The Two Dangerous Assumptions at the Heart of Optimization Culture

RIGHT FROM THE START, Jane Jacobs goes on the offensive.

“This book is an attack on current city planning,” Jacobs wrote. “My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning.”

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So begins The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961 but still in print today. It’s the most famous—perhaps the only famous—book on city planning ever written, and it is a 400-page takedown of what Jacobs viewed as the dehumanizing trends in urban development that arose during the 1950s.

Jacobs was in favor of dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods where people naturally comingled as they went about their day. She was against isolated suburbs, centralized commerce hubs, and other fads that she felt divided communities and cut people off from one another.

I stumbled on Jacobs’s Death and Life months ago while I was doing research for my own book. I was interested in learning how the design of communities—real and virtual—can encourage or discourage human interaction, and Jacobs didn’t disappoint.

But along with her theories on urban planning, something she wrote about the old science of bloodletting, of all things, stayed with me, and offered a useful way to understand our current culture of self-optimization.

It’s hard to believe now, but for more than two thousand years—from the time of the Ancient Greeks to the dawn of the 20th Century—bloodletting was cutting edge medical science. Generations of intelligent, highly educated people devoted their lives to learning, practicing, and advancing the treatment of draining people of blood in order to cure illness and disease. As Jacobs puts it, a grand superstructure of erudition and technical sophistication was built up “on a foundation of nonsense.”

Physicians who practiced bloodletting—and that was pretty much all of them—were so preoccupied with the details of their “science” that they never questioned its fundamental validity. As a result, countless people were subjected to painful and occasionally lethal treatments in exchange for what was, in most cases, no better than a placebo effect.

I look around at our culture of self-improvement and personal optimization, and I see a lot of the same nearsightedness and misplaced faith in pseudo-scientific nonsense.

We’re told that the best way to better ourselves is to establish regular routines based on current notions of what is optimal, and then to monitor, measure, and refine those routines incessantly in order to improve our “metrics” and maximize our “gains.” We’re told to build up streaks and prioritize efficiency and consistency. We’re told to be methodical, otherwise we’re likely to come up short.

But this approach to personal improvement only makes sense if you make two big assumptions that history and common sense tell us are dangerously flawed.

These assumptions are:

1. We know what’s best

2. More is better

Let’s start with the first assumption — that we know what’s best or optimal in a given situation.

The truth is that we probably don’t. The cautionary tale of bloodletting should remind us that human knowledge and expertise are always evolving, and so what we think of as right or ideal today is likely to be found wanting tomorrow.

If you doubt this, consider that as recently as the early 2000s, spine-straining crunches and ultra-processed “diet” foods were still in vogue among the health-conscious. Back then almost no one had heard of the human microbiome, and many viewed all bacteria as “germs.” Doctors routinely prescribed powerful antibiotics, believing that there were no downsides — a practice that, unfortunately, persists even now — and a lot of people thought scrubbing their bodies with antibacterial soaps was a good idea.

It’s a safe bet — really, a sure thing — that a few decades from now we’ll look back at our current approaches to healthy living and self-optimization — at our obsession with protein shakes and peptide stacks and sleep metrics, for example — and marvel at all our follies.

That isn’t to say we don’t know stuff; it’s just that the more we learn, the more we realize we still don’t understand. As Albert Einstein reputedly put it, “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”

Real experts understand that for all we’ve figured out, there’s a lot we probably don’t know, and that’s why few of them deal in rigid formulas or offer ultra-prescriptive advice. The sweep of human history and knowledge acquisition cautions us to seek moderation and variety in our pursuits, not unbending protocols.

The second dangerous assumption of self-optimization culture is that the longer we maintain a behavior we view as healthy or helpful, the greater the payoff.

In fact, this assumption only holds up if you ignore the potential benefits of doing things another way. In other words, this assumption doesn’t account for opportunity costs.

These opportunity costs usually go up as time passes because most things we do adhere to the law of diminishing returns. This is why when we start a new exercise program or diet, we tend to notice very rapid improvement, but as time passes those improvements fade. Likewise, the longer we maintain a work habit or hobby, the more likely we are to grow bored and disengaged, which hinders our development and performance. As the neuroscientist Bruno Averbeck once put it to me, “The longer you do the same things, the more likely they are to be the wrong things.”

Luckily for us, we’re wired for variety and exploration.

Our propensity to grow bored is one built-in mechanism that pushes us to switch things up. Research shows we also possess an instinctual preference for novelty; given the choice between two similar options, we tend to prefer the less familiar of the two. We want to see what’s behind Door Number Two.

All these instincts help us minimize those opportunity costs by pushing us to branch out and broaden our behaviors. These instincts also nudge us toward ongoing experimentation, which is to our benefit because, as discussed, there are always gaps in our knowledge—including gaps we don’t know are there, and can only stumble onto by venturing into the unknown.

Unfortunately, our current culture of self-optimization trains us to ignore these helpful, balancing impulses in favor of rigid adherence to a predetermined plan or formula. It scolds us whenever we decide we’ve had enough and want to make some changes — framing this as “getting off track” or failing to follow through. And as I learned the hard way, the longer we buy in, the more likely we are to end up burned out, checked out, and unhappy.

I want to be clear that I’m all for self-improvement. I strive to be better, and I believe in the power of dedication and discipline. But I don’t believe that dedication and discipline are synonyms for regimen and routine. We’re at our best when we’re able to adapt our behavior flexibly to suit a given task or situation. We’re at our best when we continue to explore new avenues and challenge ourselves in new ways. That’s why we need better approaches to self-improvement—approaches that embrace how we learn, grow, and engage with life.

Jane Jacobs called for a re-humanization of urban planning. I believe we need to re-humanize our ideas about how people flourish.

News and Notes

• I’ve been invited to give a talk at the TEDx Berlin conference this November. To learn more about the TEDx event, click here.
• Last month I had the opportunity to spend two incredible weeks sailing from the coast of France to Bergen, Norway, with 59º North Sailing. This was my second passage aboard their boat Isbjørn, and I’ll be writing more about the experience in the coming weeks. If you want to see photos and read a bit about my first trip with Isbjørn, click here.
• My book The Habit Trap: How Our Routines Hold Us Back, will be published on February 16 and is now available for preorder. Preorders are a BIG DEAL for authors. If you’ve found any value in what I’ve written here, please check out my book.

The Escape with Markham Heid is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.