How Self Improvement Is Actually A Trap | The Deep

A 2025 study reports that over 30% of Americans say they're in optimization mode, trying to get healthier, wealthier, and happier with smart shortcuts. In the wellness marketing industry, Gen Z and millennial life hack junkies are known as the maximalist optimizers. They are the strivers who want to live their best life. And we have built a massive online ecosystem of trending hacks like longevity pills, supplements, biomarkers, cold plunges, hormone injections, exercise regimens that would make a marine cry, and the list goes on.

The maximizers are, in many ways, truly impressive. I mean, these people are motivated. In their quest for wellness, they might give up drinking, smoking, sex, and partying. They give up a lot of cash, too. In terms of dollars, zillennials, just one thing. of America's adult population drive more than 41% of annual wellness spending, and that spending in turn is driven, you guessed it, by social media. An army of optimization influencers has made bank, promising followers the secrets to good looks, better sleep, performance maxing, time management, self-care, and even outrunning death.

At the same time, we are more anxious and overwhelmed than ever. So, what made the cult of optimization so powerful, and why are some influencers starting to ask if they took things a little too far? If I were to boil down the optimize everything culture into one catchphrase, it would be look better, feel better, perform better, and live longer, or even live forever. Gen Z, the generation just below me, puts optimizing attractiveness as its number three wellness concern. That's just behind nutrition and sleep.

Appearance hacks can range from advice on weight loss and nutrition, to nutrition, to nutrition, to nutrition, to nutrition. To skincare, to an increasingly weird looks-maxing subculture. Here's where you find, along with the Pilates and cosmetics, red light therapy and jaw exercisers. The most famous and maybe most extreme in this arena is Clavicular. He built an online identity and following around the idea that men can optimize attractiveness through fitness, grooming, diet, surgery, and... Lots of drugs, and he's not doing so hot.

Millennials, or my generation, we're not as into appearance optimizing. We are all about mindfulness maxing. The idea is to live a calmer, happier, more focused life. Millennial moms, we like journals, we like candles, and me time. But mindfulness is also about science-based regimens meant to train our attention. Strengthen emotional regulation, which we really could use, and improve our cognitive efficiency under pressure. Self-help influencers tout everything from meditation to dopamine detoxes, therapy to manifestation, digital minimalism to productivity systems. Mindfulness optimizing dovetails right with performance maxing.

Classics like Andrew Huberman and other Joe Rogan repeat guests offer peptide advice. 5 a.m. routines, cold baths, supplements, diets, and daily schedules, in addition to lots more mental health advice, to maximize your energy, focus, and physical performance. The all-in-one package. Huberman's six pillars are all about stress control to improve your moods and thereby performance. But as a mom who has been nursing babies for 21 years, a set bedtime, a set Rising time, getting full sunlight within 10 minutes of said rising time, and delaying my caffeine intake for 45 minutes after waking, it all just seems a little laughable.

But for those who can fit the six pillars into their lives, the promise is you will perform better. Be strong, become a better man, girl boss, take control of your life. And I have a lot of respect for this. Optimizers ask their disciples to do really hard things. No one really dreams of foregoing donuts and wine forever in favor of kelp and kombucha. No one really wants to be a prisoner in a 212-degree sauna for 60 hours over the course of 90 days, or ask a doctor to break their jawbone and sew it all back together.

But the promise is that the payoff will make your life better. Doing the work will make you a better person. So, you observe yourself, you try a few techniques, you fix yourself. And here I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the psychedelics. For the optimizers who want more than a six-pack and perfect skin, who want to live a life that's about more than what money can buy, there are influencers ready to walk you through a little ayahuasca ritual. Influencers claim this is the hardest thing you can do.

Now, ayahuasca might be tough, but one area of optimization takes All that effort to the extremity of human life, the longevity movement, also known as the don't die movement. Perhaps most quixotic of all, the longevity movement defies death itself. Its high priests include Brian Johnson, Peter Attia, and David Sinclair. They say the point of all this optimization of turning your life upside down with injections and fasting and sleep schedules and hormones. Glucose monitoring, cold plunges, and experimental therapies, the point is to, well, not die.

