The problem with optimisation

Those of us who drink too much are full of reasons why it’s actually good to poison our bodies. (Didn’t you hear that red wine improves heart function? Yes, that is unproven, and yes, it didn’t apply to beer, but I still think it might apply to Tyskie …)

So, before I criticise someone for doom-mongering about alcohol, I should admit that drinking very little alcohol is almost certainly better for your mind, body and spirit than drinking a lot.

Hell, when I criticise Steven Bartlett for his recent comments on alcohol, I’m not really defending drinking. I’m criticising a neurotic and vacuous culture of “optimisation”.

Bartlett, the host of the uber-successful podcast Diary of a CEO (I reviewed it here), claims that when he drank a couple of glasses of wine after an extended spell without alcohol it “ruined three days of [his] life”:

I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day … I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad.

I don’t doubt that Bartlett is accurately reporting his experiences. But this doesn’t sound like an alcohol problem as much as a Stephen Bartlett problem. Yes, alcohol disrupts sleep. I’m a zombie, sometimes, if I’ve drunk a lot the night before. But if sleep is so violently disrupted, and if this disruption has such major consequences for one’s work, diet and exercise routine, that suggests abnormal sensitivity. Human beings should be more resilient than this. Parents make it to the gym, so I’m not sure where someone who had a couple of glasses of wine is going wrong.

Well, that’s none of my business. If Mr Bartlett’s body and mind feel so much better for not drinking, good luck to him! But I wonder if — and only if — this could be evidence of an unhealthy attachment to optimisation.

Optimisation drives a lot of successful and aspirationally successful people — native to LinkedIn — to hyper-analyse data on their work, diet, health et cetera in search of the perfect results. 

I’m sure it can be helpful. If someone has figured out how to feel better and to do more, that is splendid. But I think it can lead to a certain neuroticism. “One of Bartlett’s favourite subjects is stress,” I wrote about Bartlett and Diary of a CEO before:

What causes stress? What can we do to deal with stress? What is stress anyway? Well, his podcast seems like a major source of stress. Even relatively minor lifestyle choices such as drinking coffee are hyper-analysed, from different directions, and in near-apocalyptic terms (“How Caffeine is Killing You” is one of his thumbnails). 

This seems hugely unhelpful. How can you focus on building a successful company, for example, if you’re feeling neurotic about your morning drink?

It could also be the case that in obsessing about means, one could forget ends. In obsessing about health and productivity, for example, one could forget about the fundamental question of what to do with being healthy and productive. 

“We lose so much when we demand measurability of things that are difficult, if not impossible, to measure,” wrote Becca Rothfeld this year:

Metrics can be so distortive that they tempt us to care about “what’s easy to measure,” rather than what is truly important. 

This is not always the case, of course. But I’m sure it can be.

Again, the point is not that anyone should feel compelled to drink. But I do think people should consider doing some things just because they’re fun and not because of their measurable outputs. Yes, yes, a lot more people overdo this than neglect it. But a lot of the people who neglect it are Steven Barlettian business cum cultural figures who have an outsized impact on society. 

I know what I’m talking about when it comes to a militantly rigid approach to one’s life. As someone with anorexia, and even as someone who had half-recovered from anorexia, I paid obsessive attention to what I ate. I knew how many calories I was consuming, and the proportion of macronutrients. What I didn’t know was the point of knowing this. There wasn’t one.

Escaping such an oppressive pattern of thought had a lot to do with drinking, as it happens — and with the relaxed social milieu in which my drinking took place. This is a pretty niche experience, of course, and I absolutely don’t recommend it as a treatment for anything. But it happened!

The lesson, if there is one, is that while it very much can be unhealthy to not be conscious of the physiological and behavioural impact of what we do, it can be unhealthy to be constantly, inflexibly aware of it. I’m not saying that Mr Bartlett should have a drink — but he should relax.