I peaked in 2019. Career trajectory pointing up and to the right. Side projects generating buzz. LinkedIn presence curated to the pixel. I had a color-coded calendar, a five-year plan, a personal mission statement printed on cardstock and framed above my desk. I was optimizing my sleep, my meals, my commute, my friendships, my hobbies, my rest. I was, by every metric the culture offered, crushing it. I was also so unhappy I could taste it. Like pennies on the back of my tongue. This persistent metallic awareness that something was fundamentally off, but I could not name it because the vocabulary I had for my own life only included words like growth, momentum, and upward trajectory. There was no word in my operating lexicon for: what if this is enough and I am just not allowing it to be. So here is my counter-optimization manifesto, six years late and completely unprofitable: you are allowed to be average. Not as a stepping stone. Not as a temporary rest stop on the way to exceptional. As a destination. As a life. You are allowed to be ordinary and let that be the whole story.

The Tyranny of Potential

The cruelest word in the English language might be potential. Every report card, every performance review, every well-meaning mentor who looked at you and said you could be so much more if you just applied yourself. Potential is a life sentence disguised as a compliment. It says: what you are is not enough, but what you could be is magnificent, so the gap between those two things is your permanent assignment. Close the gap. Always close the gap. The gap is the only thing that matters. Cigna's 2024 loneliness index found a striking correlation between self-reported perfectionism and social isolation. People who feel constant pressure to optimize their lives report fewer close friendships, less satisfaction with existing relationships, and higher rates of loneliness than people who describe themselves as comfortable with good enough. This makes intuitive sense once you think about it. Optimization is a solitary project. It requires constant self-surveillance, and self-surveillance is fundamentally incompatible with the vulnerability that genuine connection demands. You cannot simultaneously monitor your performance and be present with another person. The attention only flows one direction. I think about Waldinger and Schulz's work at the Harvard Study of Adult Development often, specifically the finding that the people who were happiest at eighty were not the people who had achieved the most. They were the people who had the warmest relationships. Not the most relationships. Not the most strategically cultivated network. The warmest. The most honest. The most imperfect. And the path to warm, honest, imperfect relationships runs directly through the willingness to be a warm, honest, imperfect person, which is to say, an average one.

Permission to Just Live

I quit my side projects in 2022. I stopped tracking my sleep. I deleted the five-year plan. I did not replace these things with anything. That was the point. The absence was the thing. I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped performing improvement and just existed for a while. What happened was uncomfortable and then boring and then, very slowly, something I can only describe as peaceful. The discomfort came first because my entire nervous system was wired to interpret stillness as failure. The boredom came next because it turns out unoptimized life has long stretches where nothing is happening and nothing needs to happen. The peace came last, arriving so quietly I almost missed it, when I realized that the boredom was not a problem to solve. The boredom was the proof that I was finally safe enough to be understimulated. The Survey Center on American Life found in 2021 that Americans are spending less time with friends than at any point since records began. We are more connected and less connecting. And I think part of the reason is that we have turned ourselves into projects. Projects do not have time for aimless lunch. Projects do not sit on the phone for an hour talking about nothing. Projects are efficient, goal-directed, measurable. And projects are desperately, structurally lonely, because efficiency and intimacy are nearly opposite operations. I make dinner most nights now. Nothing special. Nothing Instagram-worthy. I go for walks that do not count toward a step goal. I read books I will never discuss at a networking event. I spend entire Saturdays doing laundry and watching bad television and calling my mother. None of this is optimized. None of it is building toward anything. And I am happier than I have ever been, which I suspect has less to do with the specific activities and more to do with the fact that I am, for the first time in my adult life, not treating my own existence as a problem that needs solving. You do not owe the world your maximum output. You do not owe your potential a performance. You are not a rough draft of a better person. You are a person, here, now, in your ordinary life, and that is the whole thing. It is enough. I promise you. It is enough.