Optimisation Is a Cop-Out

Avoidance, cowardice, the poison of optionality

Memento mori, artist unkonwn

Daniel Cox, who runs the American Storylines Substack, has written a book called Generation Uncoupled, “a sweeping and empathetic survey of the new gender divide”, and he did an interview with Derek Thompson to promote its launch. Cox is a great follow on here, as with his substack the interview covers half a dozen topics of interest, including recent changes in dating, male and female loneliness, and the rise of “attention infidelity”. In the interview, he also touches on the subject of optimisation culture:

There’s a cultural dimension to all of this, as well. It’s not entirely that young people have fewer social opportunities, but that they are encouraged to prioritize their own personal experiences and expression. On social media, self-optimization culture teaches young people that the most coveted rewards in life are secured through individual effort and ambition alone…

It’s worth reading in its entirety.

I like Cox and I don’t know his full thoughts on the subject, and I don’t think he’s even wrong, but as with other occasions when someone mentions this subject I find that the criticism here doesn’t quite click with my own perceptions as to both where optimisation culture comes from, why it’s so sticky, and why it’s so bad, so I’m going to dig into that.

In that paragraph above, Cox positions his criticism of optimisation culture (henceforth OC) as individualism run amok. This is a variant of the most common criticism we hear of OC which is that it is an extreme and malign form of, or effect of, capitalism and consumerism. In this thinking we are encouraged to make ourselves better not just by buying more products but by sort of conceptualising ourselves as products and brands, kneading and trimming and monitoring in such as way as to make ourselves most covetable and desirable to others, with nothing except perhaps a core of quivering status anxiety at the centre. In this framework the attention of others is a kind of marketplace that we must continuously compete in, or lose our share, with society (corporate power) as the invisible boss for whom you have to keep upping your output in case he fires you.

While there’s something to this, the familiarity of it makes me suspicious. There’s a certain type of prestigious commentator who gets a lot of airtime, for whom “well of course the problem is really capitalism, consumerism and corporate power” are a kind of well-rewarded analytical tic. (To be clear, I am not talking about Daniel Cox himself.) These commentators can often be distinguished by the use of the qualifier “late-stage”, through which the speaker implies they have sight of a scoreboard and timer not visible to anyone else, and know the game’s already over. Even where these critiques are accurate they’re banal and so commonplace as to be barely worth making. It’s unremarkable to hear people say that consumerism, for instance, is bad, but it’s generally under-remarked by these people that life in a consumerist society is a lot more fun than not; since the alternative is mostly just societies with the exact same drawbacks but without the occasional piece of overpriced but colourful plastic shit to lighten the mood. These are often just critiques of human nature in disguise and so it is with OC. The overwhelming consideration in all situations is social status, and people will always use the technology available to them to boost that status, and to broadcast they’ve boosted it, which is mostly the same thing. Living in a corporate, capitalist and consumerist (or individualist) society influences the structure and flavour of how that framework operates but the underlying truth remains the same.

Moralist critics of OC from both communitarian and anti-capitalist/ consumerist perspective take for granted its premise that all you need to do to be happy is be as good as you can be at every point in your life. One group dislikes the enabling of corporate power and the linkage of money to that quest, and the other dislikes that “being as good as you can be” is directed inward rather than outward. Both dislike the idea that the continual quest for improvement is carried out in a mechanical and soulless way. But both accept the promise of optimisation as correct, which is that you should pursue constant self-improvement as hard as possible and in all directions at once, and that it will work to make you a better and happier person. To accept this is to accede to the tension at the heart of OC, which is that in a technologically sophisticated society, the number of datapoints outstrip your ability to monitor them and will quickly become an insurmountable burden; but the burden is unavoidable if the work is worth doing. The point is that the root of the problems associated with OC is not a societal quirk but something essential about humanity which both wings of the argument accept and are enthusiastic about, which is the importance of continuous, tireless moral improvement across all fronts, and of broadcasting to everyone you’re doing that.

OC is sticky, and sinister, because it plays on our neuroses that we’re not keeping up and not good enough - but it turns the distraction that creates into entertainment, by reframing this as a fun an kind of fulfilling displacement activity. Technology and particularly the internet does this with everything and it’s one reason why I laugh at people who are consdencing about gaming - because anything with a technological element, from social media to shopping, is gamified to the hilt - we’re all gamers now. We spend time optimising ourselves because it’s a fun and indulgent puzzle to solve that risks nothing but which we can also convince ourselves is worthy, which is the best kind of indulgence. Seeing it in this way helps us reassess and expand what constitutes OC. We like to characterise it as being a purely male phenomenon, because that’s an easy way to critique and dismiss it, and so we focus on the health and entrepreneurial forms. But one of the best examples of OC’s ubiquity, and how we pass a form of displacement via entertainment and personal indulgence off as moral nourishment, is therapy culture - which is much more appealing to women than men. Optimisation of mental health is considered an unalloyed good; but it’s clear that quite a lot of people engaging in the process of therapy are actually just doing it because they enjoy talking about their problems with a sympathetic listener, regardless of whether it results in any tangible change or improvement in their lives. I’m not dismissing therapy per se as I’ve used it myself, but I do think there is a trait of highly public and superficial reverence for it that definitely is worth dismissing.

