When my second kid was born, my first kid was not quite two years old, and my spouse traveled about 50 percent of the year. I fell into postpartum depression. This appears to be how my body reacts the hormone fluctuations that follow birth—the depression was worse with my first child.
I knew what to expect, but I was overwhelmed. Also exhausted, depressed, and frequently alone with a toddler who didn’t yet speak and a baby who wouldn’t latch. I felt like a stranger to myself; I felt like I lived in world both endless and flat, where nothing else had ever been and nothing else would ever be.
The days were okay. My sister lived nearby, and her kids were roughly the same age. We went to museums and shopping malls and outdoor playgrounds. At night, though, I came apart. The bedtime routine was brutal. Baths simultaneous and safe. Milk dispensed, teeth brushed, diapers changed, pajamas on, stories read, lullabies sung, the toddler convinced to stay in the bed, the newborn hushed to sleep. Humidifier. White noise. Baby monitor. And for literally half the year, I was doing it all myself, the only adult in the house.
What I really wanted—to give up and go back to bed—was impossible. So I spent hours crafting an extremely detailed and rigid schedule for getting the kids to sleep. One I could do alone, consistently, in the most optimized way possible. When I worked it all out, it felt good. Some people do this kind of optimization on vacations, when you have limited time and a lot of potential for sight-seeing or eating or whatever. I had always enjoyed that sort of thing, but parenting forced it from habit to lifestyle. It felt like I could control something.
What happens, though, when you realize that optimization might not actually be good for you?
Once I recovered from the postpartum depression, life hacks became really appealing. Helpfully, the internet was also falling in love with the idea. Life hacks were everywhere! With this one weird trick, you could turn your days from lonely, disorganized, and frustrating into prosperous, efficient, and rewarding! You could control your life.
The desire to control the uncontrollable is as old as people. Life hacks, intense scheduling, and time optimization are so popular because they offer structure, and structure can feel like control. Truly contemplating the vastness of your inability to “make it happen” is terrifying. What do we actually have control over in life? Mostly how we treat others, which isn’t that satisfying if all you really want is power and the feeling of safety. But if you’re less of a burgeoning despot and more someone who can comfortably admit that they want to love and be loved, your choices can make at least some impact.
Improving your life has nothing to do with the best way to load your dishwasher. It isn’t the best mantra for your six-minute mental recharge with that meditation app, or a reminder to move around every twenty-five minutes, or the best workout to burn fat. When you realize that you control so little and most of that control simply comes down to choosing how you treat other people, it generally doesn’t feel empowering. In fact, this feeling is often a pretty shitty one.
So I understand why many people don’t want to contemplate it for even a second.
You can apologize for bad decisions made in a bad moment when you lost your temper. You can decide how kind you are. You can consider the plight or privilege of those in this world with you and exercise compassion. Beyond that, we don’t have a ton of control.
It’s hard to recognize this. It’s hard to let go of the burden of expectation, of fixing things, when everything around us pushes us toward the illusion of more accomplishment and more effective ways to feel bad about our perceived failings. When you have to reckon with the way optimization hacks aren’t helping your emotional life—when, say, your body slows down and forces you to take a break, or you flame out and burn down and feel dull and drained and useless and then what’s the point of anything—what do you do then?
We can try to stop listening to those messages, for a start. Push back against the pushing, tell ourselves to stop hacking life and start healing it.
Part of this means acknowledging that sometimes you’re going to miss out. That’s true regardless of whether or not your optimize your time, though. You won’t regularly practice that instrument you picked up in a fit of wild-eyed, self-improvement optimism. You won’t keep a cleaning schedule that means you never have to look at dust in your house. Maybe you’ll miss out on what feels like accomplishing a lot, at least in the kind of way we U.S. residents tend to view accomplishment.
But: Ideas can come from non-optimized time. Taking some extra minutes to lie in bed in the morning, for example, your brain untethered to scheduled efficiency for a while. Surely there’s something neurologically beneficial about idleness verging on boredom. Daydreaming predates civilization. Finding cloud shapes, fondly remembering a favorite meal, letting an idea germinate that could lead to something revolutionary or to absolutely nothing.
I want to make space for that kind of time. The borderless time, the time that looks lazy but is happily unstructured and unconstrained by the metes and bounds of efficiency. But it’s not easy. Or rather, in my experience, it can be easy, at first, for anxiety to take over. What are all the things I’m failing to do right now? Surely they’re a better use of my time than daydreaming.
But it’s all relative. What does “better” mean in that context, really? It’s true that I probably won’t spend my final moments on this earth thinking, Gosh, I’m so glad I daydreamed all those hours away…but who really sits there, at the end of their life, and thinks, My decision to ruthlessly schedule every second to be as efficient as possible feels super validated right now.
Optimization isn’t the same thing as prioritization. You can’t do everything you want, but life doesn’t need to meet maximum efficiency standards in every minute. Executive-function your way into having free time then let it be free.
Making every minute about doing isn’t the same thing as being.
I don’t want to think of my life as a giant game of Tetris. Or a chaotic mess waiting for the perfect California Closet reorganization. So I try to prioritize more and optimize less. I don’t have answers. I don’t even get the optimize/prioritize balance right most days, if I’m honest. But trying to reach that acceptance feels healthier for me than an endless focus on ultra-optimization.
Yours in very chill, super laid-back, and extra-undefined daydreams,
That Hag
Two Ways to Feel Good About a Lack of Control in the Week Ahead:
1. Find a body of water (an ocean, a lake, a pond, a stream) and recognize how little you affect its behavior and how short a time you can keep it in your hands. You can throw a stone into the water and cause ripples. You can build a little dam and slightly divert the flow. But, really, that water is going to continue on no matter what you, individually, do during your time there. It’s also comforting to know that if you scoop the water up in your palms, it won’t stay. Its time on your skin is ephemeral and wonderful. You don’t control water, but you can enjoy it without drowning.
2. Daydream with no real purpose for a few minutes. Let your mind drift sometime this week, for at least a few minutes together. Don’t put a goal on it, like visualizing your ideal future or whatever. Just allow your brain to meander and don’t force any particular thoughts. You aren’t looking to optimize the daydreaming—you’re looking to give your brain some time free of expectation.