optimisation: a trap, alignment or a secret third thing?
the difference between a chase driven by the past and a calm, silver-lined stroll towards the future
As i'm in a pilates class, navigating the well acquainted waves of self love and self criticism, I find myself thinking about our collective obsession with optimisation.
We see this decades old obsession everywhere, repackaged but seemingly more present than ever. TikTok's endless "that girl" routines promising transformation through 5am cold plunges and aesthetically arranged smoothie bowls. The Pro-Ana tumblr days are back, now in the form of paid instagram channel subscriptions that challenge young women to starve themselves until their period stops.
The corporate world sells us optimisation as professional currency: optimise your sleep not for rest but for productivity; optimise your appearance or your interior not for joy but for "personal brand." you get it.
It’s easy to critique optimisation, and much has already been written about that. But beneath all this, I've noticed something about optimisation that feels important to share. Cause I think it’s not all bad, and that has everything to do with mindset work.
I have noticed that there is a difference between optimisation that is a response to running from something versus optimisation as an act from neutrality to arrive somewhere. The destination being to live an authentic life, not Your Personal Dream Life™, but your personal dream life, the one free from societal conditioning, free from dreams that you thought were yours but belong to others, a life full of glimmers leading you the way, a path that probably already got presented to you as a kid in your earliest drawings or in the things that you felt drawn towards.
Though these two shapes of optimisation might look identical from the outside, they truly are two very different journeys. And I believe in order to understand the difference, we need to experiment with destructing systems we live in, decentering the rules and obsessions those systems want us to live by, and leaning into softness - and no, not by choosing tradwive submissiveness or embodying conservative wellness “feminine energy” while using beef tallow as sunscreen but a secret third thing that is highly personal to you, an experimental journey that has to do with your authentic desires, discovering where you’ve built up rigid scar tissue, and exploring how to massage it back into softness.
One of the two optimisation paths I am talking about isn’t sustainable, of course. It will always lead to burnout. It’s the path that promises gold at the end of the rainbow through girl bossing and 50/50 feminism - whispering that you are the exception, that you can win this game if you just work -out- hard enough, running the hamster wheel of individualism and hyper independence until you're out of breath but never out of fucks to give.
You believe you can reach the end of the rainbow - though it keeps moving every time you get close - if you’re not like other girls. You’ll finally get picked by the man who's lived in your head since the age of 3, as long as you crawl fast enough through the mud, somehow keeping your BIAB nails and €3K hair extensions pristine.
All this, as you donate most of your hard-earned, wage-gapped money to the manchild you share the rent with while he’s busy working his full-time job of weaponising incompetence and treating you like the COO of invisible labour. paid in crumbs, thanked in sighs, forgotten in the footnotes of a non existing marriage contract. the rest of your salary goes to beauty treatments of course, in order to look presentable by patriarchal standards.
The unspoken goal is always the same: to get as far away as possible from that deeply buried belief, the one whispering that you’re not good enough, never have been, never will be.
This is just one illustration but you get it. Optimisation, when motivated by unexamined beliefs and a lack of context - like the systems you live within: patriarchy and capitalism are just two - is what those “optimisation is a trap” articles are really pointing to. And they’re right. They speak truth, its just not the whole story.
the avoidance limbo
Let's talk about optimising from a place of avoidance:
I reallly do not want to be like this/feel this/ go through this
I need to be different
I'm not where I should be
Beliefs like these are rooted in the avoidance of certain emotions. Unfortunately, this often creates more of what you’re trying to escape or suppress. Your subconscious becomes more focused on what you’re avoiding than on where you genuinely want to go. And what you focus on, you tend to create more of in your reality (because of how confirmation bias works).
Reality creation isn’t about magically manifesting objects - it’s about how your brain, through systems like the reticular activating system, filters your experience to match what you’ve been trained to notice, expect, and act on - whether that’s beauty and opportunity or failure and betrayal.
The identity your subconscious believes you’re holding feels safe- and it has a specific shape.
When it comes to habits, opportunities, and experiences, the ones that match that shape are the ones that will stand out to you.
They’ll feel easier to reach for, easier to hold.
If you - unconsciously - believe an opportunity is too big for you, you may not recognise it as meant for you, or you might instinctively pull back.
Not because you don’t want it, but because your nervous system registers it as a threat rather than something you’re built to hold.
For example: you might receive a message from someone offering a collaboration, but instead of following up with openness and confidence, you delay, downplay yourself, or respond with uncertainty - subtle signals that communicate you're not ready, even if your conscious mind craves the chance.
Your shape - your posture, your voice, your language, your energy - will unconsciously express what your inner identity believes you’re worthy of.
And that silent communication can shape the outcome long before you realise it.
