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Should You Optimize Your Life?

Steven Bartlett, the titular CEO from the Diary of a CEO podcast and YouTube channel, said in an episode last year that drinking three glasses of wine “ruined his life.” Having avoided alcohol for the previous year, Bartlett’s drinking a modest amount of wine apparently had a “domino effect” for the subsequent days, resulting in his skipping the gym, eating worse, and podcasting at a suboptimal level, along with other health metrics that took a hit, according to his wearable health monitor (called “WHOOP”).

While he was clearly being hyperbolic, for him, Bartlett’s experience underscored the detrimental health effects of alcohol and the importance of staying vigilant to his routine. For many others online, his reaction represented everything wrong with modern “tech bro” culture, which is obsessed with quantifying every aspect of one’s physical well-being. One commenter, in an Instagram reel that kickstarted much of the current discourse, argued that his issue with Bartlett’s reaction is “this endless optimization and measuring of everything, to the point where it starts to make you feel a bit miserable if you don’t quite hit your own targets…You can have ambitions and goals, get good at a skill, and do well in your life professionally, and also have a great time. Not everything has to be like work.”

Many others have since chimed in to agree. On his podcast, Ezra Klein opined in response to Bartlett: “And I do think people have this feeling of, like, well, what about enjoyment? Like, what’s the point of all this?” TV presenter Laura Jackson weighed in as well: “People are so busy tracking life we’re forgetting to actually live it,” she said in an Instagram post. “Most people’s legacy will be the people they loved, the laughs they shared and how they made others feel. Spoiler alert THESE are the things that matter.”

There’s good reason to think that Bartlett is overreacting to having a few glasses of wine: conventional wisdom seems to be that there’s nothing wrong with mild indulgence every once in a while, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up if enjoyable actions cause you to perform at less-than-peak levels for a little while. But what’s wrong with trying to live an optimized life, anyway? And is the problem in the pursuit of optimization itself, or what you’re optimizing for?

Some of our commentators seem to have an issue with the process of trying to “optimize” one’s life, in the sense of trying to meet some kind of ideal, quantified metrics pertaining to one’s health and well-being. The “WHOOP band” that Bartlett promotes, for instance, promises its wearer the ability to “measure & monitor everything,” including sleep, strain on your body, how well you’ve recovered, your stress levels, and vital signs. It also allows you to track the behaviors that may have helped or hindered those scores (for example, according to the promotional material, “read in bed” helps your sleep score, but “cat in bedroom” hinders it). Each metric is assigned a score, usually out of 100, and allows you to view trends over time in response to your actions.

For Bartlett, having a few glasses of wine made some of his numbers go down; not a terribly surprising result. But according to one critique, making sure the numbers stay high seems to be the wrong kind of motivation for living your life. The worry is that Bartlett is ignoring the simple fact that having a few glasses of wine with some friends is fun (so long as you do so responsibly, etc.), and having fun can be worth a bad night’s sleep or a so-so podcasting session. Sure, it is important to try to sleep well, get your steps in, and so on, but optimization shouldn’t be the goal.

One worry with attempting to optimize one’s life is that there might be value in being suboptimal: being optimal requires you to miss out on other valuable things in life that are enjoyable but a bit bad for you, and a person is overall worse off for not having these experiences.

We might wonder, though: when we talk about living an optimal life, what are we optimizing? Most of the factors Bartlett seems concerned with pertain to his health and what he considers good habits, alongside how he perceives the quality of his work. All of these things seem good, either for their own sake or for the sake of some other ends we might want to achieve. But there are potentially other goods out there, as well, that he doesn’t consider; as our commentators noted, pleasure is a good that is conspicuously missing from this list.

So is the problem with optimization itself, or what we consider to be the goods worth optimizing? Consider a hypothetical upgrade to the WHOOP band, called the BIG WHOOP. This new wearable health tech will not only measure all the stats you’ve come to expect – heart rate, sleep quality, your workouts and recoveries, etc. – but also how much you’re enjoying life. Just as you can input an activity to detect its impact on the amount you’ve slept, you can also track how much joy it brings you. Some of these factors will cause some numbers to go up and others to go down – e.g. cats might cause you to sleep less, but have more moments of happiness – and just as your health wearable will notify you that you’ve been too sedentary, the BIG WHOOP will also notify you if you’re not having enough fun.

We can then imagine a world where a wearer of a BIG WHOOP laments failing to optimize their fun scores in addition to their health scores. Maybe instead of drinking a moderate amount of wine, they skipped a social occasion to go for a run: good for your step count, but the trend line on the funometer is pointing distinctly downward. Optimization isn’t the problem; it’s just that the goods that optimizers tend to value the most are an incomplete set. Instead of just maximizing physical health and productivity, perhaps we could maximize a more complete set of values (“balancemaxxing” perhaps?).

