This was the summer that optimisation died

Embrace the imperfection revolution

Photo by Julian Lee/ Millennium images, UK

In early June 2026, investor-influencer Steven Bartlett lamented the loss of three days of his life. On an episode of his productivity podcast Diary of a CEO, he commiserated having drunk three glasses of wine. Though Bartlett “didn’t get drunk”, the binge “ruined three days of my life… I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or the cortisol system or whatever was all messed up. Then I podcasted worse and I didn’t go to the gym the day after and I could track all of this on my Whoop [a fitness tracker designed to be worn 24/7] – hashtag ad, hashtag sponsor, investor… whatever [Bartlett is an investor in Whoop].”

It was not an unusual statement for Bartlett, and such reflections have made his podcast among the most popular in the country, but something snapped in the public response. The backlash was immediate and furious. We should take a moment for “I podcasted worse,” but it wasn’t only that. It wasn’t even the flippant “hashtag sponsor, investor… whatever.” The public outcry stemmed from something deeper: a shift in our cultural way of life.

Productivity podcasts promoting wearable technology exemplify the extent to which optimisation culture acts as a disciplinary force in daily living. You drink the wine, your wearable knows you’ve drunk the wine, you are told you must repent for the wine by a series of flashing icons, and you’ll pay for this privilege. What was initially a helpful bit of kit for those wanting to improve their fitness has become an Asbo-style ankle bracelet, acting on the wearer as a constant reminder to work on yourself. The technology that was supposed to serve us has become the master, and we are left endlessly performing penance for a never-placated machine-god.

In response to Bartlett’s indictment of a few vinos, BBC radio presenter Greg James called on followers to join his “anti-optimisation/Bartlett cult TODAY”, saying “My issue is this endless optimisation and measuring of everything to the point where it starts to make you feel a bit miserable if you don’t quite hit your own targets.” Other media personalities reacted similarly, including Laura Jackson who posted “People are so busy tracking life we’re forgetting to actually live it. Some of the best memories you’ll ever make look terrible on a fitness tracker – and aren’t on the camera roll!”

From smart watches to personalised supplement regimes, we have obediently swallowed the dogma of tech-fuelled self-optimisation, and the professional classes of the big cities have long since swapped post-work fags and booze for morning Hyrox and green juice. Rightly so, in some cases, but it now seems like something has gone too far. As the apparatus of perfection, including sensors, apps, wearables, and pharmaceuticals have made it easier than ever for us to imagine our bodies under control, we have begun to feel that maybe we don’t want our bodies controlled at all.

From the Bastille to Woodstock, we know that riots, rebellions and revolutions are scenes of the summer. If we look back at summer of 2026, Britain’s hottest ever, and wonder just what was overthrown in all that heat, it seems we may come to remember it as the summer that optimisation culture died. The imperfection revolution is here – and you have nothing to lose but your Whoops.

The global “wellness” economy has hit a record £5trn, and is forecast to reach £7.3trn by 2029. We are now able and encouraged to track every macro and micro, every nutritionally complete morsel delivered to our mouths via biodegradable Salad Project fork. Corporate “slop bowl” lunches are now the lesser of two evils, as the likes of Steven Bartlett encourage us to glug down “nutritionally complete” plastic-flavoured Huel drinks instead of bothering to chew any food. Huel, the British meal supplement company founded by Julian Hearn and backed by Bartlett, is a portmanteau of “human” and “fuel” – in this paradigm we don’t eat for pleasure, we fuel for productivity. Bolstered by millions of venture capital firm dollars, podcasters and influencers without medical degrees proselytise the gospel of optimisation. You thought that was an innocent Aperol spritz imbibed on the patio with your friends? According to your wearable data, it might as well have come into your house, kicked your wife in the face, and absconded with the family dopamine. Look at what it’s done to your cortisol! Even the act of going to sleep brings no respite from the responsibility to optimise; your wearable or sleep-tracking mattress will deliver the verdict in the form of a “score” when the sun comes up.

