The Illusion Of Optimization: Why Treating Your Life Like a Metric Is the Reason Successful People Feel Less Than People Who Have Nothing

Why do I treat my own life like a metric to be optimized?

The same instinct that hunts external targets has been pointed inward, and the target is now you.

The Hunter does not care what it is hunting. It just needs something to acquire, secure, or improve. When the external world runs out of obvious targets, or when the targets stop producing reward, The Hunter looks for the next available territory. The most available territory is the self. The body, the routine, the productivity, the sleep, the diet, the discipline. All of it becomes new ground to be optimized.

Pernualism names this as one of the more sophisticated forms of escape. The escape from facing what is actually happening inside you is disguised as the project of improving yourself. Every optimization is real. Every metric is real. The improvements are real. The thing being avoided is also real, and it is the actual you that exists underneath the metrics.

I do this. There are months where I notice I have stacked the day so densely with optimizations that there is no space left to be a person. The version of me being optimized is a surface. The version underneath has been waiting for permission to be inhabited instead of measured.

The Pernualist read is not that optimization is bad. Some optimization is useful. The position is that optimization without contact with the underneath self becomes a costume for avoidance, and a costume that takes effort is the most expensive kind.

The intervention is one question. What part of you have you been improving so that you do not have to meet the part you have not improved. Answer it honestly once. The answer changes how the next optimization gets selected.

Why do I keep raising the bar after every win I have ever had?

Because the bar is not a fixed thing. It moves to wherever the last win landed, and then the next win has to be above it.

In Pernualism this is the natural product of adaptation, which is built into the human being at a structural level. Humans adapt to whatever they are exposed to repeatedly. The body adapts to temperature. The mind adapts to weight. The reward system adapts to wins. Whatever you achieved consistently becomes your new baseline, and the baseline does not register as a win anymore. Only what is above the baseline registers.

The math gets cruel. The thing that would have changed your life five years ago is barely noticeable today, because your baseline absorbed it. The next thing has to be bigger. When you get the next thing, the baseline absorbs that too. So you have to go bigger again. The treadmill speeds up. You stay running at the same pace. Eventually the treadmill is going faster than the speed at which you can feel anything, and you wonder why winning feels like nothing while you keep winning more.

The Pernualist position is to disconnect the experience of winning from the comparison to the baseline. The win is the win at the size it actually is, not the size it is relative to what you have already done. This is harder than it sounds. The brain wants the comparison. The comparison feels like measurement, and measurement feels like progress.

You do not stop the adaptation. You change what you measure. Measure the win against zero, the position of someone who has none of what you have. That position is closer to reality than the baseline you forgot you set.

Why do successful people feel emptier than the people who have less?

Success was supposed to deliver something it cannot deliver, and the people with less are still being kept alive by the belief that it can.

This is one of the more honest observations Pernualism makes about modern life. External achievement does not produce the internal condition that people are promised it will. It produces a temporary state that dissolves and has to be re generated through new achievement. The people who have less still believe the achievement will fix the internal condition, because they have not yet hit the level where the absence of the promised fix becomes visible. The people who have more have hit that level, and they cannot un see what they saw.

The successful person is not unhappy because of his success. He is unhappy because his success removed the story that the lack of success was the reason for his unhappiness. With the story gone, the unhappiness is bare, and the bare unhappiness has no obvious cause to attach itself to, which makes it heavier than the unhappiness of the person who still has a story.

Pernualism’s structural position is that nothing that operates against the core nature of a human being produces lasting fulfillment. External achievement is not against the core nature. It is just unrelated to it. The core nature of a person, the page underneath the writing, is not satisfied by acquisition. It is satisfied by alignment with itself, which has nothing to do with success.

This does not mean stop succeeding. It means stop expecting the success to do the job it was never built to do.

The emptier the successful person feels, the closer he is to noticing what was actually missing all along.