Three years ago, I was that person who turned coffee meetings into performance art.

Every interaction became a networking opportunity, every conversation a chance to mention my latest project.

I had seventeen different apps tracking my productivity, a color-coded calendar that would make a Fortune 500 CEO weep, and a morning routine so complex it required its own morning routine just to remember what came next.

I thought I was winning at life. What I was actually doing was performing an exhausting pantomime of success while my actual life—the quiet moments, the unscheduled thinking, the simple pleasure of doing one thing well—withered from neglect.

The breaking point wasn’t dramatic. No burnout-induced hospital visits or career-ending breakdowns.

Just a Tuesday afternoon when I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done anything without simultaneously planning the next three things. I was hustling so hard I’d forgotten what I was hustling toward.

That’s when I made a decision that probably sounds insane to anyone still caught in the optimization trap: I chose simplicity. Not as a lifestyle brand or Instagram aesthetic, but as a deliberate rebellion against the tyranny of constant improvement.

And three years later, I can say without hesitation—it was the best decision I never planned to make.

The hustle trap nobody talks about

The hustle culture we’ve built isn’t just exhausting—it’s intellectually dishonest.

We’ve created a mythology where being busy equals being important, where optimization equals wisdom, where the number of things you’re juggling somehow correlates with your worth as a human being.

I bought into this completely.

My days were architected like a Tetris game, each hour allocated and optimized. I meal-prepped on Sundays, batch-processed emails, time-blocked everything from creative work to grocery shopping.

I was so efficient I could squeeze productivity out of a five-minute Uber ride. I was also completely miserable and couldn’t figure out why.

The problem with optimization is that it treats life like a machine when it’s actually more like a garden.

Gardens don’t respond well to efficiency hacks. They need space, seasons, seemingly unproductive periods of rest. They need you to show up without an agenda sometimes, just to notice what’s actually growing.

But hustle culture doesn’t allow for noticing. It’s too busy measuring, tracking, optimizing.

You end up living in a perpetual state of functional anxiety, always slightly behind whatever impossible standard you’ve set for tomorrow.

Ironically, psychologists say this constant busyness actually decreases both wellbeing and actual productive output over time. 

Yet, we still ignore this because admitting it would mean confronting how much energy we’ve wasted chasing the wrong things.

The most insidious part isn’t the exhaustion—it’s the way constant optimization rewires your brain to see everything, including yourself, as something that needs fixing.

You lose the ability to appreciate what’s already working. You become so focused on becoming someone better that you forget to be someone at all.

I started noticing this when I realized I couldn’t have a conversation without mentally categorizing it as “networking” or “personal development” or “market research.”

I couldn’t read a book without taking notes for future content. I couldn’t take a walk without listening to a podcast about walking more efficiently.

Everything had to serve a purpose, contribute to some grand optimization project. The idea of doing something just because it felt good had become foreign.

That’s when I understood that hustle culture’s real product isn’t success—it’s the elimination of presence.

You become so busy becoming that you never actually arrive anywhere. You’re always in transit to a better version of yourself, never quite inhabiting the version that exists right now.

Recently, I’ve been reading Rudá Iandê’s new book Laughing in the Face of Chaos: A Politically Incorrect Shamanic Guide for Modern Life, and one passage stopped me cold:

“When we let go of the need to be perfect, we free ourselves to live fully—embracing the mess, complexity, and richness of a life that’s delightfully real.”

The book challenged many of my assumptions about self-improvement and helped me see how the pursuit of optimization often becomes its own kind of prison.

The insights from Rudá’s work made me realize that most of our “truths” about productivity and success are just inherited programming from a culture that profits from our perpetual dissatisfaction. I began to question whether constant self-optimization was actually serving my life or just feeding an industry built on making people feel inadequately busy.

What struck me most was Iandê’s point about stopping the internal war. All that energy I was spending fighting my natural rhythms, trying to force myself into productivity frameworks designed by other people—that was energy I could have been using to actually live.

Slowly I realized that wholeness doesn’t come from adding more systems; it comes from accepting what’s already there.

Living in the margins of an optimized life

The shift to simplicity wasn’t about adopting minimalism or Marie Kondo-ing my existence.

It was about creating space for things that couldn’t be optimized: wandering thoughts, unproductive conversations, the luxury of changing your mind mid-project without having to justify it to a productivity app.

I started small. I deleted half my apps without replacing them with “better” apps. I stopped color-coding my calendar. I quit trying to hack my sleep, my diet, my exercise routine.

Instead of a morning routine, I just started mornings. Instead of networking, I just started talking to people I found interesting.

The withdrawal was real. My brain had been trained to equate activity with value, so periods of seeming non-productivity felt like moral failures.

I had to relearn how to sit with unstructured time without immediately filling it with tasks. I had to remember that not every moment needed to be leveraged for future benefit.

But what emerged in that space was surprising. Without the constant mental overhead of managing my optimization systems, I had cognitive bandwidth for deeper work.

Without the pressure to make every interaction “count,” I started having better conversations. Without tracking every metric, I began to notice what actually mattered.

The biggest revelation was how much mental energy I’d been spending on productivity theater—the elaborate systems and tools that made me feel productive without actually producing anything meaningful.

Once I dropped that performance, I had so much more capacity for the work itself.

Simplicity, I learned, isn’t about having fewer things. It’s about having fewer decisions.

Every productivity hack I’d adopted had increased my decision fatigue while claiming to reduce it.

Every app added cognitive overhead while promising to eliminate it. I was spending more energy managing my productivity system than I was spending on the work the system was supposed to optimize.

Now my days have shape but not strict architecture. I do important work when I have the energy for important work. I handle administrative tasks when they need handling. I take breaks when I’m tired, not when my calendar tells me to.

This probably sounds chaotic to people still trapped in optimization mode, but it’s actually the opposite. It’s the difference between forcing your life into someone else’s template and finding the rhythm that actually works for your mind and circumstances.

The respect I lost from people who equate busy schedules with importance was more than offset by the respect I gained from people who could sense I was actually present in conversations instead of mentally cycling through my task list.

The opportunities I missed from not having a “personal brand” were replaced by opportunities that came from doing better work with more focus and less anxiety.

Three years in, I’m more productive than I ever was in my optimization phase, but more importantly, I’m producing things that matter instead of just producing activity.

I’m present for my life instead of constantly planning the next version of it.

I’m no longer performing success; I’m just quietly building something real.

The hustle culture evangelists will tell you that simplicity is a luxury you can’t afford, that optimization is necessary for survival in a competitive world. But I’ve found the opposite to be true.

In a world where everyone is frantically hustling, the person who can think clearly, work deeply, and stay present has an almost unfair advantage.

While others are busy optimizing their optimization, you’re actually getting things done.

Choosing simplicity over hustle isn’t about doing less—it’s about doing fewer things better, with more attention, and without the exhausting overhead of constantly trying to improve the process.

It’s about trusting that you don’t need to be fixed, optimized, or upgraded. You just need to be allowed to work.