The Optimization Trap
We are over-optimizing. We need more connection.
As the new year begins and resolutions are everywhere, this has been on my mind, partly because I’ve been wrestling with it myself.
Over the last few days, I found myself racking my brain about what my own resolutions should be. More structure. Better habits. Clearer goals. And then I realized I was doing something I’ve been noticing more and more in our culture.
Optimizing.
We’re surrounded by messages about how to do life better. How to wake up earlier, think clearer, work harder, exercise more, eat healthier, recover faster, stay sharper. Even rest has become something to systematize.
I recently listened to a conversation between Steven Bartlett and Chris Williamson. What stood out wasn’t advice or tactics, but something quieter. Despite their success, both were still circling the same feeling. Never quite doing enough. Still chasing the sense of being enough.
It sounded very familiar.
It mirrors conversations I have every day with ambitious, high-achieving clients. People who are capable, driven, and thoughtful, yet carrying a constant internal pressure to keep improving, tightening, refining. As if pausing would mean falling behind.
And this isn’t something I’m only noticing professionally. I’m thinking about it personally too. As a parent. As someone raising children in a culture that increasingly equates worth with output.
What concerns me isn’t ambition. It’s the absence of relief.
By relief, I don’t mean rest as another strategy or permission to disengage. I mean the feeling that you don’t have to be improving in order to be okay. That there are moments in the day where nothing is being measured or optimized. Where you’re not subtly tracking whether you’re ahead or behind.
When that relief is missing, people don’t usually slow down. They keep going. They stay busy. And over time, being with other people starts to feel like something to fit in, rather than something that actually restores them.
So many of us are trying to optimize everything. Our routines. Our health. Our work. Even our healing. On the surface, it looks like growth. In practice, it often creates more pressure and, at times, real suffering.
When optimization becomes the primary lens, connection quietly moves to the background. Time with others becomes something to fit in. Presence becomes conditional. Rest has to be earned.
And yet, when we eventually look back on our lives, I doubt we’ll be thinking about how efficient we were or how well we optimized our days. I suspect we’ll remember the people who mattered. The relationships that shaped us. The moments where we felt known, understood, or simply connected.
As this year begins, I keep coming back to a simpler question. Not what do I want to accomplish next, but what do I want my life to be about?
For me, the answer keeps pointing in the same direction.
Less optimization.
More meaningful connection.
That feels like a good way to begin.