The Optimization Ethos: Anatomy of a Cultural Imperative
Decisions to self-optimize do not happen in a vacuum. People operate within physical and digital spaces that are themselves intentionally designed, built, and equipped with optimizing for commercial activities in mind.
Speaking in a video announcing the launch of their new "genetic optimization software," Nucleus Genomics founder and CEO Kian Sadeghi declared that their technology helps parents give their children "the best possible start in life."
The new platform goes beyond traditional IVF screening methods, and even allows parents to "optimize their embryos based on intelligence."
While the software itself obviously raises a lot of questions, I was more drawn towards one word that was repeatedly used in the video and the press release: optimization.
As a digital marketer, the word is inescapable. In fact, it might be one of the most overused to the point of nauseating industry buzzwords ever to enter everyday use. But to hear it applied to describe a process where embryos are selected for implantation based on desired traits like IQ unsettled me quite a bit.
"Has it really gone this far?" I thought.
In my work, where "optimization" has been utilized for a much longer time, its effect is more trite than disturbing. In fact in most cases, it's so ubiquitous, it disappears like a meaningless linguistic artifact behind other vapid catchphrases: "Search engine optimization." "Campaign optimization." "End-to-end optimization."
Colleagues would say, "Let's optimize resource allocation, business processes, and cost structures." Or "Let's optimize team performance and workforce engagement."
It's a word that can be seamlessly appended to any existing business, marketing, or technology term, and somehow it will make sense to anyone with a modicum of attention: "Sales funnel optimization." "Infrastructure optimization." "AI-driven optimization."
But the concept has now pervaded so many facets of life beyond marketing. We have people optimizing their diet and sleep cycles. There are ways to optimize morning routines and dating outcomes. Governments optimize transportation networks and educational institutions carry out curriculum optimization. And, as mentioned, embryos can be optimized now, too. In every instance, the overarching theme seems to be a formalized refinement process to get an entity to an improved state.
The wide adoption across industries and contexts may have to do with the term's remarkable effectiveness. Its technological and organizational connotations instantly give the object a degree of legitimacy while retaining a general aura of harmlessness, regardless if the actual thing makes sense or not.
One guy chose to optimize his entire life and break it up into multiple departments (family, career, spirituality, etc.), each with its own performance metrics, and likened himself—a single individual—to a Fortune 500 organization driven by time-bound results and answerable to a board.
If all this feels stifling for you, you're not alone.
Many have already decried life optimization while acknowledging that because of its pervasiveness and apparent necessity in today's world characterized by extreme competition and economic insecurity, trying to fight it might be a lost cause.
But again, optimizing one's life is just one aspect of an ever-growing culture of fine-tuning and upgrading that's rapidly encroaching on our existence.
There must be something we can do to wriggle out of its stranglehold to be able to breathe just a little bit easier.
In this piece, I want to take a closer look into the optimization ethos and ask: what are we really optimizing? And for what or for whom? What does resisting involve, and how might that look like in practice?
My goal is to show that far from clearly improving the self or the individual, optimization can actually be more nefarious than it seems on the surface. The motivations that support it are conducted through a vast material network where the individual is just one node to an end. And that under the guise of empowering people to extract more "results" in their busy lives, optimization reinforces our role in the reproduction of systems that limit the exercise of our freedoms.
Individuals as Self-Optimizing Data Points in Global Supply Chains
Optimization within the scope of the individual is often framed as "self-improvement," and in this sense, it's just the latest evolution of self-therapy or self-help that aims to improve one’s life (emotionally, mentally, socially, spiritually, or financially) through mostly personal efforts.
At least, most people seem to believe that's simply what they're doing. They're just trying to get better in various aspects of life.
A person might optimize their daily routine by ensuring they yield maximum returns for every amount of investment. Usually, this means carefully planning one's daily schedule around their income-generating pursuits, which, of course, provide the most tangible rewards and sustain the whole ecosystem filled with micro-optimizations. So, for example, since one can't set aside too much time for exercise because of their job or jobs, they might settle for a 10-minute workout on YouTube in the morning instead of a 30-minute run. Everything needs to be bite-sized and ready to consume. Preparing food is notoriously time-consuming and keeping a healthy diet is typically complicated, so they might be subscribed to a meal kit service. Going to the office can be a waste of fuel, and making small talk to coworkers is a non-value adding activity, so if working from home is allowed, then that's where one would prefer to ply their trade. The home workspace itself would be arranged and equipped to allow for as much productivity as possible. Minimalist arrangement, ergonomic furniture, automatically adjusting smart devices, voice assistants, small potted plants that mimic being in nature, etc. are ideal.
