The cult of productivity is a trap. You cannot life-hack your way to meaning. A critique of optimization culture.
There's a certain type of person (and you probably know one, might even be one) who treats life like a performance benchmark. They optimize their morning routine, track their macros, use a standing desk, do cold showers, practice intermittent fasting, meditate for exactly 20 minutes, and probably have opinions about which note-taking app is objectively superior.
This person is exhausting. And they're everywhere.
The optimization mindset has metastasized from startups and Silicon Valley into every corner of human existence. Nothing can just be anymore. Everything must be measured, tracked, improved, optimized.
It's making us miserable.
Let's be clear about what's happening here: there's an entire industry dedicated to making you feel inadequate about how you spend your time.
Every productivity guru, every self-help book, every app that promises to "unlock your potential" is selling the same lie: you're not enough as you are, but with the right system, you could be.
Buy this course. Read this book. Follow this routine. Track these metrics. And then, only then, will you finally be living correctly.
Except the goalpost keeps moving, doesn't it?
You optimize your morning. Now you need to optimize your evening. You fix your diet. Now your sleep needs work. You build better habits. Now you need better meta-habits for building habits.
It never ends. That's the point. If you ever felt optimized enough, you'd stop buying products.
There's something seductive about data. Numbers feel objective. If you can measure it, you can improve it. Right?
Wrong.
Not everything that matters can be measured. And not everything that can be measured matters.
You can track your sleep cycles down to the REM phase and still wake up tired. You can count every calorie and still feel unhealthy. You can productivity-hack your way through 50 tasks a day and accomplish nothing meaningful.
Because optimization assumes you've already chosen the right thing to optimize for. And that's the hard part, the part no app can solve.
Here's what happens when you optimize everything: you stop experiencing anything.
You can't just eat a meal. You have to analyze the macros, consider the timing, think about how it affects your energy levels. You can't read a book for pleasure. You need to take notes, create flashcards, ensure you're retaining information efficiently.
God forbid you just... sit and think? That's unproductive. What's the ROI on staring out the window?
But that's exactly where insight comes from. Boredom. Wandering. Unstructured time. The things optimization culture has trained us to eliminate as "waste."
Everyone wants to know the optimal way to do things. What's the best framework? The best workflow? The best approach?
But here's the thing: context matters. What works for a Silicon Valley founder with unlimited resources might not work for you. What works when you're 25 and single definitely won't work when you're 40 with kids.
Yet we keep pretending there's a universal optimal solution. We cargo cult other people's routines and wonder why they don't work. We implement systems designed for different problems and are surprised when they fail.
There is no best practice. There's only what works for you, right now, in this specific situation.
You know what's funny? Optimization culture is just the hedonic treadmill with a productivity coat of paint.
The hedonic treadmill is the psychological phenomenon where people return to a baseline level of happiness despite major positive or negative changes. Win the lottery? You'll be happy for a while, then return to your baseline. Become paralyzed? Devastating at first, but eventually you adapt.
Optimization works the same way. Every improvement becomes the new baseline. Every hack becomes the new normal. The dopamine hit of "getting better" fades, and you need another optimization to feel like you're making progress.
It's addiction dressed up as self-improvement.
Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Here's the corollary that nobody talks about: optimization expands to fill the life available for its completion.
You saved an hour with your new productivity system? Great! Now you can optimize something else. And something else. And something else. Until every moment of your day is accounted for, scheduled, tracked, and optimized.
Congratulations. You've turned yourself into a machine.
The promise of optimization is that if you just get the system right, everything becomes easy. You'll have more time, more energy, more output, more everything.
But life doesn't work that way. Life is inherently messy, unpredictable, and resistant to perfect systems. Relationships are inefficient. Creativity is wasteful. Meaning is unmeasurable.
The things that actually matter (connection, purpose, beauty, growth) cannot be optimized. They can only be experienced.
Okay, let's be fair. Sometimes optimization is good.
Optimizing code? Great. You want your software to run efficiently. Optimizing a manufacturing process? Absolutely. Waste is waste.
But these are specific, bounded problems with clear goals and measurable outcomes. They're technical challenges, not existential ones.
The mistake is thinking the same approach works for everything. That you can optimize your way to a good life the same way you'd optimize a database query.
You can't.
Want to know the real secret to productivity?
Do less stuff.
Not "do stuff more efficiently so you can do more stuff." Actually do less. Say no more often. Stop trying to optimize every moment. Accept that some things are supposed to be inefficient.
Conversations with friends? Inefficient. Could probably text instead. But you'd miss the point.
Walking instead of driving? Inefficient. But maybe that's exactly what you need.
Making something by hand when you could buy it cheaper? Completely inefficient. Also completely beside the point.
Efficiency is not the same as living well.
It takes courage to be inefficient in a culture that worships optimization.
It takes courage to say "I don't track that" when someone asks about your metrics. To admit you don't have a system. To just... do things the slow, messy, human way.
People will think you're not serious. Not committed. Not optimizing your potential.
Good. Let them think that.
Here's a thought experiment: imagine you're at the end of your life, looking back.
Are you going to think "I wish I'd optimized my morning routine better"? "I should've tracked more metrics"? "If only I'd found the perfect productivity system"?
No. You're going to think about relationships. Experiences. Work you're proud of. Times you took risks. Moments of genuine connection.
None of which can be optimized.
And here's the real kicker: the people who actually accomplish great things often aren't the ones obsessing over optimization.
They're the ones so focused on the work itself that they don't have time for meta-work. They're inefficient in all the "right" ways, spending too much time on details that don't matter, pursuing dead ends, making messes.
Because real work is messy. Real creativity is inefficient. Real growth happens in the gaps between the optimized moments.
You don't need a better system. You don't need to optimize your life. You don't need to track every metric or hack every habit.
You need to figure out what actually matters to you, then do more of that. Even if it's inefficient. Especially if it's inefficient.
Because here's the secret that productivity culture doesn't want you to know: you're already enough. Right now. With your messy, unoptimized, gloriously inefficient human life.
The goal isn't to become a perfect productivity machine. The goal is to become more fully yourself.
And you can't optimize your way there.
So what do you do? How do you escape the optimization trap?
Stop measuring things that don't need measuring. Delete the apps that make you feel inadequate. Unsubscribe from the productivity newsletters. Stop comparing your routine to someone else's.
Do things badly. Do things slowly. Do things for no reason at all.
Waste time. On purpose.
Sit and stare at nothing. Take the long way home. Have a conversation that goes nowhere. Read a book that doesn't teach you anything useful.
Be beautifully, defiantly inefficient.
Because life isn't a problem to be optimized. It's an experience to be lived.
And you can't hack your way to meaning.
Join my newsletter to get notified when I publish new articles on AI, technology, and philosophy. I share in-depth insights, practical tutorials, and thought-provoking ideas.
Technical tutorials and detailed guides
The latest in AI and tech
Get notified when I publish new articles. Unsubscribe anytime.