Optimised to Death: Control, Anxiety, and the Marketed Self
This piece began with a frustrated observation on Instagram. Gill was scrolling through fitness accounts when she exclaimed how often the word 'optimise' appeared. 'Optimise your morning routine.' 'Optimise your recovery.' 'Optimise your mindset.' It was everywhere. It struck us that as a society, we’ve started to see ourselves not as people with needs and rhythms, but as products to be improved, marketed, and sold. (Optimise according to whom and for what purpose?)
In a world where we can track our steps, heart rate, sleep cycles, productivity, and even our emotional states, the self has become something to manage and optimise. We no longer simply live our lives, we project them, quantify them, and curate them. The modern self is a project, a brand, and increasingly, a problem to be solved.
At the heart of this cultural moment is a fantasy of control. If we can just find the right routine, productivity system, or health protocol, perhaps we can stave off decline. Perhaps we can outrun fragility. Perhaps we can cheat death. If health is virtuous then ill health implies some personal moral failing.
This fantasy isn’t new. But in recent decades, it has become dominant, fuelled by wellness industries, tech culture, and a wider economic logic that encourages individual solutions to collective problems. What’s missing in this picture, often deliberately obscured, is the role of shared meaning, community care, and the capacity to live well within human-scaled limits.
The Self as a Project
Contemporary life asks us to be constantly improving. We become our own managers, coaches, and critics. This isn't just a shift in language, it’s a profound internalisation of economic logic. The idea that every individual should operate as a small business, constantly increasing their personal value, has reshaped how we understand growth and success.
Selfhood becomes a dashboard: an ever-updating interface of metrics, feedback loops, and performance indicators. We compare, measure, optimise, and correct ourselves not to reach fulfillment, but to stay competitive: socially, professionally, even romantically. The old external disciplinarians: bosses & institutions, have been replaced by an inner voice urging us to work harder, sleep smarter, train better, never plateau, and treat even rest as something to optimise.
The trouble is, this pursuit has no endpoint. The demand for improvement is infinite, but our time, energy, and attention are not. When the drive to be better never pauses, exhaustion becomes the baseline.
The Illusion of Health as Mastery
Wellness culture promises that with enough discipline—whether through superfoods, meditation apps, or wearables—we can take control of our future. But beneath this promise lies an old anxiety: the fear of being out of control. Of aging. Of dying. It’s an anxiety that has been expertly monetised.
Rather than making peace with that truth, we are sold routines and rituals that simulate control. Health becomes a badge, an emblem of success, as if wellness were a prize won through discipline and devotion. We document, share, and display our efforts. And when something goes wrong, we internalise the blame. The illusion of control becomes a burden: if you get sick, didn’t you fail somewhere along the line?
This turns health into a moral referendum. Illness isn’t just misfortune; it’s a deviation from the plan. But health is not a guarantee. And it is certainly not a moral virtue.
How We Became Data and Branding the Self
The idea of treating ourselves as systems to improve isn’t new. The early 20th century saw the rise of scientific management; a drive to streamline human labour into efficient, repeatable tasks. Reduce complex tasks and relationships to easily quantifiable metrics and pretend they reflect the messy totality of real life. (Often this ‘efficiency’ was just an attempt to de-skill & disempower craftsmen, reduce their bargaining power and re-label them as interchangeable factory workers.) That logic has since spread from factory floors to morning routines.
In recent years, it has taken on a new sheen—more lifestyle than labour. Track your steps, your macros, your focus hours. The modern self is a dashboard, complete with metrics and performance reviews. Some embrace this with enthusiasm, seeing their bodies and minds as experiments or even IPs to market. Others feel quietly overwhelmed, unable to keep up with the daily calibration. Either way, the message is clear: your worth is in your output.
But it’s not enough to be healthy or productive. You must also be seen to be healthy and productive. The rise of social media has collapsed the boundary between doing something and performing it. Meals, workouts, morning routines, they all become content. We see this in the constant celebrity revelations of daily 3+ hour wellness routines that can be emulated via consuming lifestyle brands like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop or buying magic potions from your favourite podcaster.
In this landscape, even self-care becomes an aesthetic. And vulnerability - real, messy, offline vulnerability -has little space to exist. (Though even performative vulnerability can be commoditised.)
