In my yoga classes, I’ve been working through thoughts on this word: optimization — a concept we’ve become so entranced with as a society.
I’ve spent my whole life trying to optimize my existence. From as young as I can remember, I was taught that my existence as a woman was formed around how I looked. I’ve been sold a life that required endless self-hatred, using my energy and life force to prove I’m worthy of attaining anything. I was taught — through the adults around me, advertising, movies, and my peers — that I should be seeking the attention of men. The endless question of “do you have a boyfriend?” or “who do you have a crush on?” was pretty much the only thing people were interested in asking me.
Which generated a lifelong habit of worrying about how I look — and not only from the perspective of being attractive enough, but of being enough at anything. From school to sports to career, it’s been a lifetime of chasing enoughness. I’m certain I’m not alone in this.
Multi-billion dollar corporations have not only transformed food from a source of nutrients and sustenance into a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem that pads the pockets of the wealthiest on the planet — producing things that aren’t actually food, they are part of a system that constantly seeks to redirect our attention. This matters, because eating food that isn’t genuinely nourishing keeps us unwell. And when we’re unwell, we’re in a perpetual state of seeking something that will restore our health. It’s a loop.
And loops, once running, run you. I know this from the inside. For years I’ve caught myself returning to the same thought: there’s not enough time for everything I have to do. In that loop, I manifest exactly that — not enough time. I take on more than I should, I agree to things I don’t want to do, and I chase my own exhaustion.
The body learns what it’s fed. And not just food, thoughts too. Returned to often enough, a thought becomes a belief. And that belief, in one form or another, tends to say the same thing: I am broken, and I will have to break myself further in order to be fixed.
This is precisely what the system exploits. They’ve turned consumerist theology into such pervasive unhealth that they’ve used that very ideology to provoke anxiety in every corner of our being — not only economic anxiety, but anxiety in our nervous systems, the precise thing that drives every single action we take. An unregulated nervous system is exactly what they want. Because when we don’t feel safe in our bodies, we will consume anything to soothe that ache. And everything we’re offered to consume — every product, every idea, every piece of marketing — is designed to direct our attention toward what serves them.
They don’t want us to feel good. So the system is designed to extract unhealth from us — and within that extractive system, they’ve brilliantly woven in products, fads, ideas, and science for us to obsess over, so we feel some semblance of control. Create dysfunction, then introduce the word optimization to ensure the culture becomes fixated on how we can live longer, work more efficiently, and wring every ounce of sustenance out of everything we do.
Green juice, supplements, fitness fads, apps, cold plunges, and watches that calculate every moment of our lives — all designed, once again, to hold our attention and our spending in the direction most beneficial to billionaires.
What happens when we’re all fixated on how to optimize our sleep, eating, drinking, breathing, beauty, fitness, sex lives, menopause, ageing, brain function, social lives, work, and finances? It simply compounds our collective anxiety and deepens our sense of not-enoughness. It does the precise thing that pulls us outside of ourselves instead of inward — away from listening to our bodies. In fact, listening is so foreign to most of us that we’re no longer sure what our bodies are trying to share. We’ve gone numb to it.
I feel like I’m radically shifting my relationship with my own life in ways I’ve never known before — by practising acceptance. Accepting my physical imperfections (the wrinkles and crinkles), my emotional states, and bringing less onto my to-do list.
My lack of doing and accomplishing, and my acceptance of years of struggle, has brought me to a realization: my fatigue also comes from chasing enoughness. From sitting in the most uncomfortable places — the hollow of uncertainty, the ache of not-enough — until something quieter emerges. Not a solution. Just a moment to be human, to slow down, and to listen.
In yoga, I teach that looking at what drives our practice matters. Is a posture being shaped from a place of perfectionism, or can it be an exploration of both strength and softness? The same question applies to how we move through our lives.
When I shift my mind from constantly believing the lie — there’s not enough time — I begin to redesign how I do everything. I see the story for what it is: a story constructed to keep me caught in anxiety, rather than actually inhabiting the quality of life I want to live.
Liberation from optimization culture doesn’t begin with a new system or a cleaner product list. It begins in the body — in the willingness to sit with discomfort rather than consume our way out of it. To trade the relentless pursuit of better for the radical act of enough. To stop outsourcing our knowing to billionaires and start listening to the oldest intelligence we carry — the one that has always known what we need, if only we’d go quiet enough to hear it.
with love, Noelle