The case for optimising less
For a while now, I've noticed that something has shifted in how people talk about their lives. Not the big things, not careers or relationships or the stuff that used to be the main event. The smaller things, the stats, the metrics, the Apple Watch rings, sleep scores. You get the idea. Morning routines that take longer to describe than to actually do. The swelling sense of pride over a good recovery percentage, and (perhaps ominously so) the low-grade guilt of a bad one.
I see it everywhere. People checking their Whoop bands mid-conversation, reporting their strain scores like weather updates, genuinely put out because they missed their protein window after a workout. The tracking has become the point and it's a point of obsession. The living has become the thing that happens around it.
I'm not exempt from this, I've been in the depths of it myself. For a while I was monitoring everything: sleep, strain, calories, recovery, all of it feeding into a daily verdict on whether I'd done it right, on whether I'd had a "good" day. The good days felt great. Cloud eight. But the moment a social event or a late night at work threatened to break the pattern, I'd feel it as frustration. Not stress exactly. Frustration. Like I'd fallen off a wagon that kept moving without me. And on the days with no good excuse? "I've failed again. Why am I so useless at hitting these targets." Worst of all was breaking a streak: days of being perfectly on track, then one off day, and somehow that felt worse than never having started. Forget the good days that built the streak in the first place. It was a strange thing to feel about a system that was supposed to be helping.
I kept running into that background war between two things: genuinely enjoying what I was doing in the moment, and the "checklist" pulling me out of it. Oh, I should be asleep. I need to get a workout in tomorrow. Have I hit my pages? Did I drink enough water? Did I do my 10k steps? (I'll save a whole other article for my thoughts on the 10k target). The optimising didn't sit alongside my life. It competed with it. And it had a habit of winning, even when the thing it was shoving aside was actually good.
The optimising didn't sit alongside my life. It competed with it.
If this resonates for you, then you, like me, might have lost sight of the fact that a human life isn't a system in the engineering sense. It's more like an ecology: tangled, self-regulating and full of feedback loops that get disrupted when you intervene too much. Systems respond well to being optimised. Ecologies don't. What optimising gives you is tunnel vision on the few variables you've decided to measure, and near-total blindness to everything else that's also shaping how you feel. Your sleep score goes up. Your enjoyment of evenings goes down. Your macro nutrients are bang on target. Your time spent with friends over dinner goes down. The data never shows you that trade. It just shows you the score.
There's a contradiction in here that doesn't get named enough. The people most consumed by all this tend to be the least satisfied. The score that's never quite good enough. The journaling habit that becomes a chore. The perfectly optimised morning that somehow makes the rest of the day feel like an anticlimax. A whole system built to make you feel more alive, subtly turning every part of your life into something to be marked.
And that's the real cost. You can't be fully inside something you're busy grading. The measuring pulls you back out of the very moment it was meant to improve.
None of this means the answer is to stop caring. This isn't me saying forget about all the things that help you to be healthy. You should definitely consider them. A lot of it has a great impact in allowing us to live our lives to the fullest, in a sustainable and healthy way. I'm saying, don't let it solely dictate anything. Don't slide to one extreme end of the scale, just because you're desperate to run away from the other extreme.
Getting 80% right 90% of the time beats getting 100% right 10% of the time.
Where I've landed is this: getting 80% right 90% of the time beats getting 100% right 10% of the time. Every time. I still track a few things. I still care about my health. But I don't agonise over hitting the exact number, because I'm not a professional athlete and my body isn't going to fall apart if I miss a few days. Close to the mark, moving in the right direction: that's still momentum. And the version of me that's less stressed, less obsessive, healthier and actually there for the small moments is satisfying in ways the Whoop can't measure.
Maybe the most countercultural thing you can do right now is decide that some parts of your life are simply off limits to measurement. That's not suggesting you've given up on them. Instead, you've realised the measuring gaze isn't capable of gauging what made them worth having in the first place.
The Editor's session
I'd take this one to the Motivator. Its job is to work out what actually keeps you moving, then build something sturdier around it. And that's the knot at the centre of this piece: for a long time the numbers were doing all my motivating for me, and taking them away left me worried I'd simply drift. The Motivator is where you'd figure out how to stay in motion without the score being the only thing pushing you.
For years my stats were the thing that kept me showing up: sleep scores, streaks, targets. I want to loosen that grip without losing the motivation entirely. Help me work out how to keep myself moving when the numbers aren't the ones doing it.
Back before the apps, when you first started caring about any of this, what actually got you moving on a normal day? Let's work out whether that thing is still in there, or whether the tracking quietly replaced it.
Something to think about
Think of one thing you track or optimise. If you stopped scoring it tomorrow, what would you genuinely lose, and what might you get back?
If something here landed, or opened something you'd rather not work through alone, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. The best issues come from real stories, so if this one stirred something in yours, write to me at desk@thinkfurther.uk.