What other life is possible? An incipient counterculture is visible on social media, where feeds are increasingly dominated by endless reposts of nouvelle vague cinema stills, grainy camcorder videos of Nineties office parties, the cry to “bring back the three-martini lunch”, and elderly Mediterranean people going viral weekly doing activities that your average salad-munching anaemic commuter hasn’t had time for since their gap year. This is the visible crest of an imperfection wave, as trends exhibit a longing for unregulated lifestyles in which freedom and pleasure are elevated above discipline and productivity. Il dolce far niente, captions trill, “the sweetness of doing nothing”, as the Mediterranean figures get leathery in the sun, drizzle EVOO on everything and drink wine with lunch, calories be damned. Tutto Passa, reads the faded ink on one viral man’s chest, “everything passes”; it’s all ephemeral, so why not just chill out? Reversing the longstanding trend of posting disciplined daily routine content, influencers are “nonnamaxxing” instead (see Sithara Ranasinghe’s “Stop Bothering Mediterranean Grandmas”), behaving like archetypal rural Italian grandmothers by cooking with fats, taking afternoon naps, ignoring social media, and eating fresh produce.

Optimisation is not going quietly. Its adaptability is part of its survivability, and even explicitly unoptimised lifestyles are vulnerable to optimisation-oriented technocrats trying to extract their secrets. They have outlined and labelled parts of the world with longer life expectancy as “Blue Zones” in an effort to isolate the longevity-promoting factors of the Mediterranean lifestyle. The essence of optimisation culture is this breaking down of holistic lifestyles into isolated practices, ideally ones which can be repackaged and sold back to us with an accompanying shiny gadget. This is why it is so hard to identify and reject – the tendrils of the optimisation industrial complex grab at even the lifestyles that appear to evade it entirely.

In Jia Tolentino’s essay “Always Be Optimising”, she interrogated the figure of the “ideal woman” who attains maximum physical perfection with minimal daily effort. She echoes many writers, notably William Stanley Jevons in The Theory of Political Economy, who defines optimisation as “to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable at the expense of the least that is undesirable”. This is the optimisation paradigm that has us dissecting the world into Blue Zones, extracting individual vitamins and sleep timings and exercise levels, condensing them into pills and apps and dispensing with the rest. However, now we’re asking, what if “the rest” was the whole point?

Technological modernity has so altered our self-conceptions that some figures are now explicitly producing life for life’s sake, rather than living’s sake. The past advocates of what Wired magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly coined as “the quantified self”, who collected data on their habits and tweaked their behaviours accordingly, have evolved to include hardened transhumanists like Bryan Johnson, the American entrepreneur famed for injecting himself with his son’s plasma and tracking his night-time erections as part of a project to “make death an option”.

For most, the lure of optimisation is its old, seductive promise: that the construction of a perfect self will be followed by the reward of a perfect life. And this promise has bloomed and mutated with the technological changes of the last decade. The irony of popular cultural attitudes to physical beauty have become exemplified by the one-liner delivered by Patrick Bateman, satirical yuppie of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: “You can always be thinner, look better.” The line has been remembered superficially, and its underlying warning forgotten altogether as optimisation culture mutates itself and renews its allure for the technological age.

Lately, Tolentino’s ideal woman has reached a new critical mass, and crossed the gender boundary, in the popularisation of “looksmaxxing”. Looksmaxxing is a group of practices, initially popular in obscure corners of the internet but increasingly mainstream, aimed at optimising your physical features. Within looksmaxxing, your appearance is a problem to be solved mathematically through diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, or any means necessary. Looksmaxxing is the logical terminus of a technologically enabled optimisation culture, and this terminus is intolerable. Those chronically online among us will be aware of Clavicular (real name Braden Eric Peters), who is a 20-year-old American streamer and influencer. Part of his schtick is chatting up women on livestreams while his girlfriend (!) trails round in his wake, ostensibly proving that looksmaxxing works to get girls. He usually haunts Miami beach clubs, but in mid-June visited Paris during la fête de la musique, and failed miserably to secure any validation.

