Personal Perspective: Optimizing your sleep and habits is fine. Optimizing your way to a deep self is impossible. How to start seeing with your soul instead.
Optimization is a blunt tool, a good tool for some things and the wrong tool for what makes life most soulful. The soul knows the difference between a meaning score of 4 and 8; the dashboard records what you said it was.
I've noticed a particular kind of exhausted I keep seeing in high performers. They've optimized their morning routine, their inbox, their gut bacteria, their sleep architecture, even their saccades — and somewhere along the way, they seem to have lost the ability to tell you what any of it is for. I am not throwing rocks from outside the house. I track my steps.
I track my macros. On bad weeks, I have been known to track my own emotional state in adatabase, which I will admit is a choice. When I tell you that optimization has no soul, I am throwing rocks from inside the house. After 25 years of studying human potential, here is what I have come to believe: optimization is a blunt tool.
It is a good tool for some things, but the wrong tool for most of the things that make life most soulful. When I was teaching at Penn, students would come to my office with spreadsheets tracking their sleep, their caffeine intake, their exam scores, their relationship satisfaction , theirpractice , and their sense of meaning . I would ask how the meaning score was doing.
More than one told me it had been around a 4 for months. I would ask what a 4 felt like. And one of them, very quietly, said:"I don't actually know what an 8 would feel like. I think I forgot.
" That is the optimization trap in one sentence. The dashboards will tell you that your sleep is good, your gratitude practice is consistent, and your relationship satisfaction is stable at a 7. They will not tell you that you have forgotten what an 8 feels like, because forgetting is the kind of thing dashboards are constitutionally unable to notice. The soul is the part of you that knows the difference between a 4 and an 8.
The dashboard is the part of you that records what you said it was. These are different organs.consultant in America for 60 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. — 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 recognize it when it shows up, and you can recognize when it has gone missing, and that recognition is itself a kind of Here is the punchline 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,, connection, beauty.
None of which has a metric. None of which can be optimized. All of which is exactly what people who can't tell you what their optimized life is Let me be crystal clear that I am not anti-optimization. There are real, useful, life-improving optimizations available to anyone with a smartphone.
But there’s an empowerment move fromI can still handle hard things. Yes, the world has been unfair to me, and I am still responsible for what I do next. 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 that make you a person.
Yes, track your macros. And no, your relationship with your body is not a system to debug. I was placed in special ed in third grade for an auditory processing disability.
Then 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:That was not an optimization. That was a person.
No dashboard would have flagged me for removal from special ed. No metric 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. Optimization measures throughput.
The substitute teacher was measuring potential, and measurement too often gets a person's potential wrong. This is why I call itPick one thing this week that you have been treating as a system, and let it be a relationship instead. Your body. Your inbox.
Your morning. Your kid. The friend you've been meaning to text for three months. You don't have to stop optimizing the rest.
Track your sleep. Batch your tasks. For the things it actually works on, it's 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.and his latest book isSelf Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist?
Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Honesty at the Table: Nourishing the Mind, Body, and SoulAt the heart of any meaningful exchange, whether a shared meal or a shared thought, are the principles of integrity and trust.
Read more »
The Soul-crushing Reality of British HospitalityA journalist's account of their experience with subpar British hospitality service, including poor portions, delayed service, and overpriced food. They highlight the challenges faced by the hospitality sector due to rising costs and food inflation.
Read more »
The Soul-crushing Reality of British HospitalityA journalist's account of their experience with subpar British hospitality service, including poor portions, delayed service, and overpriced food. They highlight the challenges faced by the hospitality sector due to rising costs and food inflation.
Read more »
Drew Carey goes on foul-mouthed rant about Spencer Pratt’s LA mayoral run: ‘F–k this guy’The comedian called the reality star a “serial scammer” with no soul.
Read more »