There is something sinister about a system that disguises avoidance as personal growth work, and therefore laudable and nourishing. The idea that one can improve through optimisation is based in part on the lie that you can know what to work on, and work on it effectively in order to better yourself, without risking anything by engaging in life itself, which means personal commitments to and in front of others. There’s a TikTok I think of all the time that I saw on tiktok of a young woman in her early 20s who has never had a boyfriend, and is frustrated about that and is trying to explain her position. She’s upset that she hasn’t found someone that was worth disturbing her contented singlehood for, and is beginning to wonder if she ever will.

I find it fascinating that in the first couple of seconds of the video she says “I’ve done the work, I’ve been to therapy…”. Obviously this is a very artiuclate young woman and I’m an old guy long removed from the dating market but I must admit I find this a little sad, and an implicit indictment of the OC mindset. My first thought was - have you actually done any work on yourself? Because a person’s flaws and blindspots are mostly thrown into relief through interactions with others, and by risking something through commitment to them. She speaks about her type, but you don’t actually know what your type is until you’ve been out with a couple of different people, any more than you can learn how to drive by sitting in an armchair reading the rules of the road but without ever getting into a car. Like anyone inclined toward the written word I’ve been in that position (including in the pre-internet age) - where you spend all your time making lists and planning how you’re going to turn your life around instead of doing the small number of things that would actually help you conclusively find out what your problems and weaknesses are, and then seeing those through to their embarrassing, socially risky and uncertain conclusion; or even worse, committing to work consistently on a small selection of problems that can only be managed, not solved.

Something that is at play here which makes OC sticky is the experience of living one’s lives in front of a camera that both transmits live but also records for posterity creates a terror of making a socially damaging mistake, by say going out with someone who lowers your social status - the prospect of making a first move that is not the exact right one fills people with a paralysing horror, of publicly squandering precious optionality. These characteristics of the optimisation mindset are definitively forms of cowardice and avoidance, and they are doubly insidious as such because they come to you tarted up as signals of personal progress, growth and integrity.

One of the reasons, probably the main one, that I find the whole principle of the modern, extreme manifestation of OC absurd is that every area of my own life where I’ve made personal progress has been in direct contradiction of its principles. I lost lots of weight in my mid-twenties; I would love to tell you I cracked some code but the truth was I realised that proximity to temptation was temptation, and that I couldn’t have food in the house I wanted to eat. The second reason was that I moved next door to a gym. Isn’t that so hilarious and so absurd? The third thing I realised was that my maladaptive food habits were anxiety-driven, and my anxiety was itself driven by caring too much about what other people think - many such cases. That latter point will never go away and there’s no optimisation option available and nothing to do other than just manage it for life. I’m not a pure materialist, and I don’t think that practical circumstances are the only thing that you need to bear in mind when it comes to self-improvement or positive change. But it undermines the optimisation hypothesis that doing stupidly big and simple things, and accepting the unsolvability of certain problems rather than micromanaging them, could get you the majority of the personal improvement you’re after.

The only thing that makes me want to defend OC is the main reason people attack, which is that it is regarded as a distinctly male slice of online life. Optimisation’s connection to hustle culture and entrepreneurialism has the ring of Joe Rogan about it; because it uses technology it also has the ring of big tech about it, also deeply unhip. There is something about the need to catalogue, rank, rate and compare by picking over technical minutiae that’s distinctively male. This is often (in a colloquial sense) derided as autistic but it’s a mindset that can have all kinds of positive benefits when it’s acknowledged and appreciated, and harnessed by society in the right way and through the right institutions. Despite the fact that OC and the impulses that drive it are everywhere, and that each sector of society has their own maladaptive variants of it, critiques of it become de facto critiques of the awfulness of young men in particular because of its special connection to them and because that’s a safe outlet for that impulse.

I think a better and more targeted critique of OC is that it’s really just a very enjoyable displacement activity. Technology provides us with stress relief by giving us the illusion of progress and self-improvement, allowing us to express our anxiety by worrying away at a confected problem in a way that entails no personal risk, no more or less than football or celebrity gossip. The fact that, if broadcast in the right way, it can be used as a way to buttress social status with no real risk attached, is a point in favour of the long-term health of OC. For the millionth time, if any force drives human life, it’s social status, and proving you are getting better faster than those around you is as good a way as any to bolster it. If there is a villain in our current version of OC it is the combination of technology and social status together, the ubiquity of those two things and the incentives they create when mixed; and not individualism, or capitalism, or patriarchy, or anything else.

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