This piece was adapted from an essay originally written for a public policy course, Policy Choice as Value Conflict.
“Day 1 of Becoming a Fiber Maxxer,” “Hair styling to visually reduce facial asymmetries,” and a “Day in the life” video that starts with a 4 a.m. wake-up, 10-mile run, and ice bath: these are just three of the reels that greeted me when I opened Instagram this morning (significantly later than 4 a.m.). In recent years, a new ethos has emerged—self-optimization. As these examples illustrate, efforts to self-optimize can and have been taken to somewhat cartoonish lengths. But even if you haven’t partaken in bone-smashing (hammering your bones to make your features more defined) or don’t self-identify as a “fiber-maxxer,” chances are that self-optimization has reached you in other ways. Maybe you make food decisions based on protein content, or you aim for the magic number of 10,000 steps a day. Self-optimization is difficult to avoid in the modern era, especially with opportunistic companies rolling out an ever-expanding offering of products (Fitbits, habit tracking journals, or, perhaps the pinnacle of wellness: the sleep-, fitness-, and stress-tracking Oura Ring) designed to provide insight into virtually every metric of your health. Forms of self-optimizing influences vary, but they all share one thing in common: an underlying message that the current “you” is in some way inadequate. Fortunately, however, these messages tend to be conveniently paired with the exact, quantifiable solutions to your shortcomings.
Scrolling through these kinds of videos on social media does not typically make me feel good about myself, but I struggle to condemn the entire genre as unhelpful. After all, the goals of self-optimization are, ostensibly, about improving an individual’s health or well-being. How can these objectively admirable ends be reconciled with the often obsessive ways they manifest? This question leads me to consider the moral status of self-optimization more generally. Can we characterize self-optimization as either morally “good” or morally “bad”? This is the question that this essay seeks to clarify.
To determine the moral status of self-optimization, it is first necessary to define the term. For our purposes, we may understand self-optimization as the deliberate and often continuous practice of improving some aspect of oneself to reach (or move closer to) one’s highest potential. I note here that, while the examples of self-optimization that first spring to my mind are the more negative and outlandish ones, this definition would also encompass behaviors such as wearing glasses to improve eyesight or painting one’s nails.
Framing these more generic and widely accepted actions as self-optimization takes some of the sting out of the knee-jerk rejection of the concept that one may experience when considering only its most ostentatious forms. But there remains a tension between the different kinds of self-improvement mentioned thus far: wearing glasses feels fundamentally different from setting metrics like step counts against which to measure your performance. So, if we recognize that there are, intuitively, internal distinctions within this definition of self-optimization, our task becomes evaluating each of them independently; perhaps it is true that some forms of self-optimization are morally permissible, and others are not. The next step in evaluating their moral status, then, is determining what these morally important distinctions are.
My first instinct is to look at the practices that intuition deems good (going to therapy, wearing eyeglasses) vs. bad (aggressive calorie deficits, cosmetic surgery; i.e., procedures not medically necessary) and see what potentially explanatory patterns I can identify between the two groups. The first thing I see is a distinction between bringing people up to a baseline and attempting to excel beyond that baseline. For example, it seems plausible that we would endorse someone struggling with mental health going to therapy, and would think it a good thing that someone with poor eyesight wears glasses. But it’s far more likely that we will condemn efforts to push too far above this baseline. Unlike the prior two cases where the starting point is a place of deficiency, calorie deficits and cosmetic surgeries theoretically start from a baseline of sufficiency and seek to exceptionalize oneself. Could this examination of the starting point—below, at, or above the baseline—be the distinction we’ve been looking for between forms of self-optimization? Upon further inspection, the answer is no. Labeling an entire self-optimizing practice as good or bad still seems to lack sufficient nuance. For one, this attitude has concerning implications. If we punish attempts to surpass some baseline, does any ambition then become punishable? This presents a serious leveling-down problem—punishing excellence to keep everyone equal—and effectively sacrificing development at the altar of equality.
What’s more, counter-examples to the pattern I’ve identified are easy enough to conceive of: someone could, theoretically, go to therapy because they want to seem emotionally mature to romantic prospects, or start cutting back on calories because they feel physically better when they eat a little less. So if the practice itself can have both good and bad applications, it seems we must further refine our judgment within the practice. Perhaps it is not so much that moral status is innate to a behavior, but that it is instead contingent on the individual’s relationship to that behavior.
