Optimization Has No Soul

Yes, optimize your sleep. No, you cannot optimize your way to a deep self.

Hold on a sec while I turn on my red light. OK, ready.

So, I’ve noticed that there’s a particular kind of exhausted I keep seeing in high performers. They’ve optimized their morning routine, their inbox, their attention spans, their gut bacteria, their sleep architecture, their cold plunges, their ice baths, even their freaking saccades (see core saccade drills)— and somewhere along the way, they seem to have lost the ability to tell you what any of it is for.

Look: I am not throwing rocks from outside the house. I stay up to date on the latest biohacking innovations. I track my steps. I track my macros. I track my reading. On bad weeks, I have been known to track my own emotional state in a Notion database, which I will admit is a choice. So when I tell you that optimization has no soul, I am throwing rocks from inside the house, where I live, with the rocks.

But here is what I have come to believe after twenty-five years of studying human potential: optimization is a blunt tool. Don’t get me wrong: It is a good tool for some things but it is the wrong tool for most of the things that make life most soulful. And we are in the middle of a generational confusion about which is which.

The thing the dashboard can’t see

When I was teaching at Penn, students would come to my office hours with spreadsheets where they were tracking their sleep, their caffeine intake, their exam scores, their relationship satisfaction (rated 1–10 weekly), their gratitude practice (binary, yes/no), and their perceived sense of meaning (also 1–10, also weekly). They wanted to know which inputs were predicting the meaning score.

I would ask how the meaning score was doing. More than one of them told me it had been around a 4 for months. I would ask what a 4 felt like. They would pause for a long time. And one of them, eventually, said very quietly: “I don’t actually know what an 8 would feel like. I think I forgot.”

That is the optimization trap in one sentence. You can keep all the dashboards. The dashboards will be perfectly honest with you. They will tell you that your sleep is good, that your gratitude practice is consistent, that your relationship satisfaction is stable at a 7. But they will not tell you that you have forgotten what an 8 feels like, because forgetting what an 8 feels like is the kind of thing dashboards are constitutionally unable to notice.

This is not because the people who build dashboards are bad. It is because the soul is the part of you that knows the difference between a 4 and an 8, and the dashboard is the part of you that records that you said it was a 4. These are different organs. They do different work. We have spent a decade pretending they are the same organ, and the soul has been losing the argument.

Maslow already told us this

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who gave us the hierarchy of needs that has been mangled by every management consultant in America for sixty years, was very clear on this point. The hierarchy is not a video game. You do not unlock self-actualization the way you unlock the next level of Candy Crush. The needs work in tandem, across your whole life. You return to them. You move between them. You do not “complete” love and belonging and graduate to esteem. I think a sailboat is a much more apt metaphor for the journey of self-actualization than a clunky pyramid.

But I digress. What Maslow understood — and what I tried to update for the twenty-first century in Transcend — is that the destination is not a metric. The destination is becoming more fully who you already are. You can’t measure that with a Fitbit. You can’t biohack it. You can’t A/B test it. You can recognize it when it shows up, and you can recognize when it has gone missing, and that recognition is itself a kind of intelligence that the optimization mindset systematically disables.

And here is the punchline Maslow added at the end of his life, which most popular psychology dropped on the floor: self-actualization is not the end of the journey because self-transcendence really matters. The deeper move is outward. Past the self. Into service, awe, connection, beauty, the experience of being smaller than something. None of which has a metric. None of which can be optimized. All of which is exactly what the people who can’t tell you what their optimized life is for are starving for.

Yes, and

Again, let me be crystal clear that I am not anti-optimization. That would be cheap and it would not be true. I am writing this on a Mac that I keep optimized. I sleep better on weeks when I track my sleep. There are real, useful, life-improving optimizations available to anyone with a smartphone and the willingness to use it.

But there’s an empowerment move from Rise Above that I keep coming back to, and it applies here. The empowerment mindset is structurally a yes/and. Yes, I have suffered, and I can still handle hard things. Yes, the world has been unfair to me, and I am still responsible for what I do next. The yes/and is the move that lets you take both halves of the truth at the same time without collapsing one into the other.

So: yes, optimize the parts of your life that respond to optimization. And no, don’t believe for a second that those are the parts of your life that make you a person.

Yes, track your macros. And no, your relationship with your body is not a system to debug.

Yes, batch your emails. And no, the conversations that change your life are not in your inbox.

Yes, A/B test your habits. And no, the call you’ve been avoiding for three months is not waiting on better data.

The yes/and is the antidote to both the productivity gospel (”optimize everything”) and the romantic anti-productivity backlash (”optimization is the enemy”). They are both wrong because they are both monistic. The honest answer is two-handed: a hand for the system, a hand for the soul.

What the substitute teacher saw

There is a story I tell in Rise Above that I will tell here too, because it is the cleanest example I know of what the dashboard cannot see.

I was placed in special ed in third grade for an auditory processing disability. Then, for reasons nobody ever bothered to explain to me, everyone just sort of forgot to take me out. I sat in that classroom for years longer than any test result said I should have. A substitute teacher walked in one day, looked at me — really looked — and said: I see you. I can sense your frustration. What are you still doing here?

That was not an optimization. That was a person. There was no dashboard that would have flagged me for removal from special ed. There was no metric that would have caught what she caught. There was a human being in a room with another human being, and one of them was awake enough to see the other.

The trajectory of my life rotated on its axis because of that moment. Cello. Choir. Latin scholar. Penn. Columbia. The Psychology Podcast. Transcend. Rise Above. The book I hope to write next. None of which would have happened without a person walking into a room and looking, really looking, at a kid the system had quietly written off.

I think about her a lot when I think about optimization. There is no version of an optimized education system that catches that moment, because the optimization is measuring the wrong thing. The optimization is measuring throughput. The substitute teacher was measuring potential, and measurement too often gets a person’s potential wrong. This is why I call it seeing with your soul.

The world is full of people who need to be seen this way. The dashboard cannot see them. You can. And being able to is a kind of literacy the optimization culture is quietly training us out of.

What I want you to do with this

Pick one thing this week that you have been treating as a system, and let it be a relationship instead. Your body. Your inbox, if it contains people you actually care about. Your morning. Your kid. The friend you’ve been meaning to text for three months. Your Mom who keeps calling you. The relationship with yourself.

You do not have to stop optimizing the rest of it. Track your sleep. Batch your tasks. Run your A/B tests. That stuff is fine. It is more than fine — for the things it actually works on, it is genuinely useful.

Just remember which hand you are using.

The system hand keeps the lights on. The soul hand decides whether the lights are pointing at anything worth looking at. You need both. You especially need the second one, because the second one is the part of you the metric mindset cannot count, cannot reward, cannot even see — and which, in a culture that increasingly believes only what it can count, is the part of you most quietly at risk of going missing.

Optimization has no soul. It was never supposed to. That was never its job.

That job is yours.

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If this resonated, share it with one person who has been optimizing themselves into a tizzy. And tell me in the comments: what is one thing this week you’re going to stop optimizing, and start seeing with your soul?