Rejecting the Gospel of Self-Optimization
By: John Thomas
Tags: Christianity, Self Improvement, Spirituality, Culture, Religion

What do Marie Kondo, life hacks, and Calm, the meditation and mindfulness app all have in common? They are part of the steadily growing gospel of self-optimization movement. As noted by one tech writer, “If 2018 was the year of peak self-care, 2019 might shape up to be the year of peak self-optimization.”

Another article explains, self-optimization “has long consumed tech culture, where it’s been used to justify everything from gulping down nootropics to ceding control of your home to Alexa,” and is a “hyper-disciplined fixation of productivity.” This effort to optimize leaves very few corners of our lives untouched. On Instagram there are photos of agendas curated to impress and utilized to conquer the limitations of self. There are Reddits and sub-Reddits dedicated to pursuing efficiency via peak performance and whole websites chronicling life hacks.

The other side of the self-optimization coin is minimalism, achieving greater productivity by decluttering that which is no longer necessary from our lives. This side of the gospel of self-optimization is perhaps best personified by Japanese organizing sensation Marie Kondo. Pintrest, Instagram, Netflix, and many others, disseminate a call to minimalism as a way to become the best and most free version of ourselves.

A New York Times essay from 2016 commented on the rising trend of minimalism within the greater context of the gospel of self-optimization, stating,

“Minimalism is now conflated with self-optimization…Often driven by technol­ogy, this optimization is expensive and exclusively branded by and for the elite. In Silicon Valley, the minimalism fetish can perhaps be traced back to Steve Jobs’s famously austere 1980s apartment (he sat on the floor) and the attendant simplicity of Apple products.”

Though our commitment to the gospel of self-optimization might mainly manifest itself in our purging of closets and wearing of fitness trackers, underneath this false gospel is something quite troubling. An article at Real Life magazine described the insidious nature of the gospel of self-optimization well. The article describes an ad for an energy drink that rhetorically asked “What if people had a battery-level icon, like your phone?” The ad then shows various people moving around their day with said icons, all in the red. However, once the sluggish people slam an energy drink, their batteries are replenished and they are transformed into machines that can do anything the day throws at them.

The idea undergirding the commercial and the gospel of self-optimization is that people are machines. The article comments on the commercial, saying,

“Self-optimization becomes a form of piety: privatized labor of personal responsibility as public good. This plays out as a commitment to efficiency, as in ‘if you’re not optimizing your life for the benefit of your work…you are dead weight…’ If work is life, then professional imperatives are moral imperatives too. This portends a condition in which health is indistinguishable from productivity.”

Seeing the gospel of self-optimization in this way reveals the shaky foundation upon which it is built. It reduces people to cogs in a machine; the life hacks, energy drinks, apps, and even Marie Kondo become a kind of lubricant designed to make us work more efficiently. The beneficiaries of such a gospel are clear to see when viewed in this way. We think it is ourselves, but really it is the employer who stands to benefit most when their machines are working at peak performance.

The Times piece pointed to Steve Jobs as the founder of this gospel, at least the minimalist side of it, but in reality the quest for self-optimization and ultimate efficiency traces its roots to a time long before the advent of the information technology age. It was Henry Ford and the assembly lines he used in the production of the automobile that first reduced people to the role of machine and sought efficiency as the greatest good.

Even the car itself and the “point A to point B” mentality it inspires expose an early version of self-optimization. If in our cars we can go from here to there faster, and get lunch on the way (at a drive through without having to truly interact with another person) we can get more done in our day.

If we take a bird’s eye view of this logic we can see just how ridiculous it is. Consider the human life, it begins with a “point A,” birth, and ends with a “point B,” death. If the goal in life is machine-like efficiency — getting from point A to point B as quickly and cheaply as possible — then the greatest good is literally suicide.

None of this is to say that cars or smartphones are inherently bad. The problem doesn’t come from using them, but from trying to find in them the meaning of life and the way of transcendence. Technology changes us and the way we live. We need to be intentional lest we buy in to the false gospels that proliferate in tandem with those new technologies. We need to ask questions of them and admit their limitations. And above all we need to remember that we are not them. We are people, not designed for ultimate efficiency.

Getting lost on a walk, spending unhurried time with a friend or beholding nature, are good things, not in order to recharge our “batteries,” but in and of themselves. We don’t need to try and “transform every minute of our day into economic value.”

It was Elon Musk who said, “nobody ever changed the world on a 40-hour work week.” I guess Musk has never heard of Jesus.

John Thomas is a freelance writer. He has written for Mere Orthodoxy, Christianity Today, and Desiring God. He writes regularly at medium.com/soli-deo-gloria.

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