• Lifehacked To Death

    Images: “In & Out” and “In the City” by Fabrice Fouillet, h/t to BLDGBLOG

    Last week I wrote a response to this piece by Anne Helen Petersen “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation”. In that piece I considered the role of precarity in burnout, and how our current societal configuration, particularly in America contributes to it. In this note I’d like to pick up another thread from that piece which is the rise over the past ten years or so of lifehacking as a cultural meme or as I sometimes think of it optimization culture. Optimization culture branches off from the self-help culture of earlier decades by divorcing itself from concepts of spirituality or purposefulness. This makes it a more viral concept because it becomes about a naked pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness, which today is viewed as an unalloyed good.

    By stripping away any baggage of human purpose to focus on pure execution, optimization culture purports to offer something for everyone. By hacking your life and, for example, becoming a hyper optimized meal-prepper and only cooking once a week, you could create more time to run your non-profit feeding the homeless! The idea is that lifehacking is politically agnostic, that you simply optimize the unimportant parts of your life in order to work more on what is important to you. It could be anything! It’s probably something great.

    What is insidious here is that in fact, the operative words here are: to work more. The reason you cook all your food on one day and eat the same thing all week out of the microwave is not so that you can go for long walks and stare at the clouds, or have long and wide-ranging conversations with friends, it’s so you can hustle harder. As you may guess, this is not in fact a neutral, apolitical ideology or world view. Optimization culture is a system in which we turn ourselves, our very lives, particularly the parts outside the workplace, into factories and assembly lines. Management theorist Peter Drucker wrote “What gets measured gets managed”. Optimization culture turns us all into amateur CEOs of startups of one, measuring and managing our lives.

    The popular narrative is that this is empowering. We are taking control of our destiny! We’re improving ourselves! We’re chasing our dreams! In fact, we are giving over more and more of our lives to the market monetary economy. In meal-prepping the act of cooking and eating, something which can be a site of creative joy, community and caring for others, becomes a solitary assembly line. When we hyper-optimize these basic human functions, we are fitting ourselves more and more into the mold of that interchangeable capitalist robot, the rational economic actor.

    The reason I feel the need to challenge this narrative is that I am vulnerable to it as well. I am also obsessed with personal productivity, with optimizing my time and myself, with striving to become effective. I am not criticizing from the sidelines, I’m in the middle of this too. And if you are a meal-prepper, I don’t mean to single you out for unique criticism. I get it, we are all trying to survive here. But as someone inside it with you, I think it’s important that we consider these questions of what these contemporary ways of living are doing to us and the people we love, and question whether in fact they are wise and good, and also ask if there are alternatives available.

    PS: Yesterday was newsletter day which is why there was no post, if you’d like to sign up for my weekly newsletter via email you can do so here.

  • Newsletter Day

    Normally I’d leave this page intentionally blank today as I send out my weekly email newsletter, but since I missed a day of blogging yesterday due to flying back home from New York to Berlin with the kids, I’ll just leave a short note to remind you that if you’d like to get more thoughts, music and interesting articles not by me, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. The link to do so is here.

    The newsletter is a slightly different, slightly more private and personal way for us to connect. Today’s was the second edition. The subjects for today’s newsletter were: Breaking out of the narrative tunnel (by me), some music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and a piece by Glenn Greenwald on the MSNBC war machine.