As Johnson puts it, his life's purpose is to make humans go from the inevitability of death to don't die, make your life longer, slow the deterioration of each and every organ, muscle, and tissue, and even potentially reverse your biological aging. Johnson wants to forge himself into a new archetype. That represents the human quest for immortality in the flesh. It's not a fairy tale or a hero journey. It's a scientific experiment, and the subject is his own body. He gathers millions of data points about his temperature, his hairline, his gum line, blood tests, sleep quality, strength, waste production, sexual activity, and every ache and pain and pleasure, and he dumps it all on social media and into AI bots.

Now, Johnson sees himself as a sort of peak of health optimization. He pushes all those red lights and ice baths and workouts and Huberman lab protocols to the utter limit. Longevity influencers are also kind of performance artists. They're peddling a new or perhaps very ancient philosophy of man. Death is the last enemy, and we can defeat it. Now, not all zillennials are optimizing to that extreme, but every wellness purchase and practice reflects Johnson's quest to live a better here and now.

But the craze seems to be breaking, in many ways from the top down. Optimizers like Chris Williamson and Matt Divella are now making viral videos about how they went too far. Self-help can be a trap, wrote self-help millionaire Tim Ferriss. You're not a project, says Jay Wallace. The harder I worked, the further away I felt from the life I wanted.

Influencers who sour on extreme optimization are picking up on its inherent irony. You sacrifice all the pleasures of life to try to max out your looks and your mind and your body so that you can enjoy the pleasures of life. You can schedule every waking moment. You can monitor your heart rate and biomarkers. You can spend hours on self-care and thousands of dollars on red lights and cosmetics, but in the end, none of the wellness products can tell you what you're optimizing for.

And the problem there is that life is not an end in itself. We have to live for something. The death-defying industry is just the ultimate vanity that St. Augustine talks about in his Confessions. So, in book one, Augustine talks about his education when he was a child, and he was the best student in his school and probably in his entire Roman province. You might say that he was being optimized for fame and fortune, but looking back as an adult, he asks God, is not all this smoke and wind?

He's not asking, is it vicious? Is it evil to optimize children for a bright future here on earth? He's asking if it's just empty. Augustine was given incredible natural talents and material advantages. Quote, I was averse to being deceived. I had a vigorous memory, was provided with the power of speech, was softened by friendship, shunned sorrow, meanness, ignorance. In such a being, what was not wonderful and praiseworthy? He continues, I rejoiced exceedingly for every good gift which as a boy I had, for in this lay my error.

That not in God, but in his creatures, myself and the rest, I sought for pleasures, honors, and truths, falling thereby into sorrows, troubles, and errors. Augustine spent his entire youth glorying in himself and in God's creatures, and I see so much of his own rise to prestige and his pursuit of the good life in the optimizers today. Because they're not all grifters, after all. Like the young Augustine, these people have incredible minds, and modern science shows us amazing things about the natural world, including our bodies and our brains.

The drive to live the fullness of life, for satisfaction, for completeness, is a God-implanted drive. We want to be real, to be ourselves truly and completely. So, we use our minds and our bodies to try to make that happen. And at its root, that's where the optimizing cult is coming from. People are hungry for the good life. We've just forgotten that we're actually hungry for God. In the greatest sentence ever written in the Latin language, Augustine prays, you have made us for yourselves, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.

Humans are pretty good at figuring out ways to make our bodies stronger and our minds sharper. And even ward off our inevitable demise. We're also very good at mistaking our restlessness for heaven for a restlessness for optimizing biological life, bodies, careers, fame, and money. Wellness optimizing is especially seductive to us because we actually do feel better and happier for a while when we take care of our bodies. We're supposed to be good stewards of the material world. We just take it too far.

Way too far. And when that momentary delight in the red light, or the sauna, or our new jawline wears off, we think we need to optimize more to feel happy again. And that gets depressing really, really fast. Because no one actually wants to live like Brian Johnson. Constantly looking at ourselves in a mirror and analyzing our own every waking moment isn't fun. And it's probably borderline narcissistic. And let's be honest, no one really wants to even look like Brian Johnson. And there's something even more sinister about Instagram and TikTok optimization.

When 30% of my generation or Gen Z convince ourselves that personal wellness is the best life we can live, we end up missing out on what makes life worth living. There's been a lot of online chatter this year about the miserable moms of Instagram.

