Against self-optimisation
The inner life is not a productivity problem, and treating it as one has costs.
7 min
A pattern I meet more and more often: someone arrives with a tracking app for sleep, a journal template for gratitude, a morning routine of documented excellence — and a flat, persistent unhappiness they cannot metric their way out of. They come to therapy the way one calls a specialist: the self-improvement system has a bug, please fix it so the optimisation can resume.
I want to say something unfashionable: the optimisation itself may be the bug.
Self-optimisation borrows its logic from production. Inputs, outputs, efficiency, growth. Applied to a supply chain, this logic is elegant. Applied to a psyche, it quietly installs a manager in a place where no manager was ever supposed to live. Every feeling becomes a performance indicator. Rest becomes recovery — which is to say, rest in the service of output. Even joy gets audited: was it optimal?
The cost is subtle and cumulative. Parts of the inner life simply will not perform on schedule — grief, love, meaning, the slow formation of a conviction. Under a productivity regime these parts don't disappear; they go underground, and return as symptoms. The flatness my optimised clients describe is often exactly this: the sound of an inner life that has stopped volunteering information, because everything it offers gets turned into a task.
None of this is an argument for chaos, or against exercise, sleep, or discipline. It is an argument about governance. The question is not whether you have routines but who they serve — whether there remains, anywhere in your week, time that answers to no metric. Unmeasured walking. Reading with no notes. A conversation that produces nothing.
Therapy, done honestly, is one of the last deliberately inefficient rooms. Fifty minutes with no deliverable. Progress that refuses to be charted weekly. Clients used to optimisation often find this maddening at first, then — slowly — something else. The word they tend to reach for is room.
You are not a process to be improved. You are, at minimum, a place where something wants to live. It is worth asking, now and then, whether the current management is letting it.