I remember being asked to paint an egg.
It sat under soft classroom lighting, pale, lopsided, quietly itself. The instruction was simple: look and recreate. But somewhere between looking and drawing, I started correcting. Smoothing asymmetries. Rounding curves that didn't match some internal template of what an egg should look like. Without noticing, I had stopped drawing the egg in front of me and started drawing the version I'd been trained to expect.
I think about that moment often, because it captures something I've been unable to name for a long time. It's not about drawing. It's about the way I move through my own life. Not observing, but correcting. Not living, but optimizing.
We are good at recognizing overconsumption when it's visible. Brands get boycotted. Lifestyles get called out. The evidence is physical, and so the moral framework around it has teeth.
But there is a form of consumption that produces nothing visible, and it has escaped nearly all scrutiny. Self-improvement, the relentless consumption of habits, routines, productivity systems, and idealized versions of ourselves, is overconsumption in its most elegant disguise. It has no natural endpoint, no waste that accumulates in landfills, and no cultural reflex for saying enough. Instead of criticism, it receives admiration.
Open any platform and you'll find the templates: wake at 4:30am, structure every hour, track every input, eliminate every friction. These videos don't just show behaviors. They sell a version of yourself, and they work precisely because they make you feel perpetually behind. The product is not a morning routine. The product is the belief that you are not yet enough.
The brain, it turns out, is perfectly designed to fall for this.
We are wired for safety, not stimulation. The brain doesn't crave growth, it craves the feeling of progress. Dopamine rewards completion, structure, and the sensation of moving forward. Self-improvement culture feeds this loop brilliantly: it converts the discomfort of uncertainty into something that can always be acted upon. Anxious? Optimize the morning. Stagnant? Add a habit. The loop never completes because it was never designed to. There is always another version of yourself waiting to be built.
This is how improvement becomes indistinguishable from avoidance. The motion is real. The progress is sometimes real. But the direction was never chosen. It was handed to you, and you were moving too fast to notice.
I see this most clearly in my own academic world, where the pressure to optimize is structural. Getting into college, staying in college, graduating into something that resembles a future, none of it is passive. It demands accumulation: internships, research positions, leadership roles, volunteer hours, test scores, a GPA that leaves no margin for being human. Every experience gets quietly auditioned for its résumé value before it's allowed to just be an experience.
The cruelest part is that the system rewards this. The students who perform optimization most convincingly are the ones who advance. So the behavior gets reinforced, the pace increases, and what began as ambition slowly becomes something harder to name. We call it drive. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is just fear wearing the right vocabulary.
Yet, nobody talks about what it costs to keep up. Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, notes that the ideal of total productivity was historically modeled on a worker with no caregiving responsibilities, no mental health constraints, no financial precarity (Odell, 2020). Someone who, in reality, most people are not. I've watched people around me quietly disappear from the race, not because they lacked ambition, but because the system was never built around their reality. Mental health, financial pressure, caregiving, disabilities, neurological differences, these don't pause for productivity routines. The person who can't maintain a rigid schedule isn't less disciplined. They're just living in a system designed for someone else.
Which raises the question productivity culture never asks: who benefits from the chase? The self-improvement industry, apps, courses, coaches, content, was valued at over $48 billion globally in 2024 (Grand View Research, n.d.), and it grows precisely because it cannot be completed. Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society, argues that modern achievement culture is not imposed from outside but internalized (Han, 2015). We have become our own supervisors, our own harshest critics. The genius of the system is that it doesn't need a boss. It has convinced us to be one. And the goalposts move to make sure we stay convinced.
Consider the US News university rankings, the closest thing higher education has to an official scoreboard. Almost every year, the methodology shifts. Schools that were "the best" drop overnight not because they got worse, but because the metric changed. Students who spent four years optimizing for one version of success wake up to find the definition has been quietly updated. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. A target that never stays still is a target you can never stop chasing.
I know this. But knowing it hasn't made me immune. Because the alternative doesn't satisfy me either. A life without movement towards “better” doesn't feel like peace. It feels like absence. We change jobs for better circumstances. We pursue degrees for better futures. We wake up and try again because something in us believes that tomorrow can be more than today. Strip that away, and the question underneath is uncomfortable: what's left?
And at the end of it, because there is an end, what did we optimize toward? If the answer is exhaustion, a version of ourselves we never chose, at the cost of happiness, then the loop wasn't progress. It was just motion. And motion, it turns out, is the most socially acceptable thing you can be addicted to, because it looks, from the outside, exactly like growth.
The more we chase it, the more the chase starts to look like the point. The journey has stopped being something we live and has become something we perform. It has its own metrics now, its own highlight reel, its own audience. And so we are never quite sure whether we are living our lives or auditioning for them.
I didn't know that when I was holding the paintbrush. The egg in front of me was already complete. I was the one who redrew it. And maybe that's the question worth sitting with: how do we know when we've stopped drawing the egg… and started erasing ourselves?
Nota editorial: Este artículo contiene exclusivamente el ensayo original de Alisia Noorali (University of California, Berkeley / Haas Business School, Tanzania), cuyo trabajo fue seleccionado por la calidad y relevancia de su propuesta para ser compartido con los participantes del SABF. El contenido no ha sido editado, modificado ni intervenido por el SABF. El participante conserva todos los derechos de autor sobre su obra.
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