Over-Optimizing Our Lives Is Killing Us

Can't life just be ... a little off-task?

Picked my friend up at the airport yesterday. On the way there, I listened to this April 2019 podcast from Ezra Klein about how “work is identity, and burnout is lifestyle.” The two guests are

Anne Helen Petersen

, who wrote a BuzzFeed article about millennials becoming the burnout generation — and Derek Thompson, who wrote the “workism” article in The Atlantic.

Fun fact on that “workism” article: I was working at an agency at the time, one of those “Everyone is so slammed!” places, and one dude — Vadim, who was on my podcast — sent that article around. No one seemed to “get” it. It was a Slack conversation that died almost instantly. Ha.

Anyway, the podcast linked above (not mine, the more popular one) has a lot of interesting points, especially if you can’t really detach yourself from work — which wouldn’t make you that unique, since we broadly deify the workaholic. Let’s tackle two points quickly.

The flattening of the to-do list