your life is not an optimization problem

a brain dump on finding the glorious in the mundane

In witnessing the lives of people I know, I sometimes feel provincial. I still walk up and down the aisles of grocery stores, looking for peanut butter and Ezekiel bread. I still spend time in third spaces just to exist in them, to breathe them in, to take a cup of coffee, look around, and muse about the people around me. I still take the long way there—on foot, by scooter, sometimes even by bus. I still cook our dinners and wash the dishes, more days than not.

These chores and errands, these small pilgrimages, tether me to a physical world that is increasingly easy to leave behind. Philosopher Albert Borgmann once argued that these “focal practices”—the mundane, repetitive acts of cooking, cleaning, sharing a meal—are where meaning gathers. They resist commodification because they demand the labor of our bodies and, historically, the presence of our attention.

In these small hours—frying an egg in the cast-iron pan on a Monday morning, or guiding the vacuum across the sand a dog and a toddler have scattered like careless offerings—I feel, briefly, old-fashioned. I think of the people I know with live-in nannies, personal assistants, someone at the door to meet every need, some they didn’t even know they had. I think of my dear friends who have never swept their own floors, or those with 80+ hours of childcare coverage a week. Their lives seem devastatingly neat. I imagine, for a moment, what it might be like to live in them.

A point of contention between a husband and wife I know is whether to outsource the daily labors of living. Why walk the dog, plan a trip, shop for groceries when you can pay someone else to do it for you? At first, I believed the argument against was something along the lines of: to step away from these ordinary acts is to step away from the world itself. To become unknowable to those around you and, in turn, they to you. Your lived experience becomes separate, even illegible.

Anthropologists call these small tasks communicative acts: they speak of who we are and what we value. To give them away is to speak less of yourself.

When I was in college, we looked at tabloid photos of celebrities ordering coffee, waiting in line, looking for their keys, and we recognized our own lives in those moments of friction. We felt communion in the small, stubborn insistence of being alive.

Studies now confirm what our bodies already knew. Nearly half of U.S. adults report loneliness; forty percent go days without face-to-face contact outside work or school. I think about boarding the Big Blue Santa Monica bus and greeting the driver, the way he beams when I inquire about his day. Each time a barista thanks me for asking “how are you?,” I feel a small ache. Somewhere along the way, acknowledgment became uncommon.

It is a good thing to make eye contact with another human being. It is a good thing to engage the world even when it is inconvenient or imperfect.

But beyond that, I think my resistance comes from this emerging belief that an optimized life is a life without texture. The world flattens, becoming screens and buttons. There’s an emptiness, a soullessness, to following the formula that optimizes for efficiency. Both online and offline, everything looks the same.

Our senses—feeling the weight of a watermelon, listening to music not of your choosing, smelling mangoes for ripeness—are the marrow of living. Our senses are how we know we’re alive. Letting them atrophy in the name of efficiency is not progress; it’s a slow forgetting, a loss of our capacity for experience, and for wonder.

It would be one thing if all of the outsourcing meant that more people spent more time doing more interesting things. But sociologists studying “time affluence” find that the hours we save rarely become anything of substance. Instead, the freed time is fed into screens. I suspect time saved by ordering on Instacart is then spent on Instagram. Money buys back time only to have it lost to brain rot. We trade friction for convenience, when the friction is what makes time feel real.

My house will never look like an Architectural Digest spread, not only because I don’t have a cleaner who comes in twice a week, but because it is lived in—because it is full. Full of moments that become memories that make me want to cry when I think about them as I fall asleep, of laughter and shenanigans that leave behind throw pillows on the floor and toy trains on the kitchen table. Full of mornings that began in haste, of evenings filled with stories, of our lives intersecting in unruly beauty. Full of signs of life. Why would I want to erase the evidence of that?

I want to keep my world vivid. I want to slow down. I want to remind myself that I have this body, remind myself that I am alive. So much of this world is meant to be felt, to be experienced in full. So I’ll keep wandering the aisles for kidney beans. I’ll keep greeting the bus driver. For as long as I can, I want to find the glorious in the mundane.