cultivated through diligent application: reading, civic participation, public service, disciplined attention to the life of the mind. Smiles believed you could build a better self by doing better things.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with the base premise.

But 160 years later, his argument now runs entirely through the body.

At some point in the last decade, a large portion of the internet decided the body was a project, and a project in the most managerial sense: something with inputs and outputs, and measurable progress.

The gym stopped being a place you went to feel better and became a place you went to execute. Sleep, sunlight, red meat, cold water, seed oils, cortisol, testosterone, zone two cardio. Every variable must be tracked, every habit must be stacked, ad infinitum.

The looksmaxxing forums obsessively discuss bone structure, and the health influencers crow about their morning routines, and it all happens with the reverence a medieval monk might have reserved for the Divine Office.

The obvious critique is that this = vanity, but vanity is too easy and too ancient a sin to explain something this new.

The weirdness that used to attach itself to the full texture of a life has been violently redirected into a single obsessive beam aimed at the surface of the self, and what you're left with is a culture that has never been more earnest about self-improvement and less interested in what that the ~self might actually do once it's been improved.

Weber's ghost in the supplement aisle

Max Weber, writing about the Protestant work ethic in 1905, noted that the Calvinist who believed his salvation was predestined nevertheless worked himself to exhaustion, because worldly success had become the only legible signal of divine favour. You couldn't earn grace, but you could demonstrate that you already had it, and so a theology of predestination produced the most frenetic “industriousness” in European history.

I’d argue the looksmaxxer is the Calvinist's descendant. Genetics have already determined most of what you are, but you optimize anyway, because the work is now the whole damn point. The macros spreadsheet and the red light therapy panels and the creatine cycles and the cold plunge timers: these are, in Weber's terms, signs of election - they signal membership in a particular church.

This “framework” if you can call it that, this bullshit if you can’t, has captured an entire generation who, in other contexts, are entirely secular. The old religious architecture of sin, discipline, redemption and grace has been preserved almost intact, but gluttony became eating seed oils, sloth became suboptimal sleep hygiene, penance became cold plunges, and grace became...well, social media engagement if nothing else.

Experience becomes data

Treating experience as a variable to be optimized means experience stops being experience, and becomes data instead.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the citizens of the World State have achieved the elimination of suffering and the maximization of measurable pleasure, and the result is a civilization that is, by any human standard, barely alive.

Bernard Marx's restlessness, Helmholtz Watson's hunger for something language can't quite reach, the Savage's chaotic grief are the only moments in the novel when anyone is fully present to their own existence, and comfort, the fully optimized state, turns out to be its own form of death.

This feels familiar.

Even our suffering // mortification is now instrumentalized, because you have to be cold in a way that improves your cortisol response, and the raw fact of being in cold water and finding it horrible or exhilarating or strangely peaceful has been pre-interpreted before it begins.

The unstructured encounter with the real, the long afternoon that goes nowhere and produces nothing, the conversation with a compatriot - these experiences can't be scheduled and they have no measurable output, and their value is entirely illegible to the optimization framework. They can't be converted into content. By every metric the health bro cares about, they are an utter waste of time.

Productivity eats leisure

Around 2015, the self-help genre underwent a mutation.

The Stoic revival was part of it. Ryan Holiday moved Marcus Aurelius from the philosophy section to the business section, and a generation of tech workers started reading the Meditations as a manual.

The mindfulness industry sold inner peace as a productivity intervention, and you were supposed to meditate because it would improve your focus metrics, and whether sitting still with your thoughts was worth doing on its own terms was entirely beside the point.

The gym absorbed this logic, and the body became a startup, and the optimization influencer became its growth hacker, and the language of biohacking was borrowed directly from Silicon Valley engineering culture: stacks, protocols, outputs, iterations. The journey was irrelevant and the destination was simply a more productive you.

In the psychological literature going back to D.W. Winnicott, play is the space where creativity and selfhood develop, and play is, by definition, purposeless. You do it for its own sake, or you're not really playing.

When the entire surface area of life is conquered by “purposeful” activity, play becomes structurally impossible.

Converging toward the mean

Ivan Goncharov published Oblomov in 1859, a novel about a Russian aristocrat who refuses to get out of bed, and it reads very differently now than it did then.

Oblomov was a satire of the passive, dreaming Russian character, the man who can't act, but Oblomov is also someone who hasn't yet been captured by the performance of optimization.

He lies in his dressing gown and thinks and fantasizes and wastes time on an extraordinary scale, and the novel, despite itself, makes him undeniably sympathetic. There's something in Oblomov's uselessness, his refusal to organize his life into legible progress, that starts to resemble a vanishing form of freedom.

Is the optimization cult producing more interesting people? The empirical record isn't encouraging.

The looksmaxxed face and the engineered body and the supplement stack tend to converge toward the same aesthetic ideal, which is to say that all the optimization is producing less variation. The pursuit of objective attractiveness, to the extent that such a thing exists, is an undignified rout toward the mean.

Borges didn't have a content strategy

There's a version of this that tips into simple nostalgia: ”things were better when people smoked more and slept less and died younger of preventable diseases.”

...But I hope I’ve hit on something a little more profound than a ritual of kicking against the pricks.

Partially blind for much of his most productive life and working as a librarian in Buenos Aires, Borges had no morning routine and no content strategy. He read everything, wrote slowly, and he took jobs that paid almost nothing, and he produced a body of work that changed the grammar of fiction in the twentieth century and did something to my teenage brain from which I have never recovered.

The margin for this kind of life is getting narrower... every moment of apparent purposelessness now carries an opportunity cost that is immediately readable in the language of optimization. You could be at the gym, you could be getting your sleep score up, and so you should be, you must be, or you have failed in a deeply moral way.

The curse of the optimization boom is that it presents itself as self-expansion but its adherents are, to a man, practising self-contraction. Every hour spent on the body protocol is an hour not spent wandering, reading, getting obsessed with an obscure subject for no reason, falling in love, handling it bloody badly, making something ugly that teaches you how to make something less ugly.

The self that comes from years of successful optimization is “useful” and some might call it “finished.” But the self that is only discovered through years of purposeful uselessness is unfinished, and by that virtue, it is full of possibility and gifted with the unknown.

The gym won't give you that. Knowing your testosterone levels to two decimal places won't tell you a single damned thing about what you're supposed to do with your time on earth, which is, in the end, the only question worth spending your life on.