Optimized to Exhaustion

Somewhere in the last twenty years, we stopped living in our bodies and started managing them.

I want to show you what that looks like on an ordinary day—a Tuesday, not a day of crisis—in the life of a woman who is smart, accomplished, and doing everything she’s been told to do. Watch what the day asks of her before she’s even fully awake.

She wakes before the alarm and lies still for a moment, taking inventory.

The shoulder again. The familiar dryness. The particular quality of the night’s sleep, which she will rate, in a few minutes, on a bright screen, against a baseline she did not choose. She is not yet up but already the assessment has begun.

By the time her feet touch the floor, the day has produced its first three messages about her body. The ring on her finger reports a recovery score of sixty-five, which is yellow, which means something. The app on her phone, opened reflexively, suggests a fourteen-day program for women just like her—the demographic specified, the symptoms anticipated, the price visible only after she clicks the link and provides her personal information. The headline on the news site she did not mean to open names a hormone she has been thinking about and a deficiency she has not been formally diagnosed with, alongside the photograph of a woman roughly her age who looks suspiciously rested. Vibrant. Alive. All-natural.

She has not yet brushed her teeth.

The bathroom shelf is not a bathroom shelf anymore. It is a small archive of attempts. The bottle she ordered after the podcast. The bottle she ordered before the podcast, which the podcast then suggested she probably shouldn’t be taking. The cream that was going to address one thing and the cream that was going to address the consequences of having addressed that thing. The patches. The drops. The capsules whose label she can no longer remember the reasoning for. Each one arrived once with a small clean promise. Together they make a kind of weather system, and she stands inside it brushing her teeth.

The toothpaste is, itself, a small essay. It feeds her oral microbiome. It will not, the box assures her, compromise her enamel the way the previous toothpaste, the one she used for fifteen years, apparently did. It also brightens. The brightening is not optional. The mouth, she has read, is the gateway to the gut, and the gut is the gateway to almost everything, and so the toothpaste is no longer toothpaste. It’s an intervention, a system input, a daily act of microbial diplomacy. She brushes for the recommended two minutes, her toothbrush blinking in her clenched hand. She now times it because she’s been told that she’s been overestimating the duration for years.

She catches her own reflection in the mirror and notices, as she does most mornings now, that her teeth are not as white as they were last year, or as white as the teeth of the woman on the package, or as white as the teeth on every actor on every screen she has looked at in the last several years. The standard has moved. She is aware that the standard has moved. She is aware that the actors are not, in fact, born with those teeth. She has been bleaching, in some form, for decades, and the floor of acceptable whiteness keeps quietly rising beneath her, the way the floor of acceptable thinness rose beneath her mother, the way the floor of acceptable youth is rising beneath her now. The teeth are also, she has read in a different essay, an early indicator of biological decline. So they are both a cosmetic project and a clinical one, which means there is no version of attending to them that is not also a reckoning with how she is aging.

She rinses. She spits. She moves on.

By breakfast she has heard, without intending to, two interviews about what she should be eating, one of which contradicts the other, and caught a brief mention of a study she has not read but will now carry around with her for the rest of the day. The protein number has gone up. Again. The fasting window has narrowed and then widened and then narrowed again, depending on the source. The coffee she gave up in March is, according to this morning’s news, something she should consider adding back—the benefits allegedly proven to outweigh the heart palpitations. The kitchen, which used to be where she ate, is now where she negotiates.

She is not stupid. This is the thing that makes the day so disorienting. She has read widely, she pays attention, and she does not believe everything she sees. She has rolled her eyes at most of what was sold to her in the last decade and bought some of it anyway, because the alternative was to do nothing, and doing nothing felt, somehow, like the most dangerous option of all.

Mid-morning, on a video call, a colleague asks her how she’s been. She says fine. She means it the way most people mean it, which is to say not entirely. There is no place in the conversation, and no time in the meeting, to say what would actually be true—that she has been sleeping strangely, that something in her digestion has shifted, that her capacity for the day’s volume has changed in a way she cannot yet name, that she does not know whether what she is experiencing is meaningful or a passing murmur. The conversation moves on, as it should. She watches her own face in the small box on the screen and considers, again, the asymmetry she has been noticing in the mirror.

