The Age of Optimisation

I am halfway down the stairs before I remember. I run back up to the bathroom and slip the Oura ring onto my finger. Eighty steps, uncounted. Eighty steps, wasted. This is how it begins.

The readiness score is a 78. It has been more than three weeks since I’ve had a crown—a score of 85 or higher, the gold standard of sleep, exercise, stress, and diet. The numbers say I am not well-rested. The numbers say I am not ready. And I believe them.

I bought the Oura ring to sleep better, to curb my habit of going to bed too late and waking up sluggish. I thought the tracking would make me calmer, more disciplined. Instead, it became another measure of failure. Another statistic to fall short of.

After a year, I stopped. The ring, the app, the scores—they had become another kind of weight. But even now, I still think about those eighty steps.

From Optimising Factories to Optimising Ourselves

Optimisation was not always a word. Not the way it is now. It began in the factories, in the mines, in the fields where people were turned into numbers, and numbers into profits. Make things faster. Make them cheaper. Reduce the waste.

Medicine followed. Health became something you could track, measure, tweak. Cholesterol, blood pressure, BMI. Your body as a series of fluctuating graphs. By the 21st century, people no longer just wanted to live—they wanted to optimise.

The market responded. The digital health industry is worth over $288 billion. Every year, we spend more money learning how to live correctly.

But what is the cost of living as a data point?

The Rise of Metric-Driven Living

Everything is a metric now. How many steps. How many minutes of REM sleep. How much screen time. How productive you were. How attractive you are.

There is an entire movement, the Quantified Self, that believes measuring life means controlling it. They track their heart rates, glucose levels, calorie intake. They track their mood. They track their relationships. They trust the numbers more than themselves.

I did too. I would wake up feeling rested, then check my sleep score. If the number was low, I felt tired. If the number was high, I felt better. Reality, rewritten. My body, a machine.

The Death of Craft

I worked in advertising. We used to talk about craft. Craft was the thing that made work good—the extra thought, the refinement, the attention to detail. It was human.

Now, what matters is output. Managers track productivity, not quality. The algorithm decides what sells. The creative process is another metric.

Seventy-eight percent of workers now feel pressured to quantify their contributions. If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t scale, it isn’t worth doing.

Optimisation kills craft. It kills originality. It kills the slow, meticulous work that makes something beautiful.

The Anxiety of Suboptimal Living

There is always a best way. A best time to wake up, a best way to eat, a best way to exercise. Optimisation culture tells us we are always choosing wrong.

So we optimise harder. We eliminate inefficiencies. We track more, compare more, worry more. We fear wasting time, wasting effort, wasting potential. It doesn’t help that we are told success is a formula—do the right things, get the right outcome.

But it doesn’t work that way. Life does not function like an algorithm. And yet, we persist.

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What Resists Optimisation

There are things that cannot be optimised. Beauty, for one. Scientists say symmetry and the Golden Ratio make a face attractive. But I think about all the people I have loved, all the faces that have stopped me in my tracks. None of them were perfect. None of them followed a formula.

Love cannot be optimised. Nor can grief. Nor can art. Some things are diminished the moment they are measured.

Cultures that prioritise experience over efficiency report 27% higher life satisfaction. Even measuring that is ironic.

Reclaiming Depth in an Optimised World

We track because we do not trust ourselves. We optimise because we are afraid of doing life wrong.

But what if there is no best way? What if the goal is not to improve, but to live?

The best things are the ones that cannot be measured. The quiet moments. The feelings that defy language. The parts of life that are messy, inefficient, and real.

Maybe the real way forward is not better tracking but learning how to stop looking at the numbers. Maybe it is stepping away, leaving the app unopened, forgetting the steps. Maybe it is feeling rested because you feel it, not because a device tells you so.

Maybe it is learning to live unoptimised.