The screaming and the ice throwing, the tedium, and the message is that motherhood is miserable, and daily life as a mom is miserable, and the kids are the reason you can't journal, you can't have me time, you can't act like a 12-year-old, you can't exercise, you can't sit in a sauna. So, optimizing and what should be the most fulfilling part of a woman's life, butt heads, and you can't serve two masters. Huberman's morning routine is not possible for a young mom or dad with two or three kids under five, or even under ten.

Keeping track of every calorie you consume isn't feasible when you are subsisting on your toddler's discarded crusts. Ask me how I know. If you're caring for elderly parents or you're working as a night shift nurse, you are not going to have regular sleep. And if you're earning money to start a charity or support a family, you are not going to have regular sleep. You're not going to build that sauna out back, or subscribe to a supplemental regimen, or even buy the perfect mattress.

Real life, making choices like living for others instead of for yourself, eventually butts up against optimizing your life for yourself. If you've placed your hope for happiness in feeling great and mentally sharp, you will be frustrated, and you might grow bitter, even angry and violent. The Optimize Your Life culture breaks down when its followers and even some of its high priests realize that it's all empty show and empty promises, if you don't also have a reason for living. So, for ourselves, we have to flip the script.

If we're going to avoid wasting our time on smoke and mirrors, we need to know what we're optimizing for. So, maybe we need better role models than Stephen Bartlett. Before Diary of a CEO and Huberman Lab, communities of humans have optimized. We know them by their relative health compared to the cultures around them, their longevity of some individual members, but mostly of their community as a whole, and their comparative happiness as a group. We call them monks and nuns. Religious communities follow strict guidelines that can feel like the optimization industry's prescriptions.

There are rules for appearance, like what you wear, and personal hygiene. There is a strict order of shared life, from daily schedules and responsibilities, to rules governing sex and food, regular prayer and meditation, and careful consideration of whether to welcome new technologies into the life of the community. The difference between the optimizers and these groups is, of course, That monks and nuns, and in the Protestant world, the Amish, they aren't doing hard things to look smacks or defy death. Although, as a side bonus, nuns are beautiful and live longer on average than the rest of us.

They are accepting this particular way of living their biological life for the sake of their supernatural lives. Another key difference, and the reason why we will still have monasteries and Amish farms when TikTok is consigned to the dust. is that this kind of optimizing isn't a buffet of endless a la carte options for individual monks and nuns. Men and women join or remain in communities and make vows of obedience to a superior and a rule or constitution that, in their best form, will determine and shape the direction of all that individual's fasting and prayer vigils and recreation.

In stark contrast, Brian Johnson's quest to not die is entirely up to him. He exhausts himself with tests and doctor's visits and blood transfusions with his own son. The nun's quest is the opposite. She's deliberately choosing to die to herself.

She dies with Christ, and reaps benefits both here and, we pray, in eternity. But what about us, as in the millions of us who aren't nuns and monks and Amish? The Christian faith, I would say, is its own optimization program, but with this key difference. We're not embracing sacrifices so we can mog and slay. As Augustine realized through his conversion, All the great goods he had been pursuing, all his optimizing, were pointing him to the one true good. He says, in my unloveliness, I plunged into the lovely things which you created.

You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace. The life of Christ, whether you're a priest, or a monk, or a nun, or a laywoman, or a mom, or a dad, anyone, it's far more demanding than anything on TikTok.

But it gives us something beyond wellness, something indescribably sweet. As a Catholic, I would say that St. Maximilian Kolbe lived a far more optimized life than Brian Johnson, and Anthony of the Desert makes Andrew Huberman look like a pansy. But so does an ordinary mom who gets up for the fourth time at night to soothe a crying baby. So does the dad who works two jobs and still finds the energy to read to his kids before bed. Love is why we get up when we don't want to.

It's why we fast. It's why we control our appetites. Love is why we examine our conscience every day. We build habits and practice discipline. We do hard things. We're open to new life. The goal isn't a perfect body or a perfectly regulated nervous system, although I would not say no to those things. The goal is to be a saint, and anything that gets in the way is less than optimal. And that often looks from the outside like you're getting worse at optimizing your life.

Have you ever seen a photo of Mother Teresa's feet? Not optimized. And that's the paradox at the center of Christianity. Getting older, losing sleep. The cross is the way to real life. We weren't made to perfect ourselves for this world or prolong our lives at all costs. We were made to give ourselves away, and ultimately to give ourselves to God. And that is real optimization.

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