Self-Optimization: The Piece of Shit at the Center of the Universe

ALERT: My full-length essay on self-optimization culture is out now. Thank you to my paid subscribers for supporting this journey!

It’s the same old story:

Hard work begets success. 

It isn’t a story we are born understanding, but one we are beckoned into, coaxed by the promise of gold stars and unimaginable wealth. Children, rendered helpless by biology and circumstance, are well aware of the limitations of hard work. Yet the story prevails. 

It’s a reductive myth with no small number of creative spin-offs—from gold stars to institutional systems of punishment and retribution. Actions have consequences. The early bird catches the worm. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Do the best you can do until you do better. It's the narrative thread that runs through our economy, our education-industrial complex, our religious affiliations, and cultural norms. It’s pomp and pageantry, falling in love and filing for divorce, living and learning, from the scouts to the military, from cradle to grave. God helps those who help themselves. You reap what you sow. Karma always wins. 

But you know what else they say about karma. 

The story is the same across our sacred texts and children’s books. It permeates the legends and fairytales that populate our childhoods with heroes and villains, winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. Cinderella, for example, is born into abject poverty and servitude. Forces beyond her influence determine her fate. Nevertheless, she persists—in hard work, service to others, and disquietingly flawless character development. And eventually, her persistence and perfectionism are rewarded.

It’s the bootstraps myth in action—Cinderella, in all her perfection, conquering the rungs of society with a glass slipper and correspondingly tiny foot. It’s the myth that has driven so much of history in the United States and, by unfortunate association, the rest of the world. It’s ingrained in us from birth, encoded into our DNA— survival of the fittest. In other words, those with the advantage—or cumulative advantages—are winners. The winners prove themselves against the brutal forces of nature. The losers succumb. What it comes down to is survival. Eat or be eaten.

But in the end, it’s just a story and survival of the fittest is just a pithy term. Evolution is more nuanced—messier—than we’ve been led to believe. Fitness has little to do with perfection and everything to do with adaptability. It’s an entirely contextual concept—one that falls apart in a vacuum. An organism is “fit” only to the extent that it happens, by sheer chance, to meet the momentary demands of a dynamic and mercurial ecosystem. 

Yet, we have built innumerable hierarchies around the ever-elusive concept of fitness. We have packaged and sold it as something to be won—a place to be reached—rather than a flexible and iterative process of trial and error. Proponents of meritocracy are quick to quip: hierarchies are universal. It’s perfectly natural for organisms to arrange themselves into systems of power and subjugation. But hierarchies in the natural world are rarely fixed—as those in civilized society so often are. A predator to one is prey to another. An adaptive mechanism quickly turns maladaptive. Fitness turns out to be nothing more than good luck. Cinderella just happens to be beautiful—and aided by divine intervention. 

Like Cinderella, we are indoctrinated into a society where privileges are purportedly granted on the illusory, reductive concept of merit. Unlike Cinderella, we are given no straight route to success. It’s in your hands, we say, divesting those same hands of the resources required to ascend the proverbial ladder. If you aren’t healthy, you must not want it enough. If you aren’t beautiful, you haven’t spent enough time and money to get there. If you aren’t fit, you’re doing something wrong. After all, there are innumerable industries—backed by billions of dollars—dedicated to the murky objective of self-empowerment. You’ve been given plenty of options. The choice is in your hands. The ball is in your court—don’t you want to be a winner? 

It’s a compelling story—and we buy into it. As of 2020, the vast majority of people worldwide believed not only that the world should run meritocratically—but that it does. No matter our qualms, we are doomed to participate in the rat race, fixated on optimizing everything from workflow to our 10-step skincare routines. And even as the world descends more deeply into strife, warfare, mental illness, addiction, and other plagues of compulsive individualism, we persist in the delusion that the answer must lie somewhere deep within ourselves—beyond the toxins, the “limiting beliefs,” the traumas, the labels—the evil stepmothers—that are ostensibly holding us back. Because that’s how meritocracy operates to uphold the status quo. That’s how self-optimization becomes the only story we know. And like everyone else, I bought into it.