Essay Issue 5 — November 2024
Sorry Can’t Talk Now I’m Too Busy Optimizing Myself (And Failing)
By Sinjan Saadat
For years I’ve been trying to take the perfect selfie, and failing. I keep trying to capture that best version of me that I know exists somewhere deep down, but it just won’t show up on camera, you know, for the world to see. I tell myself it’s a matter of mere technicalities gone wrong: the lighting, the angle, the filter, my smile, my clothes, that I got half the sleep I should’ve this week, the background, etc. I know you know of this struggle. It’s also kind of a socially repulsive thing to even mention, akin to discussing bowel movements at the fancy dawat’s dinner table. Had I tried to communicate this struggle to my parents about a decade or two ago, they’d have found it totally alien, and perhaps my anxiety around it too would have appeared a bit nauseating. But how about now? My mom’s more glued to the phone than I am. Now she knows exactly what I mean about my anxiety—this strange pressure to ‘present’ oneself, to look candid, authentic, cute, clean, thoughtful, all at once. For contrast, most of the old photos from my parent’s bulky old catalogs feature them visiting well-known tourist attractions. Neither posing nor joyful, they are just kind of there. The photos taken impersonally, are usually snapped by an unfortunate, and unwilling bystander who just happened to be the dude standing nearest. Everything about their old photos scream obligation, as if someone had told them to do this, and they just went—okay fine. As if it was some kind of record to prove that they truly did visit this place. In these photos, they do not smile. Compare that to my attempt at the ideal contemporary selfie—and I am to present myself as alone, calm, comfortable, optimized, smiling, willingly performing, for the camera, and thus, the world. I suspect something significant changed about how we relate to the external world in this time between my parents’ photos from the 90’s and me sitting here typing this for you in 2024. What I’m left wondering is, are we really better off now, endlessly tweaking and optimizing the way we relate to the outside? Or, have some of the straightforward human day-to-day rituals suddenly turned into a self-defeating loop of triviality, which is frankly nothing but exhausting. These are some of the irritating questions that keep me up some nights. But of course, I then remember my select-few witty yet inspirational quotes from famous figures, and go to sleep so that I can be my optimal self who goes out into the world and achieves.
This bizarre pressure to curate and ‘present’ myself had been gnawing at me for a while, and only upon reading Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society (translated by Erik Butler and published by Stanford University Press in 2010) did I get an opportunity to rethink the phenomenon from a new light. Han, a German-Korean philosopher known for his incisive critiques of Western culture, draws on German intellectual traditions to examine how modern society’s continuous push for self-optimization has transformed how we live and perceive ourselves. In The Burnout Society, Han pushes a nuanced argument, that somewhere along the lines, the social paradigm shifted from a disciplinary society to an achievement society. The externalized pressure of NO! that perhaps our parents’ generation faced has been morphed into the internal YES!. This is now the new norm, at least in the semi-affluent urban circles that I navigate, where the most coddled, conformist, nepo-babied, and privileged individuals routinely identify as rebels and/or anarchists. The finger-wagging negativity of discipline has, in our time, turned into the relentless positivity of achievement—into the tyranny of the can. The same external forces that guided my parents to take obligatory tourist photographs return with a vengeance in our time, except the forces are internalized. The voice that tells you to optimize and curate yourself doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a foreign intruder. It tells you that you can do anything. It tells you to become a better version of yourself every day. It tells you that not only can you take that new perfect selfie that totally captures each aspect of you just the way you desire, but also that you must do this. The voice is very much inside you. Welcome to the boundaryless world of achievement society.
Here, you’re no longer a cog in a disciplinary machine; you are the machine. Congratulations. The commands aren’t barked at you anymore; they’ve been replaced with motivational quotes on Instagram, plastered over sunrise photos, and boomerang videos of green mango smoothies—“You’ve got this!” “Hustle harder!” “Yes, we can!”—which, spoiler alert, you probably can’t, at least not without the emotional equivalent of an oil change. You’re not being exploited by some evil overlord anymore—no sinister bosses lurking in the shadows, cracking the whip. No, the whip has become internalized. We’ve become our own taskmasters. Even the master-slave dialectic breaks down in this new social environment. If a job sucks, you can always quit. My parents do not expect that I must make a certain amount of money, and reach outlandish heights in my personal career. There’s no one telling me to push myself harder except that little voice in my head that’s constantly measuring, evaluating, demanding more and more and more.
