The optimization trap
Optimization has one structural flaw, and it is fatal: there is no finish line. You can always be a little better. A little earlier, a little leaner, a little more productive, a little more present. The standard moves with you, because the standard is "more," and more is not a destination. It is a direction with no end.
This is what makes the optimized life so tiring even when nothing is wrong. You are not recovering from a defeat. You are running on a surface that keeps rolling backward, so that standing still feels like falling and the only relief is to run faster, which resets the surface again.
Psychologists named a version of this long ago. Brickman and Campbell called it the hedonic treadmill: we adapt to improvements, our expectations climb to meet our circumstances, and the new normal feels as ordinary as the old one did. Buy the better thing, reach the better number, and within weeks the better thing is simply the thing. The treadmill does not break. It recalibrates.
What is new is that we have turned this private trap into a public project. We measure sleep and steps and focus and gratitude. We optimize rest itself, which is a sentence that should stop us cold. Rest was the one activity defined by the absence of a target, and we have given it a target. There are now ways to be bad at relaxing.
I am not against measurement. I spent years in insight, and a good number can cut through a great deal of self-deception. But a number is an instrument, and an instrument is meant to serve a purpose you have already chosen. The optimization trap inverts that. The number becomes the purpose. You no longer measure because you want something. You want the measurement to go up, and you reverse-engineer a life around making it move.
The question that breaks the spell is almost rude in its simplicity. What would enough look like? Not better. Enough. A weight, a salary, a level of output at which you would set the dial down and say, this will do, and turn your attention to something that is not yourself. Most of us have never specified it, because the culture we live in treats "enough" as a failure of ambition rather than the precondition for a life.
Try to answer it and you notice how little practice you have had. The number you reach for tends to be the current number plus some. Enough is always slightly ahead, which is another way of saying it is nowhere. A target you can never arrive at is not a target. It is a treadmill with good branding.
There is a different way to hold a standard. You can aim at a thing outside yourself, a piece of work, a person, a problem worth solving, and let "good enough to serve that thing" be the bar. Then the bar sits still, because it belongs to the work and not to your vanity. You finish when the work is served, and you are allowed to stop.
So here is the test I keep failing and keep returning to. Name the point at which you would be satisfied. If you cannot, you are not chasing a goal. You are feeding a machine that was built to stay hungry. What number would let you off?
Emily Hunt-Adiletta OBE is a bestselling author and keynote speaker.
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