The Hyper-Optimisation Threshold
How Making Your Life More Efficient Could Be Making it More Empty
I hate to break it to you, but your life is full of errors, inadequacies, laziness, immorality, and inefficiency.
So is mine.
The question is: what do we do about it?
With the growth of the internet, we’ve seen unprecedented congregation of like-minded people. Whether it be a mutual hobby, a political opinion, or a shared interest of some kind, it’s probably never been easier in human history to find a subculture of people who agree with you. What could possibly go wrong?
With this explosion in mass-produced niche content, we’ve seen self-improvement creep into mainstream thought. Whether it be Ali Abdaal telling you to type faster, Jordan Peterson telling you to stand up straight, or Jocko Willink telling you to do pull ups, you don’t have to go far to find advice on how to optimise your life.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with this; in fact, I’ve benefited massively from the internet-borne advice of several highly intelligent people. However, I believe the availability of this information is cultivating a counterproductive obsession with optimisation, or—at the very least—providing a means of aimless procrastination in place of meaningful work.
Let me explain.
Put Down Your Pitchforks
Just to clarify: there is nothing wrong with trying to live your life more efficiently and effectively. In fact, I would actively encourage you to do this. There’s an important distinction to make here, but first, let’s briefly cover why you should care about improving your life in the first place.
Reason 1: You’re Going to Die at Some Point in the Future
The finite nature of time not only means that you should spend it wisely, but that making small sacrifices for big long-term payoffs can be a very good course of action. Voluntarily facing discomfort on a daily basis ensures that as time passes, you continue to grow and evolve as a person. When describing his business philosophy in his autobiography, Phil Knight says this of his attitude toward growth and scaling:
“You grow or you die.”
In the context of your life, we could probably adapt this to something along the lines of:
“You grow and then you die, or you sit around and then you die.”
Not sure about you, but I know which one I’ve chosen.
Reason 2: Chronic Stress is No Joke
If you can systematically improve your life, then you’ll likely remove a lot of friction from your day to day proceedings. A 5% reduction in daily stress could be the difference between a healthy, well-lived life and a bad case of hypertension.†
These improvements are likely to pay dividends, especially if implemented early in your life. We can reasonably predict that there are a lot of days left in your life, and so making each of those days marginally better might be more beneficial than you realise.
Reason 3: That XP Bar Won’t Fill Itself
It’s a well-known truism that—at the end of your life—you won’t care very much about a lot of the meaningless tasks that you carry out. On your deathbed, you won’t remember all the times you checked your email, or sat through a mind-numbing meeting, or slaved away in a job you didn’t like to afford things you didn’t need.
This advice is almost sickeningly common, but I don’t think it’s very applicable. After all, you only die once.
Okay, so what’s something we experience on a far more regular basis? That’s easy: hardship.
Discomfort, trials and tribulations are all unavoidable facts of life. To accept this fact and move forward productively with your life, it’s necessary that you have a growing set of reasons to withstand this suffering. Life is supposed to be full of rich, meaningful, thought-provoking, challenging, and wonderful experiences, and these things rarely happen of their own accord.
In order to live the life you want to live, you must be willing to dedicate the necessary time. By living your life in a more optimised manner, you therefore move closer toward giving yourself the ability to reach your full potential.
Maximum Velocity
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
Many of life’s most meaningful pursuits are meaningful because it is impossible to speed them up. There’s no shortcut to building a strong intimate relationship. There’s no way to skip out on good diet and exercise if you want to improve your health. You can’t learn new things without exposing yourself to novel concepts and ideas. If these things could be hyper-optimized, they would no longer be meaningful.
Life isn’t about doing everything as quickly as possible. It’s about spending as little time as possible on useless activities so you can dedicate more to what really matters. Next time you find yourself optimizing your life at the detriment of actual productivity, I want you to recognise that you’ve crossed this hyper-optimization threshold. If you truly value your time, invest it where it matters, and if you don’t, then nobody will feel sorry for you when your bank account runs dry.
Never stop thinking.
- Will
† This isn’t a verifiable fact, but the sentiment remains: nobody likes the feeling of constant stress.