Optimization Is Ruining Your Life (And It's Not Even Efficient)

Is optimizing every minute of your day actually making your life better — or just burning you out faster? In this episode of MissPerceived, Professor Leah Ruppanner makes the case that optimization culture, especially prevalent in the US, is quietly destroying our ability to rest, create, and simply live.

Leah traces how we came to treat time itself as a resource to be maximized — a relatively recent social conditioning that emerged with industrialization — and explains why getting time back (from grocery delivery, AI, or any efficiency hack) rarely translates into rest. Instead, we immediately reinvest that saved time into more productivity, repeating a pattern seen since the first industrial revolution: every gain in efficiency just raises the bar for what "enough" looks like.

She connects this to her research on the mental load, sharing a striking story about a woman who drops the activities that bring her joy in order to make more room for stressful, "productive" problem-solving — and asks why we've been trained to treat rest as wasteful. Leah also explores what Gen Z's resistance to hustle culture might mean for the future of work, and why AI and automation may only intensify the pressure to optimize rather than relieve it.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction — is optimization good?

01:00 Why optimization pressure feels different in the US vs. Australia

02:20 How eroded social safety nets fuel the need to "game the system"

04:41 Getting time back doesn't mean getting rest back

06:00 A brief history: how time became a resource to optimize

07:00 The fourth industrial revolution: AI, automation, and rising standards

09:23 A woman's insight: dropping joy to make room for "productive" stress

11:48 Why younger generations are rejecting hustle culture