There are lives spent wanting to optimize everything all the time. This seemingly legitimate pursuit conceals a trap that may sooner or later close in on you. When you are never satisfied with anything, you expose yourself to an endless quest — that of constantly running toward what is better. This flaw, close to perfectionism, is unfortunately a mechanism in which millions of people end up losing themselves.
The root of the problem: the ideology of productivity
If it is true that we shifted into the industrial era over two centuries ago, it is equally true that we have entered that of productivism. This was an unprecedented paradigm shift in history, at least considering the brevity of the time span in which it occurred. This shift toward the industrial economy transformed our relationship with time. We abruptly stopped thinking in terms of seasons, as was once the case in the peasant world, and began thinking in terms of quantity produced per day, per hour, or even per minute. This change was not only economic but above all ontological: man ceased to measure time in relation to nature and began to do so solely through the prism of a world he had himself created — industrial rhythm.
This injunction to produce, and thereby to wear down our bodies, has made us slaves to the mindset of “always better.” The obsession with “always better” is contrary to nature. In nature, nothing lasts: everything erodes, everything disappears. This will to perpetually improve everything resembles the punishment of Sisyphus: it rests on a hope that, by definition, can never be fulfilled.
The second aspect of the problem: consumption
Productivity is the first engine, but there is a second one, equally powerful, without which the mechanics of the system cannot function. Without uninterrupted consumption, one cannot reasonably maintain equally uninterrupted production. If productivism governs supply, consumerism is its mirror on the demand side — two sides of the same economic system, inseparable from one another. It is practically futile to claim to escape consumerist ideology when one moves within a globalized space, and even more so in an industrialized country: any attempt to break free from it exposes one, more or less, to a form of social exclusion. The manifestations of consumerist and productivist ideology are multiple and take forms that one does not suspect.
The various hiding places of productivism
In the past, doing nothing was not necessarily seen as a fault: it was willingly seen as a moment offered to the contemplation of God. Although spiritual laziness — or acedia — was condemned as early as the 4th century by Church theologians, it in no way evoked the more modern notion associated with the physical and the moral. With the advent of productivism, doing nothing suddenly became a failure of optimization: idleness was immediately condemned as a loss of earnings. Only one kind of downtime was accepted: that which recharged one to work better. Thus it was subjected to strict discipline: days off, holidays, vacations — so many accepted downtimes, but only as fuel for better performance.
Ambition, continuous improvement, personal development, economic success: so many values willingly celebrated as positive, but which maintain a close link with productivist ideology. Contemporary success can hardly be embodied outside the economy anymore. The good father, the devout man, the man useful to his community: so many figures relegated to oblivion. The erasure of these models of social elevation has left a void that is now filled, often in a pathological way, by deviant or toxic behaviors. The kind man is now mocked as naive or fragile, forgetting that this posture of gentleness is the secularized expression of Christian values that structured the West for hundreds of years. The harshness and toxicity of certain behaviors find their tolerance in the mimicry of the dominant classes, partly stemming from the industrial era. To objectify, to despise the other, is to reactivate the figure of the boss, the capitalist, the bourgeois — that man who wielded, in his domain, a quasi-right of life and social death over his workers.
Everything we are witnessing today in the degradation of human beings is but the repetition of a centuries-old domination: that of serfdom, slavery, and factory labor. Where the serf and the slave were more or less reduced to the status of animals, the factory worker was, for his part, assimilated to a mere machine.
Optimization everywhere destroys human relationships
Pushed to its extreme, optimization eliminates all friction, perceived as a waste of time and energy. Those who place optimization on the pedestal of all their decisions often end up alone, without family and almost without friends. This rarefaction of social ties is not without irony: man, who has only been able to prosper through civilization — and even more through the nation — turns away from it as soon as his fortune is acquired. Such a system is unsustainable: it carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The sustainability of a human group requires that satisfaction be cultivated within it — a notion that far exceeds the framework of the individual alone. A group, however strong, only survives through solidarity with its weakest members. The eugenic totalitarianisms of the 20th century forgot this and they collapsed. Human beings are not disposable objects. An ultra-transactional society, optimized to the extreme, produces its own poison: antisocial behaviors that destroy it.
Replacing optimization with harmony
If it is understandable to want to reserve a few spaces for optimization — in the way one keeps spices for exceptional dishes — it would be naive to believe that one can confine it to a defined perimeter. By its very nature, it overflows, colonizes, infiltrates everywhere. It takes only a moment of optimization to lift the lid of Pandora’s box and see the most cynical and calculating behaviors escape from it. A far more coherent value, compatible with the idea of satisfaction, is harmony. This takes on a holistic dimension and does not interfere with the natural course of life and healthy human relationships. Harmony may, in some respects, wear the trappings of optimization, except that it serves a nobler purpose: the coexistence of beings governed by divine laws. Harmony does not seek domination or oppression; it proposes an order that settles over time, without brutal rupture, even if it means resorting to a passing conflict to restore justice and equity. In this sense, wanting to make oneself an optimized being is already aligning oneself with the logic of the machine — as evidenced, in their excess, by brain implants. The tech elites, under the transhumanist banner, pursue the same dream: to erase the carnal boundaries of the human. But with all this performance and optimization, what remains of man, if not a high-performance machine? In its early days, the machine was meant to serve us; now it replaces us: the tool has dismissed the worker, the slave has ousted his master.
