Why Optimization Culture Is Making You Miserable

Scott Galloway (0:01)

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Scott Galloway (1:20)

Welcome to a bonus episode of The Prof G Pod. Beginning this week, we're bringing you an Extra Conversations episode on Tuesdays. More time with people who help us think differently about work, life, and what matters. Today, we're joined by Oliver Burkeman, a writer and journalist known for his work on productivity, mortality, and the power of limits. We discuss with Oliver takeaways from his books, Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, the trade-offs between living in the present and building towards your future, plus why embracing AI shouldn't become the organizing principle of our lives. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Oliver Burkeman.

Oliver, where does this podcast find you?

Oliver Burkeman (2:08)

I'm in the North York Moors in Northern England.

Scott Galloway (2:12)

As one does. How did that happen?

Oliver Burkeman (2:15)

We lived in Brooklyn for a long time. West American, and then in 2021, we moved here planning to come for a year and we just stayed.

In hindsight, I think we were just a pandemic data point. It felt like a very original life choice at the time, but I think a lot of people did something similar.

Scott Galloway (2:33)

So, you have two best-selling books and they essentially make what I would say is a similar argument, that the way most people chase productivity is backwards, and that our drive for control and perfection isn't making us better, it's making us miserable.

We've argued a similar point, that optimization culture is less about improving life than is about anxiety beginning to devour it. How would you diagnose our modern obsession with optimization and quote unquote maxing culture?

Oliver Burkeman (3:03)

I don't think the underlying psychology is necessarily new. I think we have new opportunities to indulge it and go completely crazy with it, but I think that just huge amounts of all sorts of things that we do in life can be understood as trying to avoid confronting our finite nature, trying not to realize that we have finite time, finite control over that time, finite talents, finite ability to predict the future, etc.

As I've written, I was obsessed in a very straightforward way I think with productivity for years. I wrote about it in The Guardian, I was doing it in a kind of a wry, sardonic British way, but I think I was hoping, maybe mainly unconsciously, to reach the moment at which everything was under control, and I could handle all the demands that were thrown at me and be perfectly efficient in that way. It took a very long time to start to figure out that that was, it was never going to happen, and it was never going to happen for reasons that had baked into the human condition. So anyway, I think it's a lot worse now because there's so many, and if we're even going to talk about the role of AI in expanding our sense of what it's possible for a human to do, but that sense that eventually to be productive in a way that matters, and especially if you want to enjoy the process, you have to confront those limitations instead of constantly trying to outrun them.

Scott Galloway (4:39)

How would you describe or how can someone identify and distinguish between healthy discipline and an optimization mindset that goes overboard?

Oliver Burkeman (4:54)

It's a really good question. I think it's one of the struggles of my life. I'd like your opinion. I mean, for me, I think you identify it partly in the effects it has.

So, if it results in that mindset of constantly living for the future, constantly feeling like you're almost at the point of dominance and vanquishing but you're not there yet. If it makes you busier, which I think sort of control-oriented productivity actually does for reasons we can talk about if you want, then I think that's a pretty good sign that it's not working. But also the question of the place that it's coming from, for me for years and still to some extent today, the motive was like if I can get to this point, if I can work hard enough, handle everything efficiently enough, be sufficiently productive, then I'll reach the minimum level of being able to feel okay about myself. I think that everyone who falls into this category of insecure overachievers is doing that same thing, trying to get up to the baseline.