Optimal looks different for everyone

For most of my twenties, I was chasing the “optimal” morning routine.

Sunlight within minutes of waking, at least 500mL of water, some form of movement, a little meditation, a cold shower, and caffeine delayed by however long the latest study recommended.

Even on the one morning David and I could actually slow down, I'd sit there with a coffee in hand, anxiously waiting for a number on a clock to give me permission to drink it.

Say "life optimisation" to a hundred people and you'll get roughly three reactions. I've cycled through all three myself.

The first is excitement. You're reading the books, tracking the metrics, stacking every protocol into a routine that's optimised down to the minute. Our time is finite, so why wouldn't you want to make the most of it?

The second is exhaustion. You did that for years, and the system that was supposed to give you control is now the thing exhausting you. There's always one more protocol to add, and the sheer volume of what you're supposed to be doing has started costing more than it gives back.

The third is rejection, quiet or loud. All that exhaustion eventually led to the conclusion that optimisation itself was the mistake. That trying to turn a messy, finite life into a spreadsheet was never going to work, because life is meant to be lived, not managed.

Each of these is right about something.

But each is also reacting to the same picture of what life optimisation is supposed to look like, and that picture was wrong from the start.

Picture it with me.

Waking at 5am to a flawless morning routine.

Deep work blocks with zero distractions.

An optimised exercise regimen.

A perfectly engineered diet.

An evening routine optimised for the science of ideal sleep.

That’s the image most people are carrying when they hear the phrase, and to be fair, the underlying advice is useful.

But the problem was never the advice. It's the assumption underneath that life optimisation looks the same for everyone, and if you’re not living inside it, you’re falling short. That assumption is what turns useful information into a quiet, permanent sense of failure.

Which means the definition needs to change, not the ambition behind it.

Life optimisation does not look like one thing.

Life optimisation is simply making the best opportunity cost decision you can, given the life resources you actually have and the arbitrary life goals you’ve actually chosen.

This definition acknowledges that we all live in wildly different realities. What’s reasonable for one person is out of the question for another, but no one tells you that when they’re handing you the routine.

Your time, mental resource, physical resource, financial resource, social capital, and misconcepts set will never match anyone else’s, and neither will your goals.

Which means you and I could read the same piece of advice and reach opposite, equally correct verdicts. Not because one of us is doing it wrong, but because we're optimising towards different destinations and thus the allocation of finite resources towards that destination has to look different too.

But there’s one more plot twist to this process.

Counterintuitively, optimising well and consistently will still look suboptimal in hindsight.

Your goals shift and iterate, so the target you were optimising towards keeps moving. Your resources aren't static either.

Judged by a version of you with more experience, more knowledge and a different set of resources, even the best opportunity cost decision you made then will feel a little suboptimal now. That doesn’t mean you got it wrong. That's what deciding well under constantly shifting constraints actually looks like.

Which means life optimisation was never an end state you arrive at and then live inside forever. There’s no idealised version of your life waiting at the finish line where everything finally clicks into place and stays there.

Just like a tightrope walker whose balance is the result of a continuous stream of small corrections, weight shifting, posture adjusting, and a hundred tiny recalibrations a minute, life optimisation is a practice of continuous error-correction, decision by decision, for as long as you’re making decisions at all.

Your optimised life was never going to look optimal on paper

You don’t have to be the person who’s excited about optimisation, or the one who’s exhausted by it, or the one who’s ready to reject it outright. You just have to make the best decision you can, with the resources you actually have, towards a life you actually chose.

Next time you come across a new piece of advice, the question isn't "is this good?" Almost all advice is good for someone.

The question is “does this serve my goals, what would saying yes to this cost me elsewhere, and is that trade-off worth it?”

The caffeine delay may have contributed to my goals around focus marginally. But it came at the cost of being present with David and sharing a ritual we both loved.

So these days, Sunday mornings for me just mean coffee with David. Nothing more optimised than that.