commit heresy

optimization is making you boring and mattefying your energy

This is a general call to commit heresy, but I have to start with my specific call, which came in the form of an email from my library:

“Your book is available at UCLA’s Young Research Library until 7/23, when it will be returned to The UC Berkley Library.”

Shit. I really needed this book — it’s an almost-impossible-to-find copy of Benefits of Leisure from 1990 (trust me, I tried eBay, world of books, Are.na pdfs, all my ol’ tricks, and no dice), and it contains an obscure article on spirituality and leisure that I’ve decided if I don’t read, I will die. Good news: The book is waiting for me at the library. Bad news: The library is on summer hours and is a minimum two-hour roundtrip drive.

The only day I have free in the extremely short window available for pickup time before my book is banished back to the Bay is a morning that I usually spend doing toddler things with my son. I’m thrilled to hang with him, but am I chomping at the bit to drive an hour-ish across town and then back again with him in tow? Seems rife with opportunities for potential meltdowns.

I do calculations in my head at the speed of light — how long will he be ok in the car early in the morning when he’s not likely to fall asleep? we can’t just get back in the car and turn around, he needs to get some energy out… where could we go on the west side that would be fun but not so fun that he doesn’t want to head back by lunchtime? should I bring the stroller or will he be want to walk from the car to the library? can I convince him to listen to the new Madonna album or will the Moana 2 soundtrack win the day again? — weighing whether it’s more inconvenient for me to schlep westward and pick up this book today or if it’s more inconvenient to pause my research for at least a month while the book returns to the Berkeley library before I can check it out again.

Gentle reader, I’m sure you’re hovering at the edge of your seat, waiting to learn how I blaspheme myself.

Long story short: took the drive, got the book, carried the toddler across campus, stopped at LACMA, had a meltdown, listened to Olivia Rodrigo on repeat.

I wasted money, I wasted time, I was not efficient, I did not optimize, I got distracted. It ruled.

Five deadly sins against the Church of Efficiency and Optimization — truly asking to be singed by the licking tongues of hellfire if you’re an ADHD brain like me.

walking the stacks (had to ride the elevator up to the 5th floor to look out the window, naturally)

optimization is your favorite hiding spot

Before I ask you to sin, I need you to understand: I am not anti-optimization. I love a system. I have read Essentialism every year since 2018, and David Allen’s Getting Things Done was the stark dose of reality that saved my life as a beginning entrepreneur.

And if your brain is shaped like mine — squiggly, distractible, easily excitable, highly imaginative — eliminating the inessential is the only reason the essential ever gets a turn. It’s how you get to do any work at all. Cutting the noise is a necessary kindness you do for yourself to maintain your cognitive capacity and creative function. I will defend this to anyone. The squiggle is real and it must be managed.

But.

It is possible to over-essentialize. To get so good at eliminating the inessential that you eliminate the stuff that was inefficiently feeding you. You offload all extra thinking to AI agents, or same-day delivery apps, or automated grocery drops. You optimize the noise out. And then optimize the texture out. And then you’re left with an uncannily smooth image that sort of resembles life, but is a poor simulation of the real. And one day you’re living a life with no opportunities for wrong turns, detours, drives across town, no meltdowns in a museum courtyard, nothing that didn’t earn its slot on the calendar, and you cannot for the life of you figure out why everything feels like it’s happening behind a thick layer of glass. You optimized your one wild life into a clean, quiet, climate-controlled oblivion. And now you’re bored and uninspired, and trying so hard to focus, but there’s nothing to focus on because you’re so uninspired you haven’t come up with an idea to make anything new in a long ass time.

So I’d like to invite you, gently, to come commit a little heresy against the Church of Optimization in the name of re-enchantment.

Not to burn it all down. Just to leave a door open for mystery to slip in.

taken all the way to its logical end, “eliminate the inessential” will eventually eliminate the thing your essential work runs on

Your work — if it’s creative work, if it’s your work and not a task someone handed you — runs on inputs. On glimmers. On the wink from the universe that you can only catch sight of if you’re standing in the right spot and not paying attention to your phone. And you cannot receive a glimmer in a hermetically sealed room. (That’s very much not what airtight rooms are for. Like, actually airtight rooms are for tasks like controlling the spread of contagious diseases like ebola, which feels pretty pretty different than the vibe we’re going for.) You optimized away distraction, and distraction, it turns out, is also the delivery mechanism for everything interesting that was ever going to happen to you.

So this is the part where I tell you that in order to do your work, you sometimes have to not do your work. yaaaaaaaay.

I’m not talking about not doing your work “as a break.” Not as “self-care” so you can return to the grind more productively (that’s optimization wearing a Sleep No More mask as a “disguise” — we RECOGNIZE you). I mean it as method. Pulling your head up and going out into the unoptimized world is not the thing that interrupts the work. For a lot of us, it is the work — the input-gathering phase that the head-down phase depends on completely and takes zero credit for.

If you’ve been here for a bit, you know I’m on a whole “re-enchant the world or at least your life” kick. And I feel strongly that becoming a heretic — about almost anything, but especially for the Church of Optimization — is a necessary move for those who dream of a world with more live-ness.

commit heresy!

Heresy can be a spiritual and creative act. To embrace your inner heretic is to question the status quo and find it lacking. Free yourself from the shackles of hegemony, embrace heresy.

In a world that worships at the altar of AI-powered “productivity” and optimizing everything from your sleep cycle to your bowel movements, become a heretic simply by resisting the frictionless path. You’re not a lubed up dildo. A little friction won’t kill you.

Tiny acts of heresy you can commit today:

• Every time you want to buy something, get it from a real in-person store. (I promise you, this will actually save you money from so many angles) rive, take the bus, crouch for the bottom shelf, spend the forty minutes of not-finding-it that come before the finding. On the way you’ll pass six things you weren’t looking for, and one of them will turn out to be what you were actually looking for.

• Take the weird way home. Let the errand grow a second, useless limb — the museum bolted onto the library run, the detour that serves no mission and that you could not defend in a meeting. (This is the one that’ll make your inner COO wince… let her ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

• Resist the allure of the Claude Daily Dashboard. Just be normal and take two minutes in the morning to do a high-level peruse of your email inbox and calendar before you jump in and start firing off missives.

• Actually email your customers to ask them for feedback. Don’t do it in a Google form or an Instagram question box. I’m being deadly serious here. Go to your email service provider. Create a list of your most dedicated subscribers. Email each of them individually and see if they’ll answer some of your questions via email, or better yet, hop on a quick 15-minute call with you to give you some feedback about the products and services you offer. Be a person talking to other people. THIS WILL SADLY AND RAPIDLY BECOME VERY RARE IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS.

• If someone tells you to “show them the ROI” on an idea that’s titilating you or an action you derive great pleasure from or a piece of art you’re making, politely decline.

• Get the photos printed at the weird film shop and talk to The Guy who has opinions. The app that mails you a matte finish in three days optimized The Guy away. The Guy was kind of the whole point.

None of this will make you more efficient. But that’s the sacred part. Keep your systems — my dogeared copy of Essentialism remains on the shelf and so should yours, it’s a great book. Just cut an escape hatch in the sealed room. Because a room with no door is just a very spacious coffin.

See what happens when you stop hiding behind the good girl rules of optimization. Find your act of heresy, and commit to it. I’ll see you in hell!

More on re-enchanting a life that's gone a little smooth…

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