Chine McDonald explores the recent backlash against our cultural obsession with self–optimisation. Can we resist the pull of productivity? 04/06/2026

Businessman Steven Bartlett – whose influential podcast Diary of a CEO has gained more than a billion listens – has come under fire in recent days for saying that having two glasses of wine “ruined” three days of his life “because of the domino effect that it caused”. Bartlett laments the horror of getting worse sleep that night because of the alcohol, eating poorly the next day because his “dopamine system or the cortisol system or whatever was all messed up”. He then – horror of horrors – “podcasted worse” and didn’t go to the gym the day after. All of his supposed failures could be tracked on his various self–optimisation devices.

The response has been fascinating. Radio 1 presenter Greg James called on people to join him in the anti–optimisation movement because “optimisation is killing fun”, he said. He also might have a book out saying just that.

The backlash to Bartlett’s comments have been less about the specifics of enjoying alcohol (some applauded those who have managed to give it up entirely), but the sentiment was more a tirade against the ‘optimisation movement’ which uses data, technology, life and productivity hacks to improve quality of life. That is, if we measure the quality of life by how much we achieve, how much of our to–do lists we blast through, how much money we make, and how much our bodies are optimised health–wise to achieve the said goals.

We start each weekly team meeting at Theos with an icebreaker question. I regret asking the team last week to share the most ‘self–optimising’ thing they have done recently. Some bristled against the question; some of my colleagues rightly pointed out that we shouldn’t be falling into the trap of thinking that the self–optimising way is the right one. After all, one of the key societal narratives we as a team are hoping to counter in the world through the wisdom of Christian scripture and tradition, is exactly this concept of self–optimisation. Nevertheless, we all had answers: ranging from increasing vitamin intake to lifting weights to being trained on how to use AI.

We were reminded of our senior researcher Hannah Rich’s excellent long read in which she interviews members of religious orders about their rules of life that counter this idea that we are what we achieve. The piece begins with a striking quote from the novel Stone Yard Devotional, which tells the story of the protagonist who flees to a convent in the Australian outback:

“Being here feels somehow like childhood; the hours are so long and there is so much waiting, staring into space. Absolutely nothing is asked of me, nothing expected.”

I confess that I find in this quote both liberation and terror. It’s hard to resist the pull of productivity and self–optimisation when life feels overwhelming. Self–optimisation isn’t all bad, but rather a very human attempt to provide control, order and habits that we think might lead to a better life, especially when the world feels so turbulent. And yet the pull of nothingness – of just being – is a very human hope, too. But it feels counter–cultural because, as I heard Romanita Hairston say so powerfully at Washington National Cathedral last week: “We have not yet learned how to be valuable without being useful.” 

She was speaking at The Understory festival, which Theos partnered in, and which a few of us attended in Washington DC last week. Run by our friends at Comment magazine, the inaugural festival gathered civic, institutional and faith leaders to explore what Christian humanism in particular might offer into this fragile and turbulent political and cultural moment. Anne Snyder, Comment’s editor and creator of the festival, explained the concept of the ‘understory’ as the “hidden unity” beneath the world’s fracture. “Something real and raw is stirring beneath our disordered politics and performance,” she said.

What has this got to do with Steven Barlett’s two glasses of wine and the backlash to a culture of self–optimisation?

What I see in the anti–optimisation movement is an understory emerging that is dissatisfied with the overstories we have been told about who we are. Beneath the overstory that tells us we need to be endlessly productive and optimised to feel ok about ourselves is a desire to express to another person: I think we’re made for more than this. Do you? Or as Czech theologian Tomáš Halík told those of us gathered in DC: “Humanity has had the intuition that we are more than what we currently are.” On Tuesday, back in London, at an event we held at the Royal Society of the Arts on behalf of the Fetzer Institute on the launch of their new book, we discussed too the sacred understories that lie beneath the so–called secular; and encouraged society across sectors to pay more attention to them. 

As we see an increasing resistance to the belief that the overstories we have been told to believe are the only stories, perhaps, as Romanita Hairston said, “there is an understory of connection that is not fuelled by the name tags that we wear.” 

I think a Christian understanding of what it means to be human can help us in this moment to put language around what feels instinctive to many, whether they are ‘religious’ or not. People are increasingly turning to the wisdom and steadiness of faith traditions to help us make sense of what we’re going through. For example, could any of us have predicted that in 2026 the pope’s encyclical would go viral? And yet Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas has received mainstream coverage the likes of which we’ve never seen. 

And that podcast I mentioned at the start of this piece – Diary of a CEO? Well, the latest episode out today is Steven Bartlett in conversation with none other than last year’s National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast speaker, Christian apologist John Lennox.

In these times of hunger for things that can hold us in this moment, the role of organisations like ours is perhaps to connect the understories bubbling under the surface to a story – and a person – that might help us. In the gospel accounts, when a rich young ruler asks what’s needed for him to gain eternal life, Jesus in effect tells him to let go of all the things that he might find security in and give it all away. For our self–optimisers today, that might be the wealth and the sleep trackers and the things we might grip on to for dear life; the constant need to save time or to master it for our own purposes.

Perhaps Oliver Burkemann is getting to the truth of Christ’s response to the human need to both achieve and control and produce when he writes: 

“There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.”

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