Doing all these and more supposedly would allow one to "focus on more important things in life," and be "the best version of yourself."
But are these common optimizations, sometimes referred to as "life hacks," really just driven by and benefit the individual or is there a larger machinery at work?
Take for example, in digital marketing where optimization is the norm. No ad copy, email, or another kind of asset is deployed without some sort of A/B test to ensure that the item is already the better version before the target audience has even laid eyes on it.
User experience on web pages, such as on checkout, are studied and streamlined based on a feedback loop to ensure frictionless purchase activity. Post-purchase or remarketing email campaigns and social media ads automatically lock onto a user the moment they leave the website to ensure they remain engaged, increasing the likelihood of a future visit.
Everything is engineered towards getting a potential customer from awareness to conversion in the shortest amount of time possible. Less time to convert usually means more time for more conversions.
Negative experiences from reviews and feedback are collected as data points, which inform how the next iteration of customer-facing assets are going to be optimized.
According to Fenwick McKelvey and Joshua Neves, optimization operates through three core techniques: quantification, de-situation, and formulation. Quantification turns social phenomena into numbers. De-situation abstract data from context, and formulation reshapes problems into solvable formats.
This abstraction of real experiences into aggregate data is necessary to solve a problem that has been posited mathematically, that is, how to get customers to buy. If they don't buy, there must necessarily be mathematical equivalents of their discontents, too, so that the pieces of software keeping track of the optimization process will know how to adjust dynamic strategies for the same customer or the next one who fits their profile or persona.
And here is where we see the conflict: on the one hand, a person might think they are optimizing their lives for themselves in pursuit of personal rewards that could benefit themselves, tangible or not, but on the other hand, they clearly exist within optimized streams of consumer activities that steer them towards defined commercial objectives that are external to them.
If you feel like you're saving a lot of time and "getting more out of life" by adopting an optimized lifestyle, ask yourself why this happens. Is it because various devices and programs, such as health tracking apps, have prepared personal goals for you to achieve? If eating quickly and healthy is easier now more than ever, is it because you've shared your specific personal schedule and nutritional requirements with a company? If you're getting work done faster, are you using AI to optimize your workflow? And if you feel as if you can spend all day in your home office without needing to touch grass, is it because you've packed it with the best connected devices and productivity software your money can buy?
Buy. That is still the operative word in all of these examples.
But none of these optimizations would be possible if there were no industry standards by which people's digital activities can be measured and acted upon. For instance, businesses, when discussing the value of their customer base, must be able to agree on who engaged customers are and who are not. Websites must be designed to accommodate ads with uniform specs. Apps must work in a variety of operating systems and devices while retaining user information and core functionality. Smart phones, smart watches, TVs, and other devices designed and manufactured by different companies globally must be able to somehow harmoniously work together in homes and office spaces to generate demand.
This standardization and interoperability are a characteristic of a global capitalist supply chain that makes optimization possible.
Supply chains quantify and standardize global space and time as part of a "logistics revolution” that relies on “lean manufacturing, flexibility, just-in-time inventory systems, [and] ‘pull’ production,” among other calculative systems. —McKelvey and Neves
Decisions to self-optimize do not happen in a vacuum. People operate within physical and digital spaces that are themselves intentionally designed, built, and equipped with optimizing for commercial activities in mind. Through optimized marketing, they are then nudged towards purchases, which ultimately sustain these spaces and the overall economy, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
Thus, for example, you may think that you've only taken up running to improve your health. But if you were convinced by your friends to run, and if you bought a new pair of running shoes, a GPS running watch, and stocked your fridge full of energy gels and drinks, you essentially took action within a unified system optimized to keep businesses generating revenues in these industries going. And in this system, no matter how personal or even sincere the act of self-optimization is on your part, from a commercial standpoint, it's just one data point that can be abstracted and synthesized with others to make profit streams more effective.