I now return to the examples of glasses and step-tracking watches. We may think of both practices as ones that may objectively achieve self-improvement ends. However, the key distinction between the two lies in their relationship with their wearer. Glasses do not bring with them any evaluative metrics and, therefore, cannot, by definition, impose them upon their wearer. A Garmin, however, can. Note that tracking your steps does not necessarily lead you to internalize these metrics, but it does introduce the possibility of doing so. Over time, a number such as 10,000 may shift from a descriptive measure of activity to a normative measure of success. When this happens, a person’s autonomy is undermined because the relationship between the individual and the practice becomes inverted. Note that I anchor this evaluation on autonomy because any form of self-work requires you to be both the agent and the subject of your own will, making control over self-evaluation especially important. In many self-optimizing fads, the practice ceases to assist the person’s purposes and instead replaces the person’s will, defining what counts as “doing well” in the first place. The person’s actions become increasingly tailored to satisfying a framework that feels less and less optional. This autonomy distinction is most visible in health metrics and the quantification of wellness, but note that it can also arise from more subconscious social metrics, such as comparing others’ behaviors as the standard against which to measure one’s own.
Again, I stress that having these evaluative metrics in one’s life is not inherently bad. The undermining of autonomy occurs only when a person values those metrics and weighs their worth against others’ standards. If I were to casually watch “What I eat in a day” videos for recipe ideas, I would not be engaging in autonomy-undermining self-optimization. But if I were to watch them with a constant comparative eye, thinking, even subconsciously, about how my own day of eating compares, I would start to lose some of my autonomy in distancing myself from evaluative standards.
Hence, we arrive at the conclusion I am ultimately attempting to advance: self-optimization is not inherently wrong, and becomes morally concerning only when
1) it introduces external standards AND
2) those standards become the default lens through which a person understands their own success or failure.
An obvious objection to my claim is that it is impossible to live in modern society without internalizing evaluative criteria. From grades to Greek life rankings, we are constantly exposed to standards against which we are measured. If my argument is that autonomy is undermined whenever external standards become part of one’s self-evaluation, then it appears that nearly all facets of modern life can likely be labeled as autonomy-undermining. But that is not the full extent of my argument. I’d like to emphasize that the mere presence of evaluative standards in one’s life/sense of self is still not enough to condemn self-optimization morally. It is only when these standards become ingrained to the point that a person no longer sees them as optional or chosen that they truly become autonomy-restricting. This allows for a more reasonable understanding of ordinary practices. A student may treat grades as an indicator of academic performance without allowing them to dictate their sense of worth, and an athlete may use fitness metrics as data points rather than as measures of adequacy. Their senses of autonomy may remain intact.
Another critique is something along the lines of original consent. By buying an Oura ring, am I not tacitly agreeing to let its metrics become a central part of my life? If so, then any resulting loss of autonomy appears self-imposed and therefore not morally objectionable. Admittedly, there is some degree of responsibility involved in voluntarily adopting these practices, and arguing that individuals are simply passive victims would be disingenuous. But initial consent is not informed or detailed enough to encompass all subsequent effects: choosing to adopt a practice is not the same as choosing to let it define your relationship to yourself. Much like a frog in a pot of ever-warming water, the shift from using a tool to letting it evaluate your worth is gradual enough that it may go unnoticed. What began as something freely chosen can become something more invasive without a clear moment of consent.
We are quick to condemn self-optimization outright because of just how slippery the slope is from adopting its practices to becoming consumed by them. Still, it is important to distinguish between the practice itself and one’s relationship with it. In this essay, I have argued that the increasingly omnipresent phenomenon of self-optimization is not inherently morally problematic. Rather, its moral status depends on how the individual relates to the standards it introduces. When these artificial standards maintain a degree of separation from one’s sense of worth, they can support genuine improvement. Still, when they become the default framework through which an individual understands themself, autonomy erodes. This leaves us with an important, if somewhat vague, instruction: not to outright reject self-optimization, but to pay careful attention to the extent of its power over you.