Anyone who has ever spoken to a Parisienne will understand that approaching them in public while wearing a beret and an “I <3 Paris” tank top, yelling “Bawnjour!” like Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds and asking them if they want to hit the club is a recipe for disaster. The response was damning, and French netizens have delighted in posting “ma douce France” over vignettes of gorgeous Parisiennes wrinkling their noses and practically telling him they have no spare change. “On a pas le temps,” says a pair of almost laughably beautiful women as they brush past his crew in a viral video, strutting away down the avenue. On a pas le temps, we don’t have time, has become a rallying cry on French social media and beyond: we don’t have time for an inane obsession with how our physical appearances refract through cyberspace. Despite having optimised excessively, achieving as close to “mathematical perfection” as he’ll get, French baddies ignore him in favour of tubercular looking men in turtlenecks whose max lift in the gym is the weight of a copy of L’Être et le Néant.

Clavicular may be a young man struggling with severe body dysmorphia, but he functions in public like a Greek tragic figure, a Narcissus who only loves his reflection as seen through others on a livestream. And like any great tragic figure, he is a personification of society’s greatest fears. Clavicular fell victim to the extraordinarily simple dream sold by optimisation culture: cause and effect. Do “the work” and you will achieve the life you want. Starve and you’ll get thinner, work out and you’ll gain muscle. But the calculations of looksmaxxers fail to consider that perfection is not a prerequisite for increased attraction, and this is what netizens observe when they take delight in public situations of Clavicular getting “mogged” (read: outshone or outdone by someone else, especially in physical terms) by various randoms like the ASU frat leader, the judge in his court case, or an Australian news anchor. The reactions against optimisation are revealing that there is no simple causal relationship between perfect looks and a perfect life. As Mark Greif put it in his 2004 essay “Against Exercise”, “saddest of all is the belief that an improved body will bestow bliss on the unloved.”

Attraction isn’t mathematical, and perfection has diminishing returns. The recent furore around Dua Lipa’s boyfriend Callum Turner’s shirtless pics is case in point. She is stunning, ripped, the right amounts of lean and curvy, and commentators have been quick to point out that Turner is far from the shredded Adonis that Clavicular would call a “looksmatch” for Dua. Obviously this is ridiculous, because Callum Turner is evidently conventionally attractive and works out; he just isn’t shredded to the bone and dehydrated for a photo. A viral X post summed up the situation: “For all the jokes on here about chubby Dad bods, this is actually the exact physique most women are attracted to. Tall, broad, well built, clearly trains his ass off but also looks like he has no problem smashing a burger and fries and would throw you over his shoulder afterwards.” Flippant, yet clarifying: an attractive physique is a plus, but not one so high maintenance that it interferes with the enjoyable activities of daily living.

Despite the best laid plans of tech entrepreneurs and podcast bros alike, however, the allure of technologically assisted optimisation has begun to lose its grip. Gen Z internet users comment “Palantir btw” on videos of influencers using wearable technology, French girls ignore Clavicular in the street, and women yearn for Callum Turner over more “mathematically perfect” counterparts. No matter the millions of pounds spent on marketing optimisation, the resistance to optimisation is stronger by the day. Why?

Life for the young, not least in Britain, is characterised by a feeling of being endlessly suspended, waiting for the fulfilment of dubious promises about the future – even without optimisation. We are constantly being asked to delay gratification: pay high taxes and receive, at some point theoretically, excellent public services, pay into your pension and perhaps receive it at 90, stay renting your mouldy flat until circumstances show mercy or one of your family members dies. One might start to get the feeling we’re being lied to in some kind of protracted pseudo-Protestant-Ethic style scam, that we’re being encouraged to adhere to ascetic diets and subject ourselves to worldly discomfort in the diminishing hope that it will yield a cosmic reward.

It is hard to believe we could bear any more demands to serve our future selves. But optimisation culture works to distract us from our states of futile anticipation by disguising itself as the opposite: its privations as rewards, its stricture as freedom. We might have a stagnant job market, a dreadful housing situation, and revolving door politics, but there are more distracting rewards than ever in the form of shiny new toys to buy. Controlling your body feels basically like controlling your life, so stop whining and get in the sauna, munch those vitamins, get a GLP-1 subscription and throw your money at a ThirdSpace membership to undo the stress you’ve spent eight hours diligently accruing at your desk. Optimisation is so seductive because it’s framed as a rare opportunity to exercise freedom – the freedom to make your own choices and control your own outcomes – but it’s a suspicious freedom that enriches companies through the collection of your sensitive information.