That’s how magnetism works.
“You attract what’s on your frequency” is, in my opinion, just another way of describing something rooted more in neuroscience than in spirituality.
And holding an avoidant identity is how goals become constantly shifted, always just out of reach. You'll never experience satisfaction and you'll create more and more avoidance in other ways in your reality. You never arrive because you are constantly recreating the same avoidance loop. you recreate running and never arriving because the fear is bigger than the desire and by now that running feels comfortable, it’s ingrained in the brain like a habit, even if you don’t love the feeling of it.
It is the tragedy of any girl with an eating disorder, never arriving to the weight of peace and acceptance. The stress repeats with every milestone or even intensifies, eventually sprinkled with a coating of desperation.
I know this path intimately. For years, my optimisation was a beautiful shield -colour-coded planners, immaculate routines, countless self-improvement books - all to avoid sitting with parts of myself that needed attention.
Not to mention endless to do lists with unachievable goals. In retrospect it was a system set up for failure. and without me knowing, this resulted in erosion of my self trust.
finding the path to healthy optimisation
To keep from slipping into this avoidance limbo, we need to begin with neutralising: accepting what is, and even practicing a form of detachment after the embrace, adding proximity between ourselves and judgment. In order to reach this place we must first digest the things we avoid, shine light on our deepest limiting beliefs about ourselves and address all involved parts of ourselves with love, even those we’d rather keep in shadow. What are you avoiding? What are you ashamed of? What do you feel guilty about? Can you find a way to be okay with these parts of you?
Only from a place of acceptance can we start to create what we truly want and optimise in a healthy and sustainable way. Some people create their dreams from a place of avoidance, which can be a big ad seemingly efficient force. But they’ll usually don’t ever feel like they’ve arrived, and they keep recreating the stressful energy in a loop until they address the thing they wanted to avoid in the first place.
Of course, that doesn’t imply that you need to be a perfect post therapy healed package of detachment and neutrality before you can be in a state of healthy optimisation. It is more about truly accepting that we can never be perfect, and stop attaching heavy narratives to moments that are or were just… moments.
Only after we've felt all the feelings deeply, we can decide to be neutral. if we do it before that, we are bypassing and that will lead us to the limbo. Once we feel more neutral (in general or this can apply to a specific situation or goal), we can start walking the path we were supposed to walk.
With all the beautiful things you've learned from the heavier days, you can evolve, pulled towards your true desires. The learnings are your tools now. you found them like little shiny gems in a video game. you can navigate with the silver compass you've collected in past levels, you can envision your personal north star with the stargazer you traded for your biggest trauma and you can now build the glass stairs to get there.
Because at its heart, life is about creation: building, growing, and making what we create more aligned with our vision. Optimising. This honours our creativity and the love we have for life and creation itself, but it also honours our holy body and brain.
Making theory physical is an honouring ritual to your ideas. And adding buckets of intention and sprinkles of romance is a tender, loving form of optimisation.
the first alternative to optimisation
Call me a magical thinker but this is why I think routine and development aren’t always products of a capitalist society obsessed with ROI, growth, and perfection. Or a patriarchy obsessed with control and appearance (although both will always be woven into our reality, of course, until a global structural change will happen).
Choosing optimisation can be an expression of self-love when we free ourselves from the illusion of being chased, and choose a quiet stroll in the dark, following the fireflies towards a calm sea of opportunity and destiny.
Because the alternative is what? Chaos? Constant impulse chasing? Nihilism and narcissism and going from afterparty to mental hospital? Operating with a complete disregard for other peoples feelings? Zero structure and not honouring your brilliant mind, vision, spirit, and body? I love being whimsical but there is a difference between a non linear dance on your authentic path and rioting against your past (see? escapism: reaction, not action) or even worse: "conveniently" cherry picking from society what you want to rebel against, without one original thought in your head.
Not expressing your true authentic self leads to depression. Not being true to yourself leads to anxiety. And to get out of these states, we need to consistently choose baby steps of self care. 1% better everyday. warm milk and a forehead kiss after a day of ruthless rumination.
But most of all, we need to work on our self-trust.
promise keeping to ourselves and others
How do we achieve self-trust? By keeping tiny promises at first. never over promise yourself anything and deeply celebrate your wins everyday.
When I was deep in my burnout and post-burnout depression (hello, Saturn return), I accepted the fact I couldn’t leave my bed most days. But I kept the promise to myself to follow any glimmers like tiny fireflies in the dark. In my case this was educating myself about K-beauty and do my skincare routine every morning and night. I couldn't go to the supermarket but I could do my skincare. So I promised to myself not break this habit, and I kept it. Up until this day I have never skipped my skincare routine.
