So You Want To Break Free From Self-Optimisation Culture?
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There’s been a lot of conversations happening over the past week about just how toxic self-optimisation culture is, thanks to Steven Bartlett’s melodramatic claim that drinking a few glasses of wine ruined three days of his life. And honestly – I’m relieved. As someone who has been writing about optimisation culture for the best part of nine months, I sometimes feel like I’m talking into the ether. So I’m delighted that more people are realising that it’s one of the great plagues of modern times.
I started How To Be Less because, as a health and wellness journalist, I was writing a lot of articles designed to help people improve their lives, which sounds all well and good. But after going through a period of burnout, I realised that there is simply too much advice out there around how we can self-improve (much of which I was contributing to). This guidance meant that I I was prioritising an optimised life — one in which I was maximising my time, energy, productivity levels and health — rather than a happy one. And it was making me miserable.
I wanted a space on the internet to interrogate this culture. I was and am perplexed at how we’ve reached a point whereby efficiency is the metric by which we measure the success of our lives. I wanted to think about how we got here, and where we go next.
A lot of the content I’ve seen around self-optimisation this week points out how absurd optimisation is. But the solutions are often too simplistic. “Just relax!”, Loosen up!” “Ditch your Whoop and eat McDonalds everyday!” But it isn’t that simple. For so many of us, optimisation is embedded into the way we live our day-to-day lives and think about ourselves. It’s not as easy as just taking a day off and doing something fun, or having a big night out every now and then.
In fact, stepping away from self-optimisation culture is a lot harder than keeping up with it. There’s no health tracker you can wear on your wrist that will tell you you’re doing it right. Leaning back into being human and living a happy life for the sake of it is complicated, especially if optimisation has become part of who you are without you even realising it.
Plus, there are some merits to wellness culture. Exercising more, eating healthier and getting better sleep is good for us. It’s not that we should stop caring about these things altogether, just a little less than a lot of us currently do.
In fact, if I’ve learnt anything from trying to disengage from self-optimisation culture, it’s that it isn’t just as easy as slowing things down, switching your brain off or quitting wellness. Self-improvement can play a role in our lives and I’m not suggesting that we never work hard again, or give up on anything that involves pushing ourselves.
To get over optimisation culture, we can’t go under it, we can’t go over it – we have to go through it. And by that,I mean that we have to tackle it with a critical lens. It’s not as easy as optimise or don’t. It’s about thinking deeply about what it means to build a happy and fulfilling life, which is confusing at the best of times, never mind when there’s billions of pounds of wellness marketing being shoved down our throats on a daily basis.
That’s where How To Be Less comes in. This is a space to think about the various ways optimisation culture impacts our lives. It’s not just about strict gym routines or cutting back on alcohol. Optimisation shapes what we do with our free time, it impacts how we process our emotions, it distorts how we think about taking care of ourselves and it’s fuelling various political crises.
I think the key to untangling yourself from the web of self-optimisation is realising how deep it runs societally. But it’s also a deeply personal journey, and I share plenty about my various attempts to step away from self-optimisation culture too. I’ve written about how it shaped my self-esteem, my ability to spend time with myself and some of my biggest life decisions.
Free subscribers to How To Be Less will receive essays on all of these topics and much, much more in their inbox on the first three Friday mornings of each month.
And starting this month, I’m excited to be launching a new offering as part of my newsletter: Unoptimise, a monthly guide to meaningfully stepping away from optimisation culture, which will feature:
A few ways I’m unpacking my own relationship with self-optimisation each month.
Journal prompts to help you consider your own relationship with optimisation.
Articles, book and podcast recommendations to help you think more critically about wellness culture.
And, a guest feature from someone wise and wonderful, who is successfully unoptimising their life.
Paid subscribers will receive Unoptimise in their inboxes on the final Friday of each month for £4 per month. From next week, paid subscribers will also have access to audio versions of every newsletter.
I’d really appreciate you becoming a free or a paid subscriber and I’d love to hear from you in the comments about what you enjoy about How To Be Less, and what you’d like to see more of.
Thanks for reading!
Alice x
excited for this series!!
That line about “efficiency as the metric we measure a life by” lands right in that hollow place where a woman’s nervous system is wired to optimize even her free time and still never quite feel alive inside it.
The way you’re building How To Be Less as a slow, critical un‑training ground feels like exactly the kind of gentle rebellion she needs: not quitting care, but shifting from self‑surveillance to a life that actually feels good in her body, not just on her tracker.