That’s not even the most twisted part—you’ll convince yourself that you really can succeed and achieve your dreams, right up until the moment you’re staring at a blinking cursor at 3 a.m.. Coffee jitters are kicking in, with lungs full of ash and a dozen unwatched YouTube tabs open, you are trying to finish that ‘side hustle’ gig, while also mentally preparing and getting anxious for tomorrow’s gym session, the one you scheduled to help with your anxiety. And between the late-night side hustle and the workout session at the gym are the nine excruciating hours in the office. On top of that, add another hour of commute which is so horrendous, you can’t help but curse each and every one of your ancestors for pushing us all down this path. It is a never-ending to-do list. You’ll tell yourself it’s just a matter of staying organized, buying the right productivity planner, cutting down a bit on the little things that really get you going, downloading another app to track how many hours of sleep you’re missing. The kicker: even as you edge closer to a crash, a small voice will still insist you’re not doing enough—maybe because there’s always someone on your feed who is doing it all, or at least pretending to, with the same wide, self-assured smile on a perfect selfie, that makes you question over and over again what you’re doing wrong. It’s not their fault you’re tired, you’re probably just not doing life right. After all, isn’t this freedom? Isn’t this the utopia we were promised? In achievement society, the final frontier of optimization, the thing that needs most tweaking and optimization, is you. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll agree that the cracks don’t take long to appear at all, and it’s not a whole lot of fun being one with the machine. We are becoming prisoners inside our own skulls, the system demands it. Prepare to burn out.
As a young adult, I saw burnout as something almost noble—like exhaustion was the only path to uncovering some raw, authentic version of myself. Some could call it salvation. But authenticity is just another construct of ‘achievement society’—a gleaming illusion of self curated for public display and consumption. Instead of reaching inwards for some deeper truth, we’re polishing and tweaking the surface, creating a ‘brand’ that’s less about who we are and more a commodified caricature. One that is optimized for approval and validation.
Our parents grew up in a disciplinary society that repressed them, but in this “achievement society,” burnout doesn’t repress; it depresses. Falling short of an ideal “best self” feels like a personal failure. We’re both the driver and the loud backseat critic—motivating, coaching, managing ourselves. And because rest feels like failure, there’s no guilt-free way to stop. The freedom to “be anything” has become an ocean of endless possibility, but it’s a paradoxical freedom: totally boundless, but also oppressive. And when failure is inevitable, we find only ourselves to blame. Burnout takes leisure time hostage too. Even when we try to unwind, guilt lingers, transforming entertainment into another task. The real leisure—Feierabend—has become tainted and taken hostage, no longer a sanctuary but a source of quiet self condemnation. We chase optimization, not realizing that burnout is the destination, with depression waiting at the last stop. But can you really stop?
I was curious about how the slow transition toward an achievement-focused society first began to take shape. History, of course, isn’t some tidy succession of grand moments or pivotal, curtain-raising inventions. It’s messy, incremental, the product of a thousand subtle pivots and tiny shifts that sometimes only make sense in hindsight. And yet, in tracing this peculiar shift towards an achievement society—or at least the point where it infiltrated my own life—certain moments seem to crystallize the transition in ways too powerful to ignore. Karl Marx (1880-1883) and Frederich Engels (1820-1895) sketched out that the means of production, including technological shifts, does more than just change the way people work. It seeps into every pore of how a society organizes itself, so that new gadgets and gear aren’t mere tools but fundamental tectonic plates shifting the very shape of human consciousness and collective purpose. Every piece of technology, from the plow to the steam engine, rewrites the script on what society values, what it fears, and, crucially, how it keeps score.
Fast-forward a century or so, and we have our own gleaming specimen of this tech-becomes-destiny principle: the iPhone—the gleaming, glassy harbinger of a freshly minted social reality that somehow requires more thumb dexterity than any era before it. This gadget—barely the size of a small paperback, equal parts oracle and mirror—signaled the dawning of a world where one’s success, mood, popularity, and sense of self-worth could be calculated, displayed, and constantly refreshed on a tiny, glowing screen. And thus, a new social order descended upon us with all the subtlety of an avalanche in slow-motion.
