The Optimalist's Way
The rich world has succumbed to complacency and cynicism. Why bother going to Mars? We have plenty of problems on Earth. Why develop better, faster cars? If anything, we should drive less and lessen our impact on the planet. Why develop a better, faster anything? This whole modern world has largely been a mistake. We’re out of harmony with the planet. In fact, we’re destroying the planet. The way we live is unnatural. We have flown too close to the sun, and we’re due to plummet back down to Earth right about now.
In a recent podcast appearance with Tim Ferriss, Balaji Srinivasan makes a striking point: Icarus was a myth; planes are real. It seems very obvious once stated, but it somehow feels provocative. The Icarus myth is very old but a form of it is ubiquitous today. We were arrogant, we thought we could fly high, and now we need to be brought down to Earth. Get rid of that SUV, ride a bike. Take the bus. Eat local. Live small. All this thinking is based on the assumption that we can’t make human life much better in every way and we shouldn’t try. We can’t, we mustn’t, get from point A to point B faster or live in a bigger, nicer house. We need to lower our expectations and settle for a more constrained way of living.
It is a strange conclusion to jump to after centuries of miraculous advances in living standards. We progress and progress and progress, and then we run into a few major unintended side effects and call the whole thing off? There is an eternal tension between embracing the fruits of human’s unique inventive power and recoiling from the unforeseen side effects. There should be a balance. But right now we are out of balance. We are too afraid, too soft, too prone to navel-gazing. We’re comfortable enough, and can’t be bothered to improve our lot further.
Enter the optimalist. This is a term that Balaji Srinivasan has been playing with lately. He uses it as an alternative to the term transhumanism. From the podcast with Tim Ferriss
Optimalism is, in a sense, you’re improving. You’re getting better. It is optimal physical fitness. It is optimal health. It is taking care of oneself. It is optimizing finances. It is optimizing everything.
Interestingly, Srinivasan compares the breaking of limits in health to the breaking of limits in flight by the Wright brothers.
All of our planes don’t crash either. We managed to outdo Icarus. It wasn’t some arrogance of thinking we could fly. We could fly. We could figure it out. Yes, there were some crashes. We figured it out. We got it down to a not just a science, but to an engineering.
Running with that thread, an optimalist might be a person who simply thinks “everything should work way better.” Who strives for optimal fitness, optimal productivity, optimal everything. It could be a way of thinking that extends from the everyday to the epic. It’s rejecting poor health and striving for excellent health. It’s contributing to projects that make the typical person’s life measurably better instead of waging meme warfare on Twitter. Optimalism is about striving to thrive and developing the tools that help humans thrive.
What does it look like to be an optimalist?
Let’s take a universal human concern: health. An optimalist doesn’t accept mediocre health, but strives for exceptional health. An optimalist would learn and try experiments and get results. Not only that, but an optimalist might develop tools that could be generally used. They might develop an app like Strava to help other people level up too. And an optimalist would look ahead to things that don’t currently seem possible, to being super fit at 80.
It’s a way of connecting the everyday to a grander purpose, of not only practicing healthy habits but keeping up with new advances and helping to develop them. It’s a hopeful, energetic approach to life at a time when pessimism abounds. It’s optimistic but practical. It might be something the world needs more of right now.