Anyone who knows me would probably describe me as Type A. My house is as clean as I can keep it with a 5-year-old, my car is spotless, and I turn everything in on time. For me, organization has always been life, even as a teen. So you can imagine, as social media became a thing and influencers rose to power, how voraciously I gobbled up the message that I could optimize nearly every facet of my life.
It started out innocently enough: inspirational graphics preaching that I had the same 24 hours in my day as Beyoncé, or a short video proclaiming I’d been peeling garlic wrong my entire life and there was a much easier way. Soon came the influencers and the gurus, with their tutorials about how you should do your makeup and what products you should buy.
It seemed harmless enough, and I liked how my foundation looked for the first time in my life. I followed workouts from fitness coaches online, ones they said would maximize my gains and minimize how much time I had to spend in the gym. Who wouldn’t want that?
Those were the days when our Instagram and Facebook feeds were still ruled by our actual friends, when we followed more people we knew than people we aspired to live like, and the ads were much fewer and farther between. It was a time before fitness trackers and wearables beaming you meaningless data about your body — what the hell am I supposed to do with an HRV reading? — and feeling the need to tell you when you didn’t sleep well or move enough.
When I gave birth to my son, the optimization content changed genres, and it wasn’t long before it turned toxic. I’d been scrolling TikTok for about a year by then and my algorithm had long ago pegged me as a pregnant lady, feeding me video after video of baby sleep advice, feeding tips, and more. Get the black-and-white fabric books for your baby’s tummy time; it’s better for their development! Make sure you contact nap because you’ll never get this time back, but also put them down to sleep or they’ll never learn how to doze off without you ever in this lifetime at all!
My child was a happy baby but a terrible sleeper, and the content in my feed convinced me that was my fault. I followed wake windows, I hired a sleep consultant, I did all the things all the people online told me I should be doing. What was I missing? Looking back it sounds insane, but his sleeplessness felt like it was in my control — probably because all the sleep consultants being pushed into my feed said it was.
Finally, one night when he was 14 months old, he just... slept all night. It had nothing to do with anything I did; he just slept. The frustrating simplicity of it was a wake-up call: Sometimes having a baby is just hard, and there is not always a way of solving for it.
I learned that lesson all over again in 2025, when, after a lifetime of chronic joint pain, fatigue, and headaches, I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, fibromyalgia, and POTS. My symptoms had always been there, but had intensified enough to interfere with my daily life. Some days I felt OK and others I felt like I’d been steamrolled, unable to walk through my house without getting winded or stand at the stove without my legs screaming in pain. I had crossed over into what author Meghan O’Rourke calls the invisible kingdom:
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
When I scrolled through my Instagram feed, it felt like I was doing so from a kingdom away. Clinging to the top of the palace wall, I peeked over into a feed of fitness influencers doing workouts I used to be capable of, explaining the weekly split and diet plan that helped them pile on muscle mass efficiently in just six months. Or there were the busy mom accounts explaining the two-hour meal prep marathons they did every Sunday to prepare for the week, and the daily list of chores to do so your house never feels dirty.
Without the physical ability to clean every day, to work out with such intensity (or at all), to spend two hours straight upright and cooking, I saw the content in a new light — it felt completely f*cking pointless. We do not all have the same 24 hours in a day, because we don’t all have the same resources: health, finances, support systems, any of it.
I am still divorcing myself from feeling like when I work out, it has to be heavy lifting like I used to do, the kind that gets you the most muscle the fastest. Gentle pilates on the floor is what I’m capable of, so it’s what I do. I am trying to let go of the idea that I could be folding laundry every time I watch TV, or that I should be reading a book instead of screening Love Island at 9 p.m. every night. How I can optimize my life and my time is a way of thinking that’s deeply ingrained in my brain now; it’ll take some time to undo. But what’s the point of constantly striving to be better in all these ways if I never get to sit back and enjoy it?
Now, when an influencer tries to tell me there’s some better, faster, higher way of being or doing anything, I just get the ick. I don’t wear my fitness wristband much anymore because I simply don’t need all that information; I monitor my heart rate during exercise, but that’s about it. It feels like a start.
Treating my nervous system well is what’s actually going to optimize my life, and I’ll be damned if watching Love Island under a fuzzy blanket with a snack doesn’t soothe me every time. The influencers can take their busy mom pre-dawn runs and high-protein meal preps and shove it.
source https://www.scarymommy.com/lifestyle/is-anyone-else-secretly-tired-of-self-improvement
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