By lunch the algorithm has caught up with her. The DM from a name she barely recognizes asks if she has tried the protocol. The ad in her feed shows a woman who is laughing on a beach because she addressed her cortisol. The article she reads while eating warns her that what she just ate will spike her glucose, and she opens, briefly, the app that would tell her by exactly how much, before deciding not to know. The deciding-not-to-know is its own small expenditure.

She scrolls. The next post is about a symptom she mentioned to her sister on the phone three days ago. She has not searched for the symptom. She has not typed it into anything. She knows the explanations—the algorithm is more sophisticated than she gives it credit for, her demographic data is doing the work, she has probably read about the symptom somewhere without remembering—and she also knows that whichever explanation is correct, the experience is the same. The post knows what’s on her mind. She’s being met where she lives, by a feed that has learned to find her there.

She returns three messages. She makes one decision that she’ll second-guess for the next four hours.

In the afternoon, the friend texts. There is always the friend. The friend has found something, or stopped something, or started something, or is asking whether she has heard about the new something. The friend means well. The friend is also adrift in the same weather, looking for somewhere to land. The text contains a screenshot of a lab panel with three numbers circled in red, and the question—half joking, half not—of whether she should be worried.

She does not know whether her friend should be worried. She does not, if she is honest, know whether she herself should be worried. The numbers on the panel are real. The reference ranges are also real. What is missing is the conversation that would tell either of them what the numbers mean for the distinct life inside which they were measured. For the specific body that she lives in. That conversation is not on offer. The lab panel is on offer. So is the supplement. So is the next lab panel three months from now, to confirm the supplement worked. Or didn’t.

She replies with something supportive and noncommittal. She closes the thread. She notices, vaguely, the fatigue of having had this exchange before.

By evening, she has been told, in one form or another and without anyone saying so directly, that she is failing. She is failing to optimize. She is failing to have addressed the deficiency. She is failing to have arrived, at this point in her life, at the version of herself that the marketplace insists is available to her if only she would commit to their protocol. The failure is total in the sense that there is no possible version of her day in which she could have succeeded—because the criteria moved at lunch, and again at three, and again when the email arrived at six.

She is also tired. Not in the way that the supplement is for. In the older, quieter way. The way that has to do with having spent the entire day in a kind of low-grade adversarial relationship with her own body. With having met every signal her body offered—the shoulder, the sleep, the digestion, the asymmetry on the screen—as a problem to be researched, addressed, intervened upon. She has been transacting with her body all day. She has not, in any moment of the day, simply been in it.

This is the part that is hard to see. The exposures are visible. The fatigue is visible. The shelf and the watch and the DM and the lab panel are visible. What is not visible, because it has been the structuring assumption of the entire day, is that every input she encountered offered her the same fundamental relationship with her body: a transactional one.

Buy this.

Fix this.

Test this.

Optimize this.

Defer to this.

Worry about this.

None of them asked her what she felt. None of them invited her to consult her own body or experience. None of them treated her as the witness to her own life.

I’ve been watching this day, in some form, for twenty years. From inside the clinic. From inside the conversations after the workshops. From the inboxes of practitioners I have trained. From the women who write to me to say that they have done everything right and yet they feel anything but right. From, occasionally, my own bathroom shelf—because no amount of clinical training fully exempts a person from the weather she lives inside.

What I want to name here is that the woman in the scene above does not have a willpower problem, an information problem, or a discipline problem. She has an environment problem. She is living inside a structure, built across a century and across many industries, that requires her not to trust her own body in order to function as designed. The transactional relationship is not her failure. It is the system’s success.

So I won’t hand you a protocol for escaping it. That would only be one more thing to optimize, one more program for women just like you. The point was never to win the day she was losing. The point is that the game itself is rigged, and you are allowed to stop playing it—not all at once, not perfectly, but in small refusals.

You are allowed to not know your recovery score. To let the gray come in. To eat the breakfast without calculating it. To have a body that is simply having a Tuesday—stiff shoulder, strange sleep, and all—without filing a report on it, without keeping score. None of that is failure. The shoulder is not necessarily a problem to be solved. It is a shoulder, in a life, on an ordinary morning.

Somewhere in the last twenty years we stopped living in our bodies and started managing them. The way back is not better management. It’s the slow, almost forgotten act of inhabiting the body you already have—the one that has been with you the whole time, reporting faithfully, asking only to be lived in.

Not optimized. Inhabited.