By Leo Babauta

These days, so many people are trying to optimize their lives in every way — and I’m as guilty as anyone. Life optimization seems to be the theme for many of us.

But the thing is … it never ends. You can spend months trying to optimize every facet of your life … and you will still feel like more needs to be done. That’s because underneath the optimization mindset is the hidden message: My life as is at the moment isn’t good enough.

We want to optimize our health because our fear is that we’re not going to be able to handle the future without it. We want to optimize our productivity because we judge ourselves for not being more productive. We want to optimize our morning routines, sleep routines, finances, and more … because we fear that we’re not doing good enough at life.

This mindset stems from a fundamental dissatisfaction with our lives and ourselves.

We’re always looking toward a better future, instead of just living with gratitude in the life we already have in front of us.

This comes at a cost: we put pressure on ourselves, it stresses us out, we are comparing our lives to everyone else on social media, we’re rushing (because going slow isn’t optimal), we always feel behind, never done. Does any of that sound familiar?

So what can we do instead?

Let’s lay out some credos of the Unoptimized Life.

  1. Let some things be sub-optimal. It’s worth asking yourself why you want everything to be optimal — is there a fear that if it’s not the most optimal, you’ll be doing things wrong or failing? Entire industries have been formed on people wanting to optimize everything, and being afraid of missing out on what’s the absolute best. It’s OK to be inefficient or suboptimal, if it means hours of less stress. Have fun with a task, enjoy the activity, don’t worry about perfection. Wander and explore.

  2. Let yourself do things without an outcome in mind. What if you could start something and not need to get to a certain place. I’m learning the game of Go right now, and it’s fun to just learn for the sake of learning, without needing to “get good” or achieve a certain rank.

  3. Practice getting to “good enough.” Not everything needs to be absolutely perfect — in fact, most things don’t. You might explore getting to good enough … and then stopping there, and being satisfied with that.

  4. Don’t focus much on metrics. Sure, some things need to be tracked, but not everything does. Lots of meaningful things are better without being tracked or measured for progress.

  5. The big one: from improvement to appreciation. Instead of asking, “How can I make this even better?” … you might ask, “What’s already beautiful about this?” The practice of appreciation is deep and powerful.

Let yourself be human. You’re not an improvement project. You don’t have to always upgrade.

Growth is fun, but having a death grip on progress and perfection takes all the fun out of it. Let it be joyful! Let it come from curiosity and enjoyment, rather than all the ways we feel inadequate.

And practice just being here, without having to get anywhere.