The Extreme Is the Easy Way Out

I have wasted far too many years of my life in pursuit of optimization. Everything had a number, and that number could, and therefore should, go up. I tracked my sleep down to every minute, and cold-plunged at 6 am; I batched my emails into two windows a day, and treated anyone who expected an answer outside of those windows like they’d gone and kicked my dog. I had a spreadsheet for my weight, a spreadsheet for my water, and a separate spreadsheet for bio-experiments. My calendar was a fortress of time blocks in every color of the spectrum. I read the books, and I listened to the podcasts - at 1.75x speed, of course. By every metric I’d chosen to measure, I was arguably “winning.”And I was also miserable. Miserable and entirely succumbing to ennui. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was actually wrong, and when I finally did, I felt like a damn fool. The thing I’d figured out is roughly two thousand years old, was taught by a man sitting under a tree, and has…