The Optimization
Impulse

But the impulse to optimize is also something residual of the ruling system that’s currently tanking. Amid coronavirus lockdowns, stock markets around the world are crashing. More jobs were lost this past month than during the 2008 financial collapse. Government-mandated lockdowns to deter the spread of the virus mean that, whether jobless or teleworking, many of us are now stuck at home with more free time than usual. Even before this latest development, as a cause of economic precarity and digital technologies, the boundaries between work and play, labor and leisure had long been disintegrating. All of this has only seemed to amplify the capitalist drive to make one’s time productive.

At this moment of uncertainty (How long will this last? Will people I love die? Do face masks do anything? Is summer cancelled? Why is lack of smell a symptom? What is this 5G conspiracy?) one of the only things we have control over is self-optimization. Whether or not we’re exfoliating, moisturizing, intermittent fasting, closet-organizing, colon-cleansing, yoga-practicing, booty-building, oil-pulling, hydrating, meditating, detox-dieting, cardio-conditioning, vegan-baking, pesto-making, upholstery-cleaning, TikTok-dance-learning, spice-rack-alphabetizing, and stuff-that-doesn’t-bring-us-joy purging. Seize the day, except the mood is darker, more like a mistranslated t-shirt I once saw: “Carpe Die.”

Since the 1970s, automation has increasingly replaced traditional manufacturing jobs where the relationship between labor and production was very clear. Rather than letting robots do the grunt work and leaving the rest of us to share the rewards, lounging around with more time for writing poetry or gardening on Animal Crossing, the idea persists that we need to labor for at least eight hours a day to earn a decent quality of life. And so over recent decades we’ve seen the proliferation of what anthropologist David Graeber has coined “bullshit jobs,” largely administrative and managerial positions that are seemingly useless, but the employee has to pretend that’s not the case in order to keep a way to pay their rent and food. While these pointless jobs crush souls, market reforms in recent decades have resulted in longer hours and less secure employment. Even as the gig economy has made clear that the labor market’s idea of productivity has become convoluted, if not perverted, culturally we can’t seem to shake the drive to make the most of our time.

I am a product of millennial hustle culture. I may hate lingo like hustle and grind, but I pride myself on working 16 hour days and eating every meal at the office. While the economy measures an individual’s productivity according to income, and so by that standard, I’m not very productive, (embarrassingly) sometimes my inner monologue sounds like those Fiverr ads celebrating eating coffee for lunch or sleep deprivation being a drug of choice. Ironically, a lot of what I’m doing when I’m performatively labouring away is reading and writing about how capitalism is bullshit. Still, work is my boyfriend. The deadlines make me feel needed. And when I’m not working, I’m obnoxiously self-congratulatory about spending my time doing other productive things like practicing yoga or sewing my own clothes or making soup from scratch.

Three weeks after lockdown was first implemented in Italy, fake news celebrated a side effect of the economic shutdown’s decrease in polluting activities: fish, swans, and dolphins were returning to the Venice Canal! Alternative facts aside, these tweets captured the zeitgeist of people questioning whether or not this disruption to the status quo is really only doom and gloom. The economy is supposedly healthiest when everyone’s throwing money around, but it’s felt nice to buy less and cook from scratch more. Maybe we could all lead happier, simpler lives this way, being kinder to the planet. The degrowth movement, which emerged in the early 2000s, advocates intentionally shrinking the economy to address climate change. European academics like Serge Latouche and Giorgos Kallis argue that the idea of infinite exponential growth, upon which our entire economic and political structure is based, doesn’t align with the reality that we live on a planet of finite resources. And there are others who’ve been sounding the alarm, declaring economic productivity and the stock market are flawed ways to measure how well a society is doing. Right now people are wondering if one missed paycheck has so many suffering, was the economy really as good as Trump was boasting? Good for whom?

The urge to be productive, to optimize, may come from living under capitalism, but when we look at the economy, growth and productivity can seem abstract. The stock market was doing well before the pandemic, but its self-care is as convoluted as ours. Record-low interest rates incentivized corporations to keep borrowing. Instead of paying off debts, they repurchased their own shares to boost stock prices. Meanwhile most of us stayed living paycheck-to-paycheck, fumbling through the gig economy. The present moment is a wake up call that the system’s broken, an opportunity to come together around a shared experience of precarity—and there’s organizing going on around rent strikes and bail fundraising. And yet the government is still saving corporations with taxpayer money and we remain addicted to performing productivity at home.

Both on a personal and structural scale, what will “going back to normal” look like? Will I keep up my moisturizing routine? Will companies downsize their office spaces and prefer their employees teleworking? Will that woman ever live down broadcasting herself on the toilet over Zoom? Some changes that had already been creeping along have been accelerated. Pre-Coronavirus Seamless, Netflix, BlueApron, Amazon, and Casper already seemed to be encouraging millennials into a culture of atomization, a kind of WiFi-connected pod living where you never have to leave your home and anything can be delivered to your door. “The darkest part of all of this,” predicts writer, comedian, and political consultant, Steven Philips-Horst, “will be discovering we actually prefer the predictability of physical isolation and lowered stakes of virtual interaction. It’ll be like when you open a dog’s cage and it just stays in there.”

Whitney Mallett is a New York-based writer and filmmaker.