The Illusory Goal Posts of a Self-Perpetuating System
What binds this culture of self-optimization is the view that there's an essential lack in an individual.
You're not healthy enough. You're not productive enough. You're not attractive or rich enough, and so on, so forth.
The fact that we can now monitor our own progress in these self-improvement projects is one of the most striking technical revolutions of our time. But while the platforms and methods for communicating this lack are new, the lack itself and its various forms are old.
Nikolas Rose framed traditional therapy as individualization of social ills as it tends to depoliticize suffering, recasting structural injustices as personal failings to be addressed through internal reform. Health issues among populations arising out of limited accessible healthy options for diet and exercise are hardly new. Social inequality has persisted for centuries. Hierarchies of power and privilege are as old as humanity itself. Therapy might have been a major method for transforming these social ills into depoliticized personal failings in the last several decades, but today, self-optimization through personal apps and easily available commercial services and procedures (example, Botox for the enhancement of the skin) are their main vectors for self-correction.
This lack is located all over the individual. Never in history have we been more aware of so many deficiencies within ourselves. And that awareness is not an accident; on the contrary, it is, in many ways, revealed and manufactured by optimizing systems themselves.
Daniel Nehring and Anja Röcke, in their analytical framework for studying and discussing self-optimizing practices, state:
The object area of self-optimising practices encompasses all facets of the ‘self’, that is, one’s body, psyche or lifestyle. The body, psyche or lifestyle can, however, not be optimised as a totality, but only in the form of single elements, for example, for the body, muscle mass, nutrition and appearance; for the psyche, moods and well-being; and for the lifestyle, the practical planning of everyday life.
But it makes perfect sense for these practices to not encompass the totality of the individual, because capitalism must necessarily view the person as divisible into a multitude of separate parts to target as many products as possible towards different elements. In this way, you have optimized shoes for apparently different kinds of running (training vs racing), an optimized diet for your specific goal (muscle mass or lighter weight or vegan or vegetarian, etc.), optimized equipment for better sleep, optimally sized screens and appropriately configured devices for reading, playing games, and working. It goes on and on and on.
There's no one way to optimize the self. There seems to be as as many as there are products and services that can be catalogued.
This seeming infinite divisibility of the optimizing self in Western capitalist societies is in contrast to many old, typically Eastern religious and philosophical belief systems that view or try to improve the totality of a person. In Taoism, the human being is the microcosm of the universe; and body, breath, mind, and spirit are not separate entities but expressions of a single energy. It is not goal-driven but encourages alignment with the Tao (the Way). In Buddhism, the self is not a fixed essence but a bundle of interdependent aggregates: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. The project is not to upgrade the individual, but to cease suffering in all layers of experience.
This highlights the fact that while personal deficiencies and the often scientific and logical ways to address them might be seen as obvious in Western capitalist societies, that has not always been the case from a historical and multicultural standpoint. And if we adopt a more existential perspective when considering this lack in human beings, their immediacy and necessity are even in question. Instead, we see that they're just modes of interpreting the human experience contingent upon our place and time in history.
In other words, these self-optimization problems posited as mathematical and empirical in nature, are not as solid as they appear to be, but are also social constructs.
Further lending credence to this is that optimization goals are never final. They may even be illusory.
Self-optimising practices have a structurally open and dynamic process logic of permanent adaptation and exceeding of achieved targets. Following this logic, every result can and should be changed and further improved. This requires a permanent control of achieved targets as well as a continuous and flexible readjustment of the involved parameters and pursued goals. There is no predefined end that is fixed once and for all, nor is there an overarching, ultimate goal. —Nehring and Röcke
In fact, optimization produces "suboptimalities," according to McKelvey and Neves. The pursuit of optimal states inherently delineates what is suboptimal. It doesn't matter if you think you've achieved a healthier version of yourself than yesterday based on your health tracking app's unlocked achievements and milestones. The subtext is you're always less healthy than you can be tomorrow. Nobody achieves the perfect work-life balance or the ideal home office with a single, defining act. There are endless ways to micro-optimize, surpass targets, and set new records for yourself or other users to break.
