How to De-Optimize Your Life: Two Book Reviews
"Optimal Illusions" Misses on a Big Swing While "Slow Productivity" Connects on a Smaller Swing
Today, I’ve got one of my occasional short essays for you—this one prompted by my disappointment with a book I was excited to read, Optimal Illusions, by Coco Krumme.1 And it so happened to have a thematic connection to another book I just finished, Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport, so I wrote up my thoughts on the two together.
Also below, I found an awesome YouTube music channel I wanted to share, and a related page from (one of) my sketchbook(s).
See you next week with part 3.2 of Blood of My Blood.
In this issue:
Reading Optimal Illusions and Slow Productivity
What I’m Listening To
Sketchbook Share
Reading Optimal Illusions and Slow Productivity
When I heard about Coco Krumme’s book Optimal Illusions, mentioned off-hand in a podcast,2 I was super excited to read it.
The idea that we’ve been led astray by the false promises of “optimization” and grinding away to achieve “success” appeals to me. And it appeals to many people, if the mid- and post-pandemic trends of the “Great Resignation” and “quiet quitting” are any indication. Cal Newport observes in his book Slow Productivity,
“Between the spring of 2020 and the summer of 2021, a period spanning less than a year and a half, at least four major books were published that took direct aim at popular notions of productivity. These included Celeste Headlee’s Do Nothing, Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even, Devon Price’s Laziness Does Not Exist, and Oliver Burkeman’s delightfully sardonic Four Thousand Weeks.”
So I was disappointed to find that despite pointing at a thesis whose truth many of us feel in our lived experiences, the book is rather muddled.
What Krumme does well is to point out that optimizing doesn’t mean that the result is the absolute best outcome that can be. When you optimize, you are choosing something to optimize for, such as profits or number of widgets, at the expense of other things, such as human or animal quality of life or environmental impacts.
But some of the examples Krumme discusses to illustrate “optimization” were unclear or downright baffling.
The one that sticks out the most is how Krumme devotes a section of her book to describe how Marie Kondo is an exemplar of the optimization movement. And Krumme doesn’t just cite Kondo as an aside, she circles back to highlight Kondo again in her closing wrap-up to the book. I wasn’t able to come up with some charitable contortion of thinking to get Kondo’s decluttering philosophy to appear to be another step down the path to optimization hell.
Krumme rightly expresses skepticism about doubling down on optimization as the solution to the ills of optimization, such as Effective Altruism and the idea that if I can just make a ton of money, I’ll be able to solve the world’s problems. Another way this is formulated is “Let me accumulate a ton of wealth and I will solve all of our collective problems.”
But she also expresses skepticism about the effort to reland and repopulate bison because it requires purchasing vast tracts of contiguous land. Such a tactic is reminiscent of what megacorporations and the ultra rich do, which makes Krumme view the relanding effort as paradoxically another effort to “optimize”.
This strikes me as an unhelpfully puristic way to look at things. Just because cutting fruit and one method of murder both involve using a knife doesn’t mean that cutting fruit is morally suspect.
I know, there are the old sayings, “you can’t fight fire with fire” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” But rather than applying an aphorism without thinking, it’s more useful to ask ourselves whether and why using a tool may or may not have the effect of perpetuating the conditions that cause the problem we’re trying to solve.
It’s not clear to me why taking land back from singular industrial uses to be rewilded exacerbates the capital “O” Optimization movement. That’s not to say there aren’t other, human reasons to be dissatisfied with the idea of a complete reversion to per-industrial lifestyles. But we don’t need to quibble with whether or not something is “optimizing” to have those discussions.
Altogether, the book reads like Krumme is trying harder than she needs to to build the case for a middle ground. But I don’t think you need the KonMari method and relanding bison to be Optimization to have a strong case that we contemporary people can’t go back to “the way things were”. And that even if we were to, the fact that there are optimizers who won’t go back means that someone would overrun us if we were to completely disengage.
We can see many of us slowing down and partially opting out. The system doesn’t work for most of us—we can’t all be billionaires or even millionaires. The abundance and over-abundance that some enjoy is dependent on deprivation for others.