What We’ve Lost
In a culture of optimisation, we are trapped in Hannah Arendt’s conception of labor: the endless upkeep of the self, measured through routines, rituals, and performance. The scale of our systems, markets and social networks leaves little space for reciprocal forms of care or community-driven support. We are encouraged to address social disconnection with personal improvement, rather than with structural or collective repair. But we are starved of opportunities for action; for the kind of public, relational life that builds shared meaning and transformation. Self-care, when isolated from community or politics, keeps us focused on maintaining ourselves rather than repairing the world around us.
The rise of self-care culture, while sometimes well-intentioned, has placed an extraordinary burden on the individual. We are told that the solution to burnout, anxiety, or loneliness is more personal effort: another bath, another journal, another mindfulness app. But this emphasis on self-care as a solo practice diverts attention from the systemic, organisational, and cultural forces that shape our wellbeing.
It also lets institutions off the hook. Instead of building more humane workplaces, equitable healthcare systems, or accessible community infrastructure, the message becomes: fix yourself.
As our lives have become more managed and curated, something has quietly disappeared: informal care, shared rituals, community meaning-making. Health is increasingly outsourced to professionals or apps, and support becomes a subscription. In the process, we've allowed something essential to erode: the idea that we are fundamentally interdependent. Old relationships of reciprocity and mutual aid have been replaced with quantified transactions and underpaid gig workers.
Modern systems encourage us to treat care as a service we consume rather than a relationship we nurture. But not all forms of care scale. Not everything meaningful can be monetised. Loneliness, disconnection, and purposelessness aren’t glitches in personal growth; they are symptoms of a society that has outsourced care to apps and services. They are social fractures that resist technological solutionism or individual fixes.
Some thinkers have argued that we have lost the tools to live and die with dignity in community. Friendships and community wisdom have become professionalised and credentialed. We’ve come to see suffering as a glitch to be patched rather than a shared part of life. And that when we frame every experience as a solvable personal problem, we isolate ourselves from the networks of care we actually need.
A More Human Way
The optimised self is a lonely figure. It hustles alone, rests alone, and often burns out alone; often blaming itself for not doing better. Its life becomes a loop of metrics and mirrors, each reflection another demand for improvement.
Maybe there is another way. One that treats health as a relationship, not a score. That finds meaning not in tracking or productivity, but in presence, connection,care & community. Not in the chase, but in the pause.
Remember that data and algorithms can only point to the past; they compel us to serve the needs of the systems defining metrics to serve their own purposes. To step away from the cult of self-optimisation isn’t to give up. It’s to return to the unruly, uncertain rhythms of human life: imperfections that don’t need fixing, conversations that aren’t recorded, afternoons with no metrics attached. To begin again, on more human terms.
And maybe, that return begins not with grand declarations, but with a shift in attention. A willingness to slow down. To notice. To refuse the demand that every moment be efficient. To be aware of the social, economic, and algorithmic forces that are instrumentalising you into a fungible value producer. To re-engage with what surrounds us: what doesn’t ask to be sold or shared, but simply exists. This isn’t about retreat; it is a subtle form of defiance, a kind of civic resistance. A remembering. A re-entry into the world as it is, not as a project to be optimised, but as a place to belong. So don’t worry about optimising yourself for some external consumption or internal evaluation. Instead engage in activities that are meaningful to you and the people around you.
Unfortunately anything that isn’t performed on social media is often ignored or dismissed. How do you even begin to criticise these structural and technological forces without becoming part of the noise? There’s inherently a whiff of hypocrisy whenever we bemoan the problems of existing online, while existing online. Krazenberg famously said that, ‘technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ It is a tool and we can decide when and how to use it and when to reject it.
For further reading:
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. Twelve, 2018.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015.
Illich, Ivan. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. Pantheon Books, 1976.
Kranzberg, Melvin. "Technology and History: 'Kranzberg's Laws.'" Technology and Culture, vol. 27, no. 3, July 1986, pp. 544–560.
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House, 2019.
Russell, Cormac. Rekindling Democracy: A Professional's Guide to Working in Citizen Space. Cascade Books, 2020.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. Human Scale. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980.