Optimizing for anxiety minimization and joy/meaning maximization is a pretty good alternative. I think it is a good way to be an admirable, productive person without burning yourself out to please others.

The article is insightful. But how serious can you take the author when it’s framed by calls to “subscribe” and “share”? What is that if not the “automatic drains” the author talks about.

He writes that there’s “a tendency to carry into our efforts to find rest the very same spirit which animates the system that left us tired and burnt out”. Isn’t that precisely what he is doing with this newsletter?

Author's lens is of work vs. rest, and sure enough, robots will always beat humans at work. Except that not all work is robotic. Sure, profits can be found in the rote optimization of process until the final result is made available through mass production for an affordable price; such optimization for process trends towards robotic optimization. But profit can also be found in the boutique, the artisan; a focus on quality and all other factors be damned, where the labor of love is self-inspiring and self-rejuvenating. Arguably, one's aim early in life should be to find for oneself labor that is so characterized - boutique, internally motivated, and capable of ekeing out a profit.

I got about halfway through, wondering, "how is he going to tie all of this into HTTP-based API calls?" before I realized he was talking about actual rest.

Apalled to see to many people in the comments not getting the point of the article. You can't optimize because optimizing (for whatever) is an effort, not rest; it undermines the point of rest. It points to the deeply engrained way we (humans, collectively) think, as if rest (or inner peace, or relaxation) was a project, a goal to achieve, or at least a to do item.

Interesting read. Though I can’t see how the general claim is true, “you can’t optimize for rest”..

Surely, you can. Many people do. It’s called FIRE.

[flagged]