Are You Optimizing Your Life?

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Sally Kohn: I see you making kind of two big critiques as I understand them. The first is that people are often looking for like that one thing they can do that's going to change their life, if they just eat the right micronutrient or something like that. The second is about sort of the importance of spending time where you're not trying to optimize or you're just kind of getting downtime, relaxing, restoring that kind of thing. So how do you think about what you should be trying to optimize versus not?Kohn: Not everything and not every aspect of your life really needs optimization and will be beneficial to try and optimize that. And so being really careful

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Why should we not optimize some things in life? Should some things (e.g., interpersonal relationships) be "off-limits" for optimization? How much time spent being unproductive is good for us? What can we learn by paying attention to our moods? Does science make progress and produce knowledge too slowly? Why is research methodology applied so inconsistently, especially in the social sciences?

Christie Aschwanden is author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery, and co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast about the creative process. She's the former lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight and was previously a health columnist for The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in dozens of publications, including Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Smithsonian, Popular Science, New Scientist, Discover, Science, and NPR.org. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. She was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2011 and has received journalism fellowships from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Carter Center, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Greater Good Science Center. Learn more about her at christieaschwanden.com or follow her on Instagram at @cragcrest or on Mastodon at @cragscrest.

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