Some people have a gift for polemics. I am not one of them. Two of my personal favorites are Lauren Oyler and Martin Luther. Their takedowns, even when excoriating, are bathed in clarity and passion. But that club is a small one, and even if I possessed the necessary chops – which I do not – I don’t think I’d apply for membership. It is too scary a vocation for someone of my disposition. Only an extraordinarily detestable target could lure me into a screed. I would require a topic that not only reeks of malign associations but gets under my skin in a singular way. Something like, say, optimization.

There is a meme that makes the rounds every new school year among parents of elementary-school-aged children. I’m pretty sure it originates from the initial Covid lockdown, but the punchline still lands. A middle-aged man stands in a crowd with hands on hips, his facial expression the epitome of Not Amused. Above the picture someone has produced a message from a teacher. “Just log into Zabelzoot, scroll down to the Zork! App, and have the kids work through the assignments sent through Kracklezam.”

The meme’s staying power lies not so much in its spot-on lampooning of the make-learning-fun website names but in the exasperation of parents at the convoluted processes through which they’re expected to guide kids these days. In theory, “Zabelzoot” or its real-life equivalent is supposed to make communication between teachers and students easier. Rather than print out an assignment and hand it to your teacher, you just click to turn it in. And yet I spend as much time troubleshooting the various homework programs on my sons’ computers, updating the software, and filling out endless two-factor authentications as I do helping them with their homework. It is a crazy-making experience that leaves everyone frustrated, tired, and not remotely in the mood for learning.

The experience is emblematic of the tyranny of optimization. Peruse the internet or talk to peers at a party, and you’ll hear a dozen new ways to consolidate your energy, maximize your efficiency, organize your priorities, and make life more manageable. We are inundated with things that promise to make us, as Daft Punk puts it, better, faster, and stronger.

French sociologist Jacques Ellul uses the term technique to describe our obsession with streamlining everything under the sun. In The Technological Society, he defines it as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” Technique aims to bring efficiency to everything in life. Anytime we use machine logic and apply it to humanity, we are in the realm of technique. For example, we don’t refine our morning routine so much as “hack” it. We don’t make the most of a vacation; we optimize our time off. Technique is so ingrained in our day-to-day that we hardly notice it. Optimization, I’d suggest, falls under the header of rebranded technique.

There’s nothing wrong with conserving our time and resources or with wanting our lives to run more smoothly. What’s wrong, Ellul argues, is that technique doesn’t accomplish these goals. Technique promises to make life more convenient, affordable, and seamless but in practice makes it more draining, expensive, and complicated. Each new technique we adopt for the sake of greater control creates problems for which we instinctively look for another technique to allay, and so on. If you want to view your child’s grade on the homework, you’ll need to set up an account with Drumblekick. You get the idea. The first reason I’d be tempted to write my screed against optimization, then, is that it doesn’t optimize. Optimization promises to cure headaches, but then it gives them.

The pattern of the spiritual life, if we take Christ as our model, is not one of nonstop productivity or engagement.

I have another, deeper reason optimization almost inspires me to polemics. The lingo of optimization sneaks the idea that we are machines into our common language and self-understanding. This should go without saying but it bears repeating: you and I are human beings, not machines. We are created, not manufactured. We are not “wired” in a certain way. There is no code in our veins. The heart cannot be hacked any more than the mind can be downloaded. These metaphors can be useful, but when we default to them, we risk enshrining productivity as the be all and end all of human existence.

Before long, the same parents fumbling with Kracklezam are reluctant to enroll their kids in any afterschool activities that don’t produce measurable growth in their child’s development. Fun, play, friendships, faith – also known as the most important parts of childhood – these things soon take a back seat to activities that promise a quantifiable outcome. This is all well and good when it comes to machines, which are essentially instrumental; they exist to produce specific outcomes. But when a human being’s value is reduced to the output he may or may not produce, dignity is the casualty.

Christians have an added reason to decry this sort of optimization, namely that efficiency is foreign to Jesus. His time management was abysmal; he did not make strategic use of the resources at his disposal. I cannot imagine an individual with a less machine-like modus operandi. Jesus took breaks, sometimes at inopportune times. When a storm raged on the Sea of Galilee and his disciples started to panic, Jesus napped in the front of the boat. Jesus never succumbed to the hurry and hard-nosed calculation that characterizes a culture of optimization – sometimes to the detriment of those in need of healing.

Very early in Mark’s Gospel, before Jesus has had a chance to do much of anything, he withdraws to a deserted place to pray. Jesus takes a deliberate pause from healing the sick and casting out demons. “In the morning, while it was still very dark, [Jesus] got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do’” (Mark 1:35–38). The pattern of the spiritual life, if we take Christ as our model, is not one of nonstop productivity or engagement.

The disciples do not follow their teacher’s pattern. Worry prompts them to seek out Jesus the moment he goes missing. They interrupt his prayers, getting in the way of his time with God. “Everyone is searching for you,” they say with unintended irony. Jesus does not mirror their anxiety, but neither does he give them a lecture about the perils of optimization. Instead, he responds with patience, kindness, and a renewed focus on preaching the gospel.

But there is a final reason that invites me to write against optimization, the most serious of all. When the “self” prefix gets attached, optimization becomes, to use Pauline language, a “ministry of death” (2 Cor. 3:7). This is a bold but not a hyperbolic claim when you consider the isolation, inequity, and despair that self-optimization generates and perpetuates.

