Your Vibes Will Be Tracked

On smoothie bowls, surveillance states, and the hollowing out of the useful that got us here

Written by Courtland, edited by Paige. Note: this post is long, and the email may cut off. We recommend reading in the app.

It started with a list—there were dozens—you combined three Pinterest-perfect routines into one GRWM gem. Remember 2017? Give it a week and see, but honestly? Making the bed first thing was a life-changer. It’s just great to start the day in control, ya know? Coming back into a neat bedroom hits different.

You prepped the lemon water the night before, woke up with a Philips SmartSleep™ sunrise alarm, and charged your phone overnight—in the kitchen.

Missed it the first day because, yeah, the routine was on the phone. But after that? Three whole days of sunlight journaling while sipping mushroom coffee. One spread even got a bunch of likes—including from that one guy who went to SCAD and has the best weeklies.

Did anyone actually convert to brushing after breakfast? If you walk out of the bathroom in the morning, you have to feel ready. Not for OrangeTheory—never gets easier—but just, in general. Honestly, even making it to the 20-minute Ashtanga video from that YouTuber was a stretch.

But honestly? As good as it looked—and it really looked good—it just became another thing to manage.

So jump cut to now. Chiller, right? Maybe a ten-minute scroll first thing. Let the day come to us. Yoga? Sometimes—fifteen minutes, enough to feel embodied. And you keep all the skincare stuff. Obviously. It’s what separates us from the animals. Style’s tighter. Palette’s dialed. Vibes, honed. This is what your best life looks like. And yeah, sometimes you hate yourself by 8:03. But hey—optimized regret is still optimized.

Which is funny, because optimization used to mean something else entirely.

The briefest history of optimization

It was a scalpel—pointed, brutal, and necessary. You cut toward a clear goal with consequence snapping at your heels, not to track your water intake on a wellness app. You optimized to outpace collapse—or outbuild the Nazis (and the Brits, and everyone else).

In fact, this is where we started. Wartime logistics. Industrial planning. Do better or break. Optimization was serious language for serious work. Watch your significant figures and carry the one—or the Zero stays king of the skies.

By 1942, Peter Drucker catches a break: a front-row seat at GM. From this stage he invents management as a discipline. His legacy sticks because systematized rather than moralized; he defines leverage—and had nothing at all to say about identity. Thanks again, Silent Generation.

Then comes the spiritual era: Covey and Tony “step into your power” Robbins. Productivity aligns with morality. Improvement becomes salvation.

Next up: the hacker era. Gen X breaks under a modern workplace that never reformed; early Ys feel the walls closing in. And since the culture is still solutions focused, David Allen's do-more-by-doing-less-correctly catches and holds, elegant in its simplicity..

Then the wheels come off. Productivity becomes entertainment. Optimization becomes meme. Improvement is clickbait. Millennials take it performative—BuzzFeed to TikTok in one step.

And now? Zoomers may be making the content, but Millennial Vision is the show. Cue: pre-dawn journaling in a planner-cum-artist portfolio, lemon water refracting, beside tagged mushroom coffee.

From Optimization to Optics

As soon as the productivity aesthetic was born, the reckoning was seeded.

Performance overwhelmed purpose. Productivity is now a villain. "Why do I need a system?" "Isn't not performing a flex?" It isn't. And since when is the point to flex?

We have degraded the culture from system to ritual to content to performance, and the core concept of doing better work is now a myth rather than example (along with much of the other good work from 1942).

To be clear: the rejection of where we are should be aggressive.

Performative optimization masquerades as authenticity. It’s dialed for aesthetic regardless of impact—which, to be clear, is just called commercialism.

Expensive gear, curated lighting, and brand partnership for productivity gummies puffed up by simulated mastery and aspirational control?

This is low-friction identity alignment dressed up as self-work. Growth abandoned for glamorizing stasis and pretending maintenance. So I guess this is what self-care looks like now. Just remember: pugs were once wolves. Optimization wasn’t always this cute.

Here's where things split

The personal track veered right the moment identity got involved, but now it's flown off the road and crashed headlong into aesthetics for their own sake: optimization as moodboard. But the so-called serious strain gained traction in web 2.0, branching left into control: dashboards, OKRs, engagement metrics. Leaving all human beings stranded at the split.

Ideology on the left, performance on the right, and humanity stuck at the fork. To follow a path is to yield a complete self to legibility and surveillance. A human as a cog, spinning toward whatever misanthropic purpose this machine demands.

So we’ve split the concept. An edge that once shaved seconds to save lives, or costs, or markets—impersonal, but accountable—traded for two millstones: one to hang around your neck and tell you to keep up, and another to grind you into flour for Wall Street bread. We didn’t humanize the concept. We surrendered it upward.

The corporate class got KPIs. We got smoothies and screen time. We won the war, designed the peace, and then sold ourselves into digital feudalism for a hojicha oat milk latte and some lifestyle theater.

Welcome to optimization now: performed effortlessness for your peers, exaggerated effort for your boss. A curated life in high resolution—a simulation at low friction—as power centralizes under the banner of progress. Everyone’s on stage and no one breaks character.

Yes, the world was the stage—and the audience. Now the theater’s empty, and we perform anyway. For no one. For ourselves. Because the performance became the point.

False Signals, Real Consequences

So what now? To stand at the junction is to be left behind, but neither path feels good. And why should they? Both are about being read for processing, not primed for flourishing.
But mmmmhmm—tasty latte! Bonus in the bank. Saved most of it (because this economy), but you earned a little something. Hashtag self-care.

If you aren't being reactionary, optimization still sounds like the good idea it once was. Smart, reasonable and with enough context cues, downright virtuous. But it's just a failure to update and we don't send out memos about this kind of thing. The word is now used to justify systems which once upon a time would have needed to justify themselves.

The word became a shield—against critique, against scrutiny, against any possibility of asking better questions. Try saying “maybe we shouldn’t optimize this.” You’ll sound lazy. Negative. Inefficient. Probably even to yourself. And so we are stuck: optimization justifies a system before the system justifies itself.

This is what erosion really looks like. Not slang. Not creativity. Not “dope” turning to “slay” and back. Not Shakespearean invention: “bump,” “lonely,” “critic.” This is when feeling overtakes precision, and image subsumes intent. It’s not cute. It’s capture: ego, ignorance, and power in sick alchemy, twisting a word to serve control slowly, and then all at once. 'Optimize' no longer means improve. 'Authenticity' no longer means real.

Ideas drive people. People drive outcomes. And language? It’s the highway they travel. We think of words as tools to express ourselves to others. We totally ignore that they’re also how we speak to ourselves. When you stop tracking what a word means in another person’s mouth, you stop tracking it in your own. And now the keyhole no longer fits one key. Now it fits any key. Or none.

A useful concept loses an extremity. Then its heart. Until it’s flayed, discarded, and worn like a skinsuit by ideologies too limp to stand on their own. Optimization doesn’t mean better. It means pre-approved.

And that should scare you. Because if you can’t push back on the premise, you can’t push back on the result. Not all improvement is progress. Loss can be optimized. Rot can be streamlined.
Improvement without scrutiny becomes obedience. You can’t undo concept creep. But you can still read the sign:

Caution: Manipulation ahead.