🌊 What Does “Optimization Culture” Accomplish?

The endless pursuit of optimization isn’t necessarily improving our lives

Jul 02, 2026

Last month, Oura launched its latest ring. With a starting price of $399, the company’s fifth iteration of a health-tracking wearable promises to put “50+ health metrics at your fingertips” with “no distractions.” It can track your blood oxygen levels, your resilience, and give you a Readiness Score at the start of your day.

This post isn’t specifically about the Oura Ring, though. The closest experience I’ve had with one is watching my roommate progressively stress about her Sleep Score until finally casting the ring aside in disgust. Now it sits on our kitchen counter, long-since charged, a discarded relic of her quest for optimal health.

But the news of the ring’s launch did get me thinking about the culture of optimization that now seems to be everywhere. From biohacking to looksmaxxing to all kinds of tracking apps.

While today “optimization culture” is everywhere, I remember when I first encountered it on YouTube a decade ago, promoted by the now-infamous Tai Lopez. Remember him?

Lopez was the guy who, while strolling in his garage, claimed to read one book every day. He’d point to his Lamborghini or Ferrari as manifestations of his success, and then the camera panned to the bookshelves he had installed beside the autos to “house the 2,000 books I just bought.” (First of all…who does that?)

At one point, Lopez tweeted this:

Your life should be dominated by only one main fear: not fully optimizing today. That’s the healthiest fear in the world.

But Lopez’s goal was not to learn from each book, but to complete it for completion’s sake. Never mind the joy of reading, or the empathy one develops from stepping into someone else’s experience and staying a while.

In 2026, Tai Lopez is part of internet lore, but his mindset of ultra-optimization is everywhere. We watch videos at 2X speed to save time. We don’t just take a walk for the sake of it: Instead, we walk the dog, listen to a podcast, and catch up on email all at the same time.

The number of gadgets and tracking apps available today mirrors that trend. A few weeks ago, a friend showed me a group chat where friends sent data in a kind of Sleep Score competition. The winner had a crown emoji next to her name.

Not long ago, smartphones provided us with limited data – daily steps or screen time – that now seem quaint. Today, products convince us that endless data, if harnessed correctly, could lay a roadmap for equally infinite opportunities to improve ourselves. But to what end?

I recently came across a video by Dr. Alok M. Kanojia, a psychiatrist and online streamer who goes by Dr. K on YouTube.

In Stop Optimizing Your Life. Start Living, he explains how obsessive optimization is transforming some of his patients into “Optimizer Bots” who pine after progress for the sake of making progress. He considers optimization unhealthy when it “doesn’t become a means to an end” but “an end in and of itself.”

This got me thinking about how priorities as laid out from a young age contribute to our intrinsic need for progress: I studied to get good grades. Then I got good grades to get into a good college. A good college for a good job. Good work to get promoted.

These rungs were tangible. I could look forward to them. But what happens when the visible signs of progress – a good grade, a promotion, etc. – dwindle? Perhaps we start to look for the most obvious thing that seems to always need mending: Ourselves.

I’m no stranger to this way of living. I used to start most days with a checklist of tasks I had to accomplish, or risk feeling like I wasted my day. It looked like this:

Work out
Write 1000 words of my novel
Progress in the development of a new skill
Play 30 minutes of guitar
Read three magazine stories

…and so on.

I considered any time not spent progressing wasted. It got to the point that I even streamlined watching sports, inherently a leisure activity. Why watch the first half when I could tune in to the last ~10 minutes of a close game and grab my dose of dopamine in less than half the time? Why not spend that time on something productive? That guitar needs learning!

I’ve since come a long way, but not without the help of a great therapist and some hard work. One of the first “homework” assignments she gave me was to partake in the most classic time-wasting exercise known to man: Reality TV. Pick a show, she said, and just watch.

So I did, and I hated it. But gradually, I noticed how allowing myself this break from chasing progress gave me time to refill my well. When it was time to get back to writing, reading, and playing guitar, I was excited. I stopped seeing these activities as more than tasks to be checked off a to-do list.

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Thanks for riding the wave. Now, back to the article.

In his video, Dr. K lists three optimizer archetypes. I want to focus on the last one: People who fear death. Time, he says, is the most limiting factor in the human experience. We optimize because we want to feel in control of something that is not in our control – in this case, death.

It kind of reminds me of when Marie Kondo, the popular decluttering guru who once preached her own branch of minimalism, changed her tune. “I realized always maintaining the perfect state of tidiness was not my goal, but spending time with my kids is. That’s what really sparks joy,” she told The Guardian.

Hearing this, I thought of an acquaintance who is fixated on optimizing his health and longevity: What he eats, how he sleeps, etc. A healthy lifestyle is important, of course. But does it become counterproductive when it becomes a constraint that impedes your ability to enjoy the parts of it that aren’t quantifiable: Time with friends, etc.?

And, if the goal is to delay death, then how much are these optimizations actually adding to our lifespan? Imagine all the time we lose by tracking data and optimizing each day; imagine the hours spent worrying, depriving yourself of experiences just to sleep 21 more minutes and satisfy a ring on your finger that told you to.

Do we really need the intricate statistics of an Oura Ring, or are we better off trying our best to eat healthy and exercise, and spend the rest of our time living, allowing ourselves to take pleasure in the things with no tangible result?

Because there will always be something else to do that is more productive. This goes along with what Dr. K says: “What is the problem you are trying to avoid solving? Every time you move toward something, what are you moving away from?”

By the way, here’s a short, cheeky video by The New York Times I think you’ll like. Make sure you watch to the very end.

Editor’s Note

Do you find yourselves obsessing over optimization? Have you found a way to overcome it? Let us know by emailing us here or leaving a comment below.

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