Is this kind of optimization any better? We might still worry that in seeking to optimize our lives, even in a more balanced way, we miss out on important things. In an interview on the Galaxy Brain podcast, author Ian Bogost argues that too much focus on optimization results in our missing “the small stuff.” He considers the experience of cooking a meal: while he recognizes that cooking is done for a reason, there are lots of enjoyable aspects of the cooking experience that don’t “make sense to think about it in terms of goals and outcomes that you can optimize.” “What would it mean to optimize the sound of onions sizzling?” Bogost asks. “That you should like continuously do it? No; that doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a part of the experience.”

If we were to be a bit obtuse, we might argue that we could, in fact, optimize the sound of onions sizzling (e.g. too small a sizzle isn’t satisfying; too cacophonous a sizzle is a sign there’s something seriously wrong with your onions, etc.). But Bogost’s point is that while optimization conceives of everything worth pursuing in terms of a specific end, many of the most enjoyable things in life are experiences we have along the way. There may simply be some valuable parts of life that are unoptimizable, no matter how much we try.

None of this is to say that there isn’t value in setting goals around your health and trying to stick to them. Nor is there anything wrong with using a device that can help track various metrics associated with your health (even if it is called “WHOOP”). But life contains more goods than can be quantified by a smartwatch, and focusing too much on optimization comes with the risk of missing out on experiences one might have while behaving suboptimally. Whatever your equivalent of an occasional few glasses of wine is, it’s probably fine.

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Life, Death, and Aging: Debating Radical Life Extension

photograph of grandmother and grandson under blankets with a book laid down

An article from The Atlantic has resurfaced in the last week, sparking new discussions about the impact of healthcare on our end of life desires and decision-making. In 2014, Ezekiel J. Emmanuel articulated his reasons for wanting to die at 75 in a provocative op-ed. In 2019, he confirmed that his position has not changed. Emmanuel’s worry is that,

It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.

When polled in 2016, over half of people in the U.S. would not want to adopt enhancements that would enable them to live longer, more healthy lives. While 68% of those polled responded that they thought “most people” would “want medical treatments that slow the aging process and allow the average person to live decades longer, to at least 120 years,” only 38% of respondents said that they personally would want such treatments. In this same poll, 69% were almost in agreement with Emmanuel, that their ideal lifespan would be 79-100 years (only 14% said 78 or younger, and Emmanuel is actually in this small camp). There are many considerations that go into this preference.

One motivation against life extension is thinking that we are only deserving some natural amount of time on this earth, perhaps in order to fulfill a religious or spiritual commitment to “move on.” Over half of the respondents in the Pew survey considered treatments that extend life to be “fundamentally unnatural.” The distinction in bioethics between “treatment” and “enhancement” could be playing a significant role here; it is easy to justify intervention to make someone whole, to restore or to ensure a state of health. Such interventions are deemed “treatment,” and are more easily covered by insurance in the U.S. “Enhancements,” on the other hand, make one better than well, or do not have wellness as an aim. Of course, there are gray areas in medical interventions that don’t fit neatly into one or the other of these categories. Obstetrics, for example, doesn’t aim to treat an illness, but nor does it seek to “enhance” the future parent.

For many, considering a life without an end point is disorienting in the extreme. Philosophers from Martin Heidegger to Bernard Williams were committed to the idea that death – a final conclusion – is necessary for bringing meaning to life. If life’s meaning is similar to the meaning that a story’s narrative has, then we may think of it as consisting of stages, with different stages shaping the import and significance of the events that came before. If a life were to go on indefinitely, it could undermine the ability to shape a narrative or derive purpose in each stage. Radically or indefinitely delaying the conclusion can be seen to thus diminish or undermine the meaning in one’s life.

For many, the considerations against life extension are grounded less in theory and more in practice. If lives are indefinitely extended, this will increase the elderly population. The potential additional strain on environmental and social resources of the additional population could be cause for concern (a la Malthus). The impact on the economy, if living a longer life means staying in the workforce longer, could mean that young people have a harder time entering the workforce when competing with workers that have decades of experience. If those who extend their lives do not remain in the workforce, then different social pressures would arise – supporting a booming retired population, for instance. Regardless of the labor considerations, an extended lifespan could alter the shape and meaning of relationships. Marriages that previously consisted of a commitment of less than 50 years now may seem like unrealistic arrangements if people can anticipate living another 50 years past the average lifespan today.

Further, the practical considerations for and against radical life extension are enmeshed in our current understandings of health care, aging, and dependence. Our worries of becoming a burden to our loved ones should our health conditions require some degree of dependent living is contingent on governmental structures not providing support, either directly to those living with conditions of dependence or to those who will care for them. The way we consider the connection between dependence and burdening is also wrapped up in the way we value IN-dependence.

In the end, the theoretical question regarding the morality of extending the average human lifespan is inextricably tied to the realities of the social and political systems in which we live.