How productivity culture colonised the self

Part of Embracing the Mundane Series

by Ezra Nadav

Optimisation didn’t start as a personal demand. It was a systems idea.

Originally, optimisation belonged to machines, processes, logistics—ways of making production more efficient, predictable, and scalable. It was about reducing waste and increasing output within bounded systems. Somewhere along the way, that logic slipped its bounds and began to attach itself to people.

Not just to how we work, but to who we are.

Now we optimise sleep, attention, mood, relationships, bodies, and personalities. We track, refine, and iterate ourselves as if the self were a perpetual beta version, always one adjustment away from being more effective, more attractive, more meaningful. The language of improvement has become so normalised that it rarely sounds like pressure anymore. It just sounds like responsibility.

If something in your life feels difficult or unsatisfying, the implied answer is rarely structural or relational. It is personal. You should manage better. Plan better. Regulate better. Want better things. The problem is not that life is demanding; the problem is that you are insufficiently optimised to meet its demands.

This is how optimisation quietly becomes identity.

When value is measured in outputs—productivity, visibility, growth—it doesn’t stay confined to work. It migrates inward. People begin to narrate their lives as performance summaries. Am I progressing? Am I maximising my potential? Am I falling behind? Even rest becomes instrumental: taken not because it is needed, but because it will improve future functioning.

The self is no longer something to inhabit. It is something to manage.

What gets lost in this shift is not just ease, but coherence. Optimisation fragments experience into domains that must each be improved: health, career, relationships, purpose. Life becomes a series of projects to be advanced rather than a whole to be lived. There is always another lever to pull, another habit to refine, another inefficiency to address.

And crucially, there is no finish line.

An optimised self is never complete—only temporarily adequate until the next benchmark appears. This is why so many people feel strangely anxious even when things are going well. Stability no longer reads as success; it reads as vulnerability. If you’re not actively improving, you must be declining.

Within this framework, the mundane becomes suspect.

Mundane activities do not optimise well. They repeat. They plateau. They do not scale or accumulate visible gains. Cooking the same meals, doing the same work, maintaining the same relationships—these things sustain life, but they don’t signal advancement. They don’t produce evidence of growth. In a culture that equates worth with momentum, they appear inert.

So people look at their ordinary days and wonder what they are missing.

This is not because those days lack value, but because value has been defined too narrowly. When optimisation becomes the lens through which identity is assessed, anything that cannot be improved, accelerated, or leveraged begins to feel like dead time. Time that should have been used better. Time that reflects a failure of ambition.

But human lives are not systems designed for maximum throughput.

They are ecological. They require balance, redundancy, slack, and care. They rely on rhythms that do not speed up without cost. A person can be well without being maximised. A life can be meaningful without being impressive.

The trouble is that optimisation culture struggles to recognise these truths because they do not convert neatly into metrics. You cannot quantify adequacy without immediately wanting to exceed it. You cannot optimise contentment without undermining it. You cannot turn sufficiency into a growth curve without destroying the very thing it names.

This is where the quiet harm sits.

Not in the desire to grow or improve, but in the belief that growth is the only acceptable state. In the idea that if you are not actively becoming more, you are somehow failing to be enough. When optimisation becomes identity, self-worth becomes conditional—granted only so long as progress is visible.

The mundane refuses this logic.

It insists that much of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be tended. It asks us to recognise value that does not announce itself, to tolerate periods of sameness without reading them as deficiency. It reminds us that maintenance is not stagnation, and that continuity is not the enemy of meaning.

To resist optimisation as an identity is not to reject effort or aspiration. It is to refuse a framework that makes worth dependent on constant self-surpassing. It is to question a culture that treats ordinary human rhythms as inefficiencies rather than necessities.

And it is to begin asking a different question—not “How do I improve this life?” but “What does this life already hold, if I stop trying to optimise it?”

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This piece is not a summary of the works below, but it is written in conversation with them.

Further Reading & Influences

The reflections in this piece draw on a broad body of work examining productivity, acceleration, care, and the ethical limits of optimisation. The following texts have shaped — directly and indirectly — the thinking behind this article:

Optimisation, Burnout, and the Self

• The Burnout Society — Byung-Chul Han

• Psychopolitics — Byung-Chul Han

These works explore how contemporary power operates through self-motivation, self-surveillance, and internalised pressure rather than external coercion — reframing burnout as a cultural condition rather than a personal failure.

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Productivity, Work, and Moral Worth

• The Managed Heart — Arlie Russell Hochschild

• Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber

Both texts examine how economic logics reshape identity, emotional life, and moral value — particularly the expectation that people justify their existence through visible productivity.

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Acceleration, Time, and the Fear of Falling Behind

• Social Acceleration — Hartmut Rosa

• Resonance — Hartmut Rosa

Rosa’s work offers a framework for understanding why stability increasingly feels like risk, and why meaning struggles to survive in cultures organised around speed, growth, and constant motion.

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Adequacy, Sufficiency, and Limits

• Small Is Beautiful — E. F. Schumacher

• Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman

These texts challenge the assumption that “more” is always better, and question optimisation frameworks that ignore human finitude, constraint, and the ethics of enough.

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Care, Maintenance, and the Value of Repetition

• The Ethics of Care — Virginia Held

• Maintenance Art Manifesto — Mierle Laderman Ukeles

This body of work reframes maintenance, care, and repetition as ethically central rather than marginal — countering narratives that equate value solely with innovation or growth.