In the end, however, what these illusory goal posts materialize are the inequalities between those who can optimize and those who can't. You're not just poorer compared with yourself next month (say, if you don't follow highly recommended wealth optimization techniques like algorithmic trading), but you're also always poorer compared with your boss who has more capital to deploy for optimizing their investments. Both of you will always be richer than a homeless person who barely has any means to optimize, or even to conceive of it.
But maybe that's the point. Perhaps the goal of the optimization ethos is to have no fixed goals at all, but only to perpetuate a ghostly haunting system.
Motives Cannot Compel Us: A Way to Rebel Against Optimization
By no means are we saying that optimization is a product of neoliberal capitalist economies only.
Looking at history, beyond the birth of capitalism, it appears that people, especially when encouraged by opportunities for wealth accumulation, tend toward optimizing the means to get it, even resorting to brutal means. Nehring and Röcke highlighted the example of the slave ship Brookes, which was the subject of abolitionist materials. The heavily circulated picture depicts over 400 African people, men, women, and children, stowed in inhumane restricted spaces within the ship for transport to the Americas. The objective of the slave traders, of course, was to optimize the ship's design and cargo planning for maximum financial gain.
Today's world is far from that horrific point in history but that is not to say that terrible things in the quest for ever-evolving enhancements that aid the extraction of profit are not happening.
That is why we must view all forms of optimization critically, and why we should consciously rebel against routinized, unconscious self-optimization lest we're ready to surrender ourselves to a treacherous external force and embrace inauthenticity.
But extricating ourselves from these mechanisms that permeate our life is extremely hard, if not impossible. The cost of withdrawing from optimization is abundantly clear: low productivity, which could result in lower income or a reduced capacity to get hired; perhaps a poorer social standing as your immediate friends and family fail to understand why you're not "taking care of yourself." In the extreme, somebody who decides to quit the optimization game completely can be ostracized as mentally unstable or a freak.
There are social movements and projects that try to swim against the optimization current, such as the slow movement, off-grid living, digital minimalism and such, but as ordinary people just beginning to grapple with the difficulty of it all, where should we start?
Here I must return to existentialism to give ourselves the wiggle room to get out of the stranglehold.
While, as mentioned, we function in a world that tries to control our behaviors and our very thoughts, in the final estimation, all of these are just motives, and motives by themselves cannot compel us to do anything.
This freedom which reveals itself to us in anguish can be characterized by the existence of that nothing which insinuates itself between motives and act. It is not because I am free that my act is not subject to the determination of motives; on the contrary, the structure of motives as ineffective is the condition of my freedom. —Jean-Paul Sartre
Motives for self-optimization may be omnipresent, but they are not part of our being, our essence, which means we are not our motives, and so we can rise above them. We can negate them by not identifying with them and choosing against them, however hard that may be.
But a requirement for this act of rebellion is to uproot all taken-for-granted meanings and beliefs—even sometimes to the apparent detriment of ourselves.
Consider: what is a perfectly healthy life? Is it passing all medical exams? Is it scoring high on an app? Or is it just a feeling of living pleasantly, however imperfectly, by traditional health standards? But then again, why live a "healthy" life at all? Some people do not place health improvements at the top of their list of how to live a meaningful life. Who are we to say that their list is not as valid as ours? Maybe they don't care about their health as much about their art or their job, spirituality, or fight. Or maybe they even want to deliberately ruin their health to make a point. So what? We must get rid of all assumed givens to see that absolutely nothing at all compels us to act or think a certain way.
Yes, "giving up" might leave us in anguish, in the sense that we will clearly see that we can decide not to optimize and live for anybody else's expectations as long as we accept the costs, but that is exactly why we're free. We're free to de-optimize. We are not determined. We can choose to quit.
Optimization may be a powerful force that constantly strikes at our personal vulnerabilities, but it doesn't have the permanence and inevitability of our freedom built into the very mode of our existence.
So drop the productivity app. Abandon the cart. Unsubscribe. Log out of all social media. Be invisible. Be unfit. Be unfriendly. Or be friendly and happy but in a totally unexpected way. Live chaotically. Live worse today than yesterday. De-optimize.
And marvel at how the sky shrugs at our choices and looks the same, anyway.