This tiny promise was my first step toward self-trust. A slow process, but it led to a foundation I could build on. To trusting I could care for myself. That it could even be fun to do so. It eventually lead to my career switch of being a beauty product developer, winning 3 awards for my creations, which gave me the confidence to start my own beauty-wellness brand that will launch in 2026. you can never predict the ripple effect of tiny promises and baby steps of self care. you can always choose between construction and destruction: listen to your belly, your nervous system holds all the answers.
can you "just be", when everything falls down all the time?
Wait, isn't there a second alternative to optimisation, next to chaos? Aren't there Eastern philosophies out there telling us to accept it all, stop chasing, to escape samsara? what if we’d stop making things better for ourselves, and just be?
that would be wonderful, and sounds terrific in theory. I went on a pretty extensive spiritual journey from age 16-26 before becoming more sceptical. When I was a teenager I wanted to become enlightened (lol) but like with many, it came from a desire to escape trauma and from a coping mechanism of magical thinking (yesss doomed diva of dissociation!).
my opinion now is that we must live our lives fully and deeply as human beings, see all of our senses, brain and nervous system as portals to experience and alchemise life, a gift so precious simply because it was given.
Why not indulge? feel, smell, sense, surrender, stumble, soften, begin again. kiss her salty lips, tell your stories, fall gloriously, hear what isn't said. gather the lesson like river stones. linger. get it wrong. disappear if you must. make myth from the mess. Create life on your own terms, with kindness as your compass, treating others as you wish to be treated (unless you’re being harmed. but that’s a story for another time).
Death alchemy: yes, all things fall, gather dust, grow mould, lose form. unless met with care, with hands willing to clean and restore. There is no equilibrium for the cost of living. All capital decays without care.
This fact used to be one of my biggest anxieties but I now understand that it is the essence of life and beauty. it is a privilege to get to be here and work with what we've been given. to gain clarity by finding patterns, creating meaning, living life by digesting and cleaning and structuring and decorating. to find our personal balance, path and forms of beauty, and tend to them like a garden with holy herbs. you get to decide what is holy, your own little hierarchy of symbolisation and value. its yours.
A third alternative to optimisation is stagnation. we all know that water that doesn't move will smell bad. it needs to go somewhere to complete the cycle of death.
BUT its important to note that stagnation is not the same as choosing to pause. Creating an intentional container of rest and healing is always constructive when done well. Rest is also part of the death cycle.
mindset shifts
I am a huge fan of shapeshifting towards my authentic path, experiments are part of this, as = letting go of identity traits that were never mine to begin with but were part of past conditioning. A healthy form of optimisation is shapeshifting towards your authentic self. Unhealthy forms of optimisation is shapeshifting out of avoidance, and shapeshifting towards someone elses dreams, be it the dreams of a system, a parent or a friend.
So in summary: when it comes to optimisation, what matters most is knowing the difference between a chase driven by the past and a stroll towards the future.
How can you know? by de-conditioning, and embracing stillness and reflection. try to turn off the music and the lights in the mirror palace. I wholeheartedly believe in our capability to have original thoughts.
And what if we strengthen this, by making it a practice to remember our greatest inner superpowers? What if we could reframe the daily tasks - waking up, creating, optimising - not as burdens, but as privileges?
Instead of thinking, all falls down all the time, what does it matter, let me hide under the sheets
or: I have to do this and its heavy
we can begin to think, I get to do this because I’ve been given this absurd gift of life that I can mostly shape into something enjoyable if I just focus on what I want to create more of in my reality, for at least 51% of the time.
or remembering: intentionally noticing the glimmers will rewire my brain to recognise more glimmers so reality will reflect even móre glimmers and help me get on my authentic path. and if you need to bathe in big emotions before you’re capable of shifting towards positivity, please do so for the sake of your own self trust.
It's actually pretty simple: our true desires are calling like sirens, singing us back to ourselves. their voices lifting us onto our paths. We only need to use our senses as portals, decondition ourselves and embrace the fact that we have superpowers.
These shifts build beautifully constructive neural pathways: the kind that quietly, consistently lay the foundation for our biggest dreams to come true. I promise.
soft realm monthly soothing media <3
-I’ve enjoyed this creator on youtube a lot lately
Although I don’t really love or ever use the word self sabotage, I did enjoy this substack post about the neuroscience of self sabotage
To listen: my monthly Echobox radio show called etherc0re contains mostly bubbles of calm, although some shows are a bit more experimental: you can listen to it here :)
thank you for reading this far. I’d love to hear your thoughts: where in your life have you noticed the difference between optimisation as avoidance versus optimisation from neutrality, leading towards sustainable creation? What tiny promises have helped you build self-trust? You can always DM me.
<3 romy