In the era Before iPhone (BiP)—a more or less straightforward banal epoch where people simply went about their lives, naively unoptimized and uncurated, without needing to collectively bear the never-ending weight of building personal brands—society generally operated under the steady cadence of routines, or perhaps even a blissfully passive sort of mediocrity. Back then, waking up, brushing your teeth, and remembering to eat a vegetable now and then counted as a job well done. And then in 2007, a new era of digitized epiphany dawned, ushered in by none other than the first iPhone, marking the inception of After iPhone (AiP). Suddenly, in 2008, the global economy threw a tantrum that left everyone in financial freefall, and the only way to stay afloat was to Uber yourself out of debt. Hustle culture was born: an economy of drivers, delivery people, and task-rabbits, “being their own boss” with fierce irony—beholden to star ratings, app glitches, boundaryless hours, and low pay. Then 2009 gave us Yes Man, a Jim Carrey-fueled hallelujah of positivity, and the power of saying yes to everything, effectively foreshadowing the social mandate to be ceaselessly, even toxically positive, for the sake of one’s own achievement potential. With 2010 came Instagram, the hallowed digital stage where, armed with filters, we discovered new layers of our own image-making potential and saw ourselves as infinitely more photogenic than anyone had ever dared suggest. The spirit of the Quantified Self movement arrived a year later, preaching the gospel of personal metrics; nothing, it seemed, could be valuable unless its worth could be measured in steps, calories, or REM cycles. 2012’s motto, YOLO, reassured us all that, sure, you only live once, but this one life ought to be spent maximizing experience density at all costs—an invitation to recklessly pursue happiness under the guise of “freedom” that actually felt like a new kind of treadmill. Then, 2013 struck gold with Vine and LinkedIn endorsements, an era where your entire existence could be condensed into six seconds or into tidy little upvotes, allowing success to be quantified, analyzed, and added to your ever-growing online resumé. Finally, 2014 brought the jumping selfie trend, an act requiring multiple takes to capture one fleeting, well-choreographed moment of spontaneity. Achievement society was fully seated, stretching and sipping water, ready for a marathon of constant visibility and optimized image. Yeah, you may only live once, but I don’t think it’s guaranteed. It’s also entirely possible that within the unwavering busyness of achievement society, you don’t even live once.
To us, our parents’ old photos from BiP look cringe. There’s no sense of hip irony, no curated expression, or trendy referentiality—just these candid snapshots where they stand awkwardly and stone-faced in front of beaches, temples, monuments, or at family gatherings. They didn’t even bother to smile. It’s practically embarrassing, like they didn’t know the rules of appearing cool or self-aware. Remember, in our hyper-vigilant cultural nexus, cringe acts as a societal police force, constantly monitoring our behavior and demanding conformity. Cringe is basically feeling shame for someone else as they aren’t following the same rules that I am supposed to. Perhaps there’s something quite rebellious about this apparent lack of self-consciousness—my parents’ generation had a kind of authenticity that’s simply absent in our endless parade of filtered and grinning selfies. This satisfied look of a selfie-taker is, after all, exactly what the neoliberal subject looks like: always smiling and selling a curated life, whose proof of existence is through their perpetual performance: the look of a perfect consumer. My parents were unperturbed and unpoliced by the demand for endless self-optimization. They didn’t need to know the rules of exhaustive self-awareness because they simply didn’t care to play the game. And so, here we are in the game a few years later, snapping our way through the desert between who we are and who we wish we were, plastering on filters and brushing off imperfections in a relentless bid to feel real while knowing, deep down, it’s just another layer of artifice. My parents could shrug off this entire dance with a genuine authentic indifference, but I can’t do that as easily. It’s as if their very ability to be cringe without realizing it feels like something I’ve already lost, some embodied cringe I’m unable to access without feeling self-conscious, as though I’ve become an achievement society avatar, carrying a thousand ambitions not entirely my own. In ‘achievement society’, every gap between the image I project and the reality I live widens and feels sharper. It’s not just a misalignment; it’s a wound, a small desert where my ideal self stands on one side, cool and curated, while my actual self, trapped on the other, glances back helplessly. This gap, this parched ground, isn’t something I can intellectualize away or solve by just taking more authentic photos. The paradox remains: the more I strive to achieve authenticity, the further I am from it. And maybe that’s the irony I’ve been sidestepping all along, one I can’t escape: I can’t dwell too long on this inner conflict because there’s no time, not with all this optimizing to do, all this unrelenting effort to polish up the ‘me’ I’d like the world to see.
