I’m Done ‘Optimizing’ My Lifestyle

This month, GQ is asking men to share their counterintuitive wellness resolutions for 2025. Find all of the stories here.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the course of the last 20 years, it’s that tech probably isn’t going to save us. And yet even for the most tech skeptical among us, it feels like we’ve largely fallen for the worst tech industry trap: the trend towards “human optimization.” That’s why this year, I’m resolving to be less optimized, less monetized, less lifehacked; and hopefully, more alive.

The logic of coding dictates that the best code is that which is the most efficient. And startup culture, which to some extent sees computer code as the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe and bending it to our will, has attempted to extrapolate this idea of removing all inefficiencies and apply it to all aspects of our daily lives. If that sounds hyperbolic, just try to find one profile of a tech founder written in the last 10 years that doesn’t include at least one anecdote about a hare-brained new biohacking scheme. Remember Sam Bankman-Fried and how he slept for four hours a night on beanbag chair? He was so efficient that he didn’t comb his hair and ate pre-packaged vegan Indian food straight from the package. This was legitimately viewed as a symbol of his genius (before he went to jail for fraud).

It’s easy (and fun!) to ridicule the silliest examples of human optimization, but the truth is, even the most tech-skeptical among us are not immune to the productivity hacking impulse. Every day I find myself implementing a sort of washed dad version of Patrick Bateman’s morning routine from American Psycho. Instead of donning an eye mask and performing 1,000 crunches to maintain my peak physical form, I do a 5-10 minute circuit of hamstring and hip stretches to keep my lower back pain at bay while I consume stimulants and stare at a laptop screen for eight hours. After that, I finish making my son one (1) pasture-raised egg for breakfast, load him into his Graco carseat, and drive him to the toddler academy daycare in my Subaru. From there I’ll head to the non-chain coffee shop for a fair-trade cappuccino and try to complete at least four (4) units of culture writing, which is easier for me to do in the morning hours before my brain gets foggy. And then it’s time for a light lunch followed by some cardio. In the afternoons I send email pitches, finish invoices for other culture writing work, and record podcasts.

In my “ideal” day, each hour is accounted for, maximized for health maintenance, family responsibilities, and dollar extraction—a value assigned to every imaginary spreadsheet cell. Old friends call to catch up and I hit the decline button. Not now! I think. I’m too busy!

The question soon arises: what are we actually getting out of all this efficiency? As fellow culture writer Alice Fraser once put it, “If you optimize every quadrant of your life sufficiently well, you could slide frictionlessly to the grave never having to have any kind of experience.”

Lately I’ve been rewatching Mad Men (sort of for fun, but also for a Mad Men rewatch podcast I started), and while almost all of the characters in it are slightly different flavors of philandering scumbag, it’s hard not to notice, and be jealous of, how often they just sort of drink and goof off and go on introspective walks and generally ponder while smoking.

Why can’t we live more like that, I find myself asking.

The obvious answer is “because we’re not white guys in the 1960s” (and also don’t want to destroy our families and die of heart attacks at 51). Still, it’s hard not to wonder whether doing away with the concept of the “smoke break” was really only about getting people to stop smoking or if it was also partly about getting workers to stop taking breaks. There’s an additional irony to me vicariously savoring these fictional characters’ frequent “me” time in a show that I’m essentially watching as part of a job.

And that’s the rub: many of us have so thoroughly blurred the boundaries between living and working that we’re barely capable of spontaneity anymore. I get an itchy, anxious feeling any time I’m doing something that can’t be monetized.

Certainly it’s worse out here in the media industry. Everyone I know, most of us with 10 or 15 or 20 years in the business, is now either holding down one of the last few staff jobs–which usually involves doing work that used to be done with four or five people and trying to please an MBA somewhere who doesn’t really understand what you do—or trying to substitute the staff job you lost a few years ago with five or six semi-regular part-time and/or freelance gigs. In either case, it tends to put the pressure on to fill all of your time slots with some type of bag-securing activity.

But I would argue that the phenomenon goes further than the decrepit, dying old bitch that is the media industry. For Gen Xers and Gen Yers like me (Wikipedia would tell you that I’m a millennial based on year of birth, but I contend that if you learned to masturbate using analog media, you’re too old to be a millennial. I owned ska records god dammit, I will not be erased), we were mostly raised to pursue our passions. Study hard and go to a good college, they all screamed at us. You don’t want to end up digging ditches and working fast food!

Now that I’m over 40, I feel like I’ve been relatively successful—and yet, managers at In n Out are earning significantly more than I am. And theirs seems like the better gig, too—with a tangible product, happy customers, and relevant metrics for success. A friend of mine recently abandoned tech sales to start a pool-cleaning business. He seems happier than ever and there isn’t a single person in our group chat who isn’t jealous of him.

Where has optimization really gotten us? Nowhere. Admittedly, we aren’t going to solve what is essentially a problem of precarity through mindset alone. That’s sort of how we got into this mess in the first place. Is it a foolish battle to fight? Is not trying to be less optimized itself a form of optimization? Maybe, but I’m reminded of Clive Owen’s character delivering a eulogy for his friend, a fellow pioneering physician, in the pilot episode of one of my favorite shows, The Knick.

JM Christensen fearlessly took up arms in the battle to oppose the inevitable, throwing himself at an enemy that has never known defeat and as sure as I’m standing here never will. One could not be blamed for wondering whether JM came to see his life’s work as a fool’s errand, a rube finally realizing that the game he’s been playing will be forever rigged against him. But my dear friend JM was a fine man and certainly he was no fool or rube. He and I spent our lives tilting at the very same windmills... Eventually, the train tunnels will crumble. The dams will be overrun. Our patients’ hearts will all stop their beating. But we humans can still get a few good licks in battle before we surrender.

Which is to say, we might not ever win the fight to spend less time worrying about money or seeing ourselves as human productivity machines. But it’s the fight that reminds us we’re alive.