Though we may not have a sustainable model for society yet, maybe slowing down can buy us the time we need to figure it out.
If you have a knowledge worker job and you’re looking for concrete steps you could try to save yourself from over-“optimization” while still keeping your job and, you know, paying the bills, Newport’s Slow Productivity has suggestions for you.
In his book, Newport discusses examples from history of how good knowledge work takes a lot of time and slow rhythms and seasonality of working to do. For example, Newton’s Principia took him over twenty years to develop! And Jack Kerouac actually first worked on On the Road in his journals between 1947 and 1949, then typed out the initial draft in three weeks (which is how he claimed to have written the book in three weeks), and then spent another six years on six additional drafts before getting to a version that a publisher accepted.
The historical examples, Newport repeatedly acknowledges, require lifestyles that are out of most of our reach, with much more control over their time and when and how they work, and even access to remote lodges and servants. So Newport offers tips to get a lesser version of what the historical examples had for yourself: namely the ability to do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. His hope is that these tips can help free people from the “dehumanizing grip of pseudoproductivity”.3
But Newport notes that his suggestions don’t solve the larger problem of a society/philosophy that values the “performative rewards of unwavering urgency” when trying to determine how “productive” one is. For that, he hopes that others will offer many more approaches to defining “productivity” so that a movement to reform how organizations are managed takes shape.
Newport isn’t trying to question the foundation of our economy and culture—though, he actually has given indications that he disagrees with the “always more” ethos of our economy and culture.4 As he puts it, “Slowing down isn’t about protesting work. It’s instead about finding a better way to do it.” And so, for Newport, pushing back against unwavering urgency is about the fact that you actually get better results (“better” assuming the same goals) from a slower way of working.
Ultimately, Slow Productivity takes a smaller swing than Optimal Illusions does because Newport criticizes the metrics we often optimize for in knowledge work, but doesn’t examine the underlying mindset.
What I’m Listening To
I stumbled upon a fantastic YouTube channel that just has DJs on to spin vinyl in hour-long sets of mostly dance music of different eras from around the world. The channel is called MAJ. A lot of it is different flavors of funk, disco, and house (so totally up my alley), as well as jazz, soul, and more.
If you’re looking for a reprieve from fake artists and cheating real musicians out of money,5 check MAJ out.
Sketchbook Share
MAJ’s videos have two cameras, one from in front of the turntables, and the other from overhead, so you can see what the DJs are doing. It struck me while listening to one of the videos that I don’t get much practice drawing overhead views of people, so this was a great opportunity to get a few sketches in! And that’s the background on this sketchbook page.
Seems like disappointment in a book spurs me to write up my thoughts, haha. Just like how unhappy diners are more likely leave a review.
I can’t remember which podcast now…
"Pseudoproductivity” is the term Newport uses to describe the pervasive school of thinking in our knowledge work organizational cultures that equates visible busy-ness (answering messages, checking emails, sitting in meetings) with productivity.
Though, he actually has given indications that he does question the “always more” ethos of our economy and culture.
In Slow Productivity, he gives the example of Paul Jarvis, a very successful web designer, who argues that instead of scaling your business, if you’re lucky enough to have high demand for your services, to leverage your position to gain more freedom instead of more revenue. Raise your rates and work less instead of hiring more people and grinding away at growing your company.
And when David Epstein interviewed him about Slow Productivity, Newport mused, “All of these strategies, of course, reduce the number of things I’m working on, which in turn reduces accomplishments and opportunities as compared to some theoretical get-after-it maximal version of Cal. But in some sense, who cares? I like what I do, I think it matters, and I’m doing it in a way that’s sustainable. A key slow productivity idea is measuring your work on the scale of decades, not days. At the former scale, I’m satisfied.”
I love me some lo-fi hip-hop, but can totally see how it’s a good target for Spotify’s nefarious schemes. That’s why if I am listening on Spotify, I avoid the playlists that Spotify generated in favor of Lo-Fi Girl’s own. At my computer, I’ll just go straight to Lo-Fi Girl’s channel on YouTube, but if I’m listening on my phone, then keeping the screen on and unlocked to listen to music on YouTube is annoying.