Quickly, though, optimisation technology creates rules that can become all-encompassing, exemplified in Bartlett’s self-flagellation over breaking rules that seem like an individual choice, but are far more bound up in external actors than optimisers would like to admit. The disciplinary effect of optimisation technology has become more obvious as wearables intrude on our public spaces, and we are collectively sounding the alarm on perceived threats to privacy like digital ID, facial recognition technology that leads to the arrest of the wrong people, and Meta glasses that allow men to harass women. What began as a dream of individual freedom come true, the promise that we could control our lives through collecting data about ourselves, has been unmasked as another set of constraints.

A more capricious but no less powerful fact is damaging optimisation culture, too: it is just not cool anymore. As Juno Kelly pointed out in her Substack essay “Beauty is a Class Game”, once there is widespread access to something, the cultural elites who control the downwards flow of “taste” lose interest. As access to physical perfection becomes democratised, societal tastemakers move the goalposts, and imperfection becomes the new marker of cool. If everyone can buy Mounjaro on TikTok shop, get their teeth restructured in Türkiye, and flip their lips in the local beauty salon, the goalposts have to shift, exemplified by the contemporary preference for a “natural” look over the high-effort beauty trends of the 2010s. Beyond cultural elitism, striving for physical perfection has become synonymous with people and practices which are categorically uncool. The pursuit of perfection is now the pursuit of the Maga-face, Mar-a-Lago wife, and the exploitative tech CEO. These are not figures that artistic circles have an interest in emulating or being associated with. Every Parisienne videoed rejecting Clavicular comes across impossibly stylish and beautiful, partially because they are conventionally attractive in certain ways, but mostly because their looks reflect a clear sense of their own stylistic preferences and a separation from the consumerist pipeline.

There also is something more deeply and permanently uncool about the serious, earnest pursuit of physical perfection, of the kind embodied in looksmaxxing, optimisation podcasts, and TikTok glow-up manuals. They are kitsch in the purest sense of the word, the kind that often exists only for a second before being satirised. As Milan Kundera defines the term in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements… totalitarian kitsch must banish all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously).” Ironic interpretations of kitsch are the basis for some of the greatest art that exists, but optimisation culture takes itself so unbearably seriously that it remains forever suspended in the moment before art. It’s why Kylie Jenner’s collaboration with Meta glasses, despite having all the hallmarks of cool (messy hair styling, digital camera shot, fishnet over face, glittery stars in the mouth) will never ring true. It’s also why, when Bella Hadid wore a Schiaparelli gown to Cannes Film Festival in an homage to Jane Birkin’s outfit at the Union of the Artist’s Gala in 1969, the effect was not the same. Bella looked perfect – she was nipped and tucked to mathematically perfect proportions, and the gown was spectacular – but Birkin’s outfit had been the product of a last-minute fix, her own decision to turn the back of the gown to the front and secure it with her own brooch. The freedom expressed in this choice, the inflection of her personal desires, is what evaded kitsch and made her enduringly stylish.

We may not be able to pinpoint the exact genesis of optimisation culture, but we are now convinced it has gone too far. Behind the rejection of optimisation is the realisation of having reached a point of diminishing returns. We can’t take any more rules, any more intrusion, and the summer brings with it sensuous desires for wine and roses that can only be subdued by work and expensive gym memberships for so long. Somewhere in our collective consciousness is an understanding that beauty and friendship and attraction in the fundamental sense, the kind that actually brings the rewards promised by chopped salad and proteinmaxxing, is based on displays of humanity. Humanity is warm-blooded; it exists in the fat cells and the peach fuzz and the crooked teeth and the sticky hands, and we above all are a nation that laughs in the face of the self-serious. The “beauty” brought about through methodical optimisation is inherently a kitsch, superficial beauty; it’s a row of well-ordered marching men in Whoop wearables who will always lose to the romantic pull of the lackadaisical rebel, put to sleep by a lunchtime glass of wine, tanned deep by the cancerous sun.

[Further reading: Stand up for your right to drink a pint vertically in Soho]