1: An introduction to Optimaddiction

Kev Fitzsimons

Published in

I Am Not A Product

6 min readJan 1, 2024

In which the Oracle of the Mall reveals a very modern problem.

“Please could you stop the noise / I’m trying to get some rest.”
Paranoid Android, Radiohead, OK Computer (1997)

Prologue

The weekend before Xmas, I was summonsed to the top floor of a suburban shopping mall, where, from a cloud of discount fragrances, a pair of manicured hands handed me two electronic tablets. On each tablet were bookmarked five prompts.

From the cloud, there spoke a calming female voice. And she said thusly: “Thine world is exhausting. Trapped you are by an Achievement Society. You have become products, not people. Now is the time to break free, to escape from this hyper-connected, individualistic culture determined to value you only as a commodity for performance and productivity.”

Verily, I replied, “That is insightful and true, but a lot to remember. Could you summarise?”

To which she said, “Repeat after me:

I am not a product.

You are not a product.

We are brief, wonderful moments of cosmic serendipity.

Let us live like it.”

I nodded politely, confused but enlightened.

She continued: “Behold the prompts on these tablets. Each prompt outlines an idea that may serve as an antidote to the poison of Achievement Society. Go now, and tweet the people what you have heard.”

And before I could tell her that Twitter was no more, the cloud disappeared. I descended to the ground floor, paid for parking, and went immediately to a therapist.

Achievement Society — or the Curse of Optimaddiction

“I just go so hard every day…I go to bed at 11pm and by 4am I’ve already done three workouts…”- TikTok ‘influencer’ (genuine quote)

Raise a hand if any of these signs have appeared in your social radius:

Calls to be your ‘best self’ or to ‘grow’ toward an unclear optimal state?
The glorification of work and/or the need for a ‘side hustle’?
Moralizing around alcohol and exercise, perhaps filmed into a smartphone on a 5am jog?
Listicles of productivity ‘hacks’ in your WhatsApp groups?
Zealous morning rituals inspired by ‘optimization bros’?
Losing friends to the tractor beam of self-care?
Excessive positivity combined with overuse of the words ‘mindset’ or ‘manifest’?

You’re not alone. This shit is everywhere.

The term ‘Achievement Society’ was coined by Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In my amateur opinion, Han is one of the most astute thinkers alive today.

‘Optimaddiction’ is my clumsy word for it. I am not as clever as Han.

Han asserts that we have moved from a disciplinary society enforced by negativity (see the work of Foucault, also clever) to an achievement society driven by an excess of positivity, information, and over-achievement.

Driven by the demand to persevere and not to fail, as well as by the ambition of efficiency, we become committers and sacrificers at the same time and enter a swirl of demarcation, self-exploitation and collapse.
— Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, Redwood City: Stanford UP 2015

Or for the TikTok crowd: Optimaddiction is a neo-liberal hype train turning people into wannabe alphas and pick-me girls, magnified to a global scale by tech bros and social media. ISTG.

The culture of an Achievement Society hooks us into a constant examination of our perceived ‘market value’. The currencies of this market range from Likes and followers to career progression, money, and health or lifestyle. Its advocates, particularly those trying to make a buck, are religious in their zeal.

Participating in this culture demands that we continually appraise our lifestyle and our apparent worth, which in turn creates a near-permanent state of critical introspection and a non-stop pressure to be always performing, always positive, and always productive.

It leads to narcissism, depression, burnout, and a performative need for public validation.

The data backs up the philosophy. A tripling in self-help book titles from 2013–2019; rising anxiety and depression in young people; burnout affecting 3 in every 5 employees…the list goes on.

As Stephen West summarised on Philosophise This!:

“This is a new, interesting, positive form of control…if only [people] make themselves valuable enough…if only they make their minds as efficient and optimized as they can be…you tell people that and you don’t need a gun to people’s heads. In the pursuit of endlessly maximising their abilities, they’ll spend the rest of their lives going crazy about never being good enough…If there’s ever a moment where they are not spending their time being as productive as they could be towards making themselves more valuable…they will actually feel bad about it.”

Do you ever feel this way?

That you can’t relax without feeling guilty? That your time must always be ‘productive’? That you must deny negative emotions and always be positive? If so, you may have early-onset Optimaddiction.

I felt like this for many years. The insidious ‘genius’ of this dogma is that outward enforcement is not needed. An Achievement Society makes us, as subjects, far more productive than we could ever be under a strict and prohibitive system. No one is making us do this under threat of punishment. We do it to ourselves because we think it’s good for us, that it’s the right thing to do; or more concerningly, that it’s the moral thing to do.

But fuck me, is it hard work.

Mea Culpa — or the message of ‘more’

For years, I promoted an Achievement Society and packaged and sold Optimaddiction to the masses. I worked for global digital agencies and consultancies devising ways to manipulate customers via social media. I designed digital products to induce certain behaviors, created content factories to bury consumers under brand messaging and invented ways for corporations to use digital information for exploitative ends.

The constant message we promoted was always one of ‘more’ — that you must do more, have more, need more, want more, and be more.

In my lame defense, the work never sat easy. I understood I was encouraging unhealthy behavior, perpetuating a damaging social worldview. Finally, having just completed 12 months in the most amoral consultancy I’ve ever experienced, enough was enough.

You could call this blog a form of penance (Catholic guilt is a hard cloak to throw off). I call it what happens when you can no longer live in the world as it is.

Am I calling for an end to capitalism? No. Simply because…well, good luck with that. But we can live and advocate for a more humane version of capitalism, one that doesn’t grind us into a state of constant exhaustion and dissatisfaction.

My goal is to explore the best available thinking on the concept of Optimaddiction and Achievement Society; I hope to inspire beliefs and behaviors that help to resist their negative influences. I hope it will give us the courage to live differently. I hope it will lead us to more thoughtful, more peaceful, and more original lives.

Epilogue

That evening, I turned on the DVD player and pushed play on Jerry Maguire, an anarchic retro protest against the Streaming Man.

The story of a ridiculously handsome and successful man, turning his back on the status quo and bravely treading a new path, struck a chord.

I looked at the two electronic tablets lying serenely on the coffee table, batteries full, ready to be woken. And it dawned on me — the Oracle of the Mall was right. We are living through the Great Exhaustion. We are burned out. We are obsessed with ourselves.

Yet, though the neo-liberal lifestyle feels like the only choice, it need not be. It is possible to not conform, to immunize ourselves against Optimaddiction. We have a prescription of sorts, smudged and unclear, but enough for us to take the first step with confidence.