“Self-optimization” has become a go-to euphemism for what used to be known as self-help. The word’s evolution foregrounds the perfectionism that was always inherent in more rigorous forms of self-help while deftly leveraging the therapeutic element of self-care, thereby lending the whole operation a moral sheen.

According to the school of self-optimization there exists an ideal version of you, and your main assignment in life, as an adult of substance and value, is to enflesh that apparition by whatever means necessary. It is time, in other words, to become the person you were always meant to be, the main difference being that you now have smart-tech to monitor your every step and ensure that you are taking the most well-informed and efficient route to the new you. Self-optimization is a data-driven approach to self-realization.

Self-optimization is almost always a solo act. Nearly everything we do to get our numbers up – of books read, of REM hours slept, of miles run, of meditation minutes logged – involves doing things on our own. The self-absorption isolates us even further from one another at a time when loneliness reigns over every demographic of the population. The church of self-optimization imprisons us in our skull-sized kingdoms when what we need most is connection. It advocates a very narrow form of self-care, which is really not care for oneself (or others) at all. Vox reporter Allie Volpe laid out the cycle in vivid terms:

Companies market skin care products, for example, to prevent the formation of fine lines, supposedly a consequence of a stressful life. Consumers buy the lotions to solve this problem, lather themselves in solitude, and feel at peace for a little while. Once the anxiety, the exhaustion, and the insufficiency creeps in again, as it inevitably does, the routine begins anew. Buy a new eyeshadow, a bullet journal, Botox, a vacation to fill the need for care that never seems to abate.

Because buying things does not solve existential dread, we are then flooded with guilt for being unable to adequately tend to our minds and bodies. We just have to self-care harder, and so the consumerism masquerading as a practice that can fix something broken becomes another rote to-do list item.

Self-optimization relies upon and exacerbates the endemic narcissism of our age. Under the auspices of relieving stress, it places a new burden of loneliness on already heavy-laden women and men.

And it places a financial burden on us as well. Self-optimization is very big business. At the close of 2024, the wellness industry in the United States was worth north of two trillion dollars. The salvation this industry heralds is available chiefly to those who can afford the products and services on offer, whether those be never-ending weekly therapy sessions, boutique gym memberships, or intravenous cocktails of bespoke vitamins. Modern wellness, as the writer Sophie Gilbert puts it, revolves around “a self-sustaining doom loop of precautionary, aspirational consumption: buy to be better to buy more to be better still.” Her description sounds more like a curse than a path to serenity, a treadmill of scrutiny and indulgence that barely masks its capitalistic agenda.

Make no mistake, any gospel available only to the well-heeled and youthful, to those of high energy and/or high net worth, is no good news at all. At least it resides miles away from the gospel of Jesus Christ which seeks the lost, the least, the last. Blessed are the poor in spirit, not the poor in toxins. To write against self-optimization, then, is to write not only against loneliness but against one of the more heartless forms of privilege.

Here the ink in my polemic pen runs dry. I can’t help but think that the overwhelming popularity of the push for self-optimization must be understood, at least in part, as a measure of the exhaustion, dissatisfaction, and discouragement many feel today. The embrace of the Thou Shalt Treat Thyself mandate constitutes a cry for help (and relief!) of mammoth proportions. It serves as an indication of the degree to which my neighbors are hurting, worn out, and aware that, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, “there is no health in us.” This is something I am not only sympathetic to, but that I feel in my own bones. Speaking of compassion, I do not mean to suggest that all self-care can or should be subsumed under self-optimization. I think for example of the Al-Anon program, the sister organization to Alcoholics Anonymous that stresses the principle of self-care to people who have largely abdicated their sense of who they are to another person’s drinking. A far cry from Oura rings and productivity trackers.

As a Christian I write against optimization because I write against despair. I aspire to write in defense of hope.

But I find one last damning piece of evidence in my case against self-optimization: the despair it instills in those who internalize its goals most deeply. The entire pursuit of optimization implies that our graphs of personal metrics will slope endlessly upward. Therein lies its cruelest delusion. Every one of our life-logging charts will eventually trail off. Age will rob us of our faculties. No matter how many supplements we chug, retreats we attend, or lifestyle coaches we hire, our bodies will break down. Self-optimization is a law without any possible fulfillment, and therefore a recipe for despair. It pits us in a battle against time that no one can win. As a Christian I write against optimization because I write against despair. I aspire to write in defense of hope, and hope does not include delusions about self-salvation.

Thankfully, my faith refuses to let me view optimization as some foreign force that preys upon unsuspecting men and women. Our culture may foster beneficial conditions, but the push toward optimization is so effective, and ironically enough, efficient, because of the foothold it finds inside every human heart. You and I love optimization because we love the control it promises. What is the allure of measurement if not the allure of personal dominion? That if I can study my data closely enough I can manipulate its direction? Alas, once that line starts heading south, we all know where it ends. It stops in the graveyard.

And yet there are worse places to find oneself than in a cemetery, surrounded by symbols of heavenly rest. Given the fumes of optimization we’ve been inhaling, we may find that the good news emblazoned on so many tombstones shines much brighter. Who knows, we may come across an epitaph or two that speaks of a God whose specialty lies in the sanctification of unoptimized souls. We may read of a Lord who does not deal with any of us according to our productivity but according to the generosity of grace. We may even overhear words from the burial service about a Father who welcomes into arms of mercy sinners of his own redeeming.