Humanise not optimise: in defence of good enough

We’re in the fully enhanced era of the internet and it’s a real downer

The internet is a difficult place for perfectionists/compulsive types. Let’s try typing in “banana muffin recipe”. You could just click on the first result, or at least restrict yourself to the first page of links to scroll through. Or you could type “best banana muffins ever”, which might provide a better guarantee of quality assurance. But we won’t know for sure unless we try and bake every version out there. How research much is too much? How do we know when we’ve had enough?

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

Nowhere is the explosion in variety and volume of information more dizzying than in the field of health. When my parents were my age, there was a fair consensus and a manageable amount of information on maintaining general good health (even if, like now, the advice changed every few years). In this era, the amount of data nudges us towards not just the goal of being broadly healthy but to optimise our health, to hack and refine our way to longevity, to upgrade each version of our body and develop our knowledge to the level of a medical expert.

As well as keeping up with the Jones’s in terms of who-knows-the-most-about-supplements, it can be a hard task to whittle the choices down and make them actionable. How do we decide which, out of all the things we’re supposed to be doing, we should be doing now, as we try and attend to work and bills and kids and breakups and elder care and the golden age of tele and all manner of global catastrophes? And it can be dispiriting, especially if you felt that perhaps the stuff you were doing before you read anything was actually fine as it was.

Used to enjoy your weekly swim or dance class? WRONG! You need to add strength training into your “movement matrix”. Feeling pleasure from a workout you love? WRONG! Your regime needs to feel hard otherwise it’s basically pointless. Eating plenty of veggies and everything else in moderation? WRONG! You need protein, paleo, a Mediterranean diet, grains, less grains, fibre, less fibre, fat but not that kind of fat, you fucking idiot.

I realised I had the ridiculous experience last week of feeling a weird kind of guilt for doing the wrong kind of exercise, according to the article I’d just read. Is it only me who is such a baby when they’re exposed to information? Do others manage to receive it with a pinch of salt (not actual salt obviously, that’s bad for your heart)?

Blue zones, rucking, protein, soy isoflavones, weight training, cold water, heat therapy, on and on. I sort of love knowing about this stuff and sort of detest it. It can feel both freeing and weighty, as can the opportunity to enhance everything. Apps and AI provide the opportunity to optimise our lives, to reduce uncertainty and reduce time spent on any suboptimal activities, like picking your nose or scrolling TikTok.

It’s all about control, because the subtext of the bio-hacker is fear of death, right? We keep hacking and hacking and tweaking and tweaking and we’ll live forever! Or at least stave off illness or weakness indefinitely. We technically know mortality isn’t possible, and that our best attempts at being healthy can be trampled on by bad luck, but our efforts provide an illusion of being in charge.

Is it mostly our genes, our luck, hard work or lack of that create our destiny? We can’t follow route A and be sure that we’ll get to B, even if we know we’re at least increasing our chances by making good choices. It takes an elevated being indeed to stay grounded enough to know we’re not in control, even as we make sensible attempts to be healthy.

I’d like to be at the point where I do engage in these attempts without obsessing about it. I want to feel that my efforts are good enough, that perfect is a fantasy and an unnecessary burden. I think it would be a shame to nix common sense and pleasure and spontaneity in pursuit of the perfectly enhanced lifestyle. It feels wrong to me to view our time as a finite resource that must have every last drop squeezed out and used effectively and efficiently.

Swimming with chilly joy in mind, because I want to

I think of all the times perfectionism in the pursuit of health goals has been unfathomable: pain, illness, sleep deprivation, mental health struggles, postpartum (you know, the realistic kind, that lasts for years not months). Times when optimising looks more like a bit of fresh air and a walk, or eating a piece of fruit as well as a Kit Kat, or putting the kids in front of the tele so I can get a short nap.

Here’s something I want to add to my movement matrix: agency. I have learned some brilliant things and made changes to what I eat, drink and what I do with my body thanks to that learning. Some suggestions have worked for me and some have felt too hard, threatening or austere for me to take on. This is my problem with general advice, I suppose, and multiple systems that suggest that we give over our autonomy and preferences and peculiarities over to generalised rules and advice. Where do we find ourselves amongst these multiple strictures?

The other day I looked at the gym timetable at the lido I swim at, wondering whether to upgrade my membership to be able to use the gym and do some of the classes available. I looked at the names of the classes: body pump, killer abs, something or other being shredded.

Such violence. Friend, it’s never going to happen. I won’t go to those classes, I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t care about what I should be doing. I just don’t want to.

So maybe some kindness, an intuition that all efforts are made equal, all urges are sacred (Kit Kats included). When I watch the sun slanting on the trees as I walk through the woods, when I stand at the edge of the pool under the grey sky at 6.30am. When a song comes on and my body dances me around the kitchen. When I take a break instead of working and meet a friend and talk at the table outside the cafe. Let the soft animal of your body do what it loves, yes? The idea that anything else could be superior or more optimal seems to be churlish, and irrelevant, and somehow to be missing the point. Here I am, right now. This is the way it’s turned out. So many things led me here. I led me here, as well as the things external to me.

Information, I am so glad for you, and also, fuck off sometimes. And of course there is the information inside me, running through my body with every breath and hormonal shift and heart beat and pulsation and transformation and oscillation. My information. I am glad for everything out there. And I am determined to stay listening to what’s inside as well, to the tessellation of the general as it connects with this specific, with this thing I call me.