Be Suboptimal
At some point during your development in whatever sport or hobby you decide to pick up, something happens that causes you to think differently about what you’re doing. It begins after you’ve spent several months (or even years) mastering the basics of your chosen activity. One day, the skills you’ve acquired aren’t enough anymore. Maybe you feel like you’ve plateaued. Maybe you got in a little over your head one day and your ego took a ding. Whatever the case, you start focusing on getting better. There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to improve; I’m in a constant state of improvement myself. What does matter is the road you choose to seek out betterment. There are many paths toward progress, but one in particular leads down a dark road—The road of optimization.
“Optimization” is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days by people who, for the most part, have no idea what they’re talking about. Everyone seems to have a different idea of what it means and how you can optimize your body, mind, and gear to be the perfect outdoor machine. The current state of the internet and social media hasn’t made it any better. After only a few minutes of scrolling, you become inundated with information about which ultralight piece of equipment you absolutely must have to be the best athlete you can be, or salty remarks from an “expert” about their highly customized lifestyle that you too should be maintaining to keep your competitive edge. In these moments you must be careful not to grab onto any of the opinions you run across. If you do, before long you’ll be wearing a $600 coat whose features you can’t stop talking about and your food pantry will be stuffed to the brim with different brands of energy bars, each meant for a specific caloric emergency. Soon, you’ll have dialed in each and every second of your day to make sure you’ve done more than anyone else you know. Your opinion is no longer your own, but someone else's. Congratulations my friend, you’ve become optimized.
An optimization phase isn’t uncommon in outdoor recreation communities, but often it’s hard to get out of. I got caught in one during my mid-twenties. For a while, I was so focused on constantly pushing it to try and keep up with other people that I read and watched videos of that I completely forgot how to enjoy my time on the mountain as a skier. I was online every day looking at all the new gear being hocked by the big brands and scoffed at second-hand equipment (much to the detriment of my already thin wallet). Seeing the pros being shuttled across the world in search of the gnarliest mountains they could find didn’t help me feel any better either. How can you even be having fun if you’re not on the steepest line with the nicest setup? These kinds of thoughts crawled around in my brain until I finally managed to sit the phone down and recognize that it’s okay to not have the resources, time, or skills that other people have. Optimization is not a prerequisite for fun. It’s okay to be suboptimal.
Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in training for your sport of choice, owning good gear, and challenging yourself. I’m in the gym often and watch what I eat much closer than I used to for many reasons. What I don’t do now is beat myself up for not having the best equipment or the smallest amount of body fat that I can. The day I started enjoying myself was the day I stopped caring about being an optimized human being. It’s okay to spend your ski season making hippie turns through the trees. It’s okay to only enjoy tying a half-dozen styles of flies for fishing. It’s okay to enjoy some easy singletrack on your mountain bike. And, I mean this, it’s okay to pick up your gear second-hand (so long as it can still be used safely).
Don’t let the opinions of others deter you from enjoying your time outside, because one day you might not be able to. On that day, it’s not going to matter how many times you got passed on the skin track or how many ounces your ultralight backpack saved you. What will matter are the memories that you made. You had an adventure, and you experienced something special.
I’ll say it again —Optimization is not a prerequisite for fun. Be suboptimal. Get out there, enjoy yourself, and whatever you do, have fun.
As I was writing this, I came across another story written bythat offers a look at the other side of this opinion. In the interest of unbiased journalism, I recommend you take a peek at their article below.
Hey Chad,
Thanks for the link. I think that it's a good thing to try hard, yes. But I also think that there is an immense amount of value in being okay with being bad at things. In fact, I have a draft post that I'm working on with that as its subject.
There is a lot of toxicity amongst elite athletes. I've seen friends face eating disorders, overtraining to the point of injury, depression, and taking on unreasonable risk in pursuit of an unrealizable ideal. Being suboptimal is actually the *only* way to be, because no one is truly optimal. It's all relative when it comes down to it.
Thanks for the thoughts, appreciate this perspective a lot.
Just Curious ~ “It’s okay to spend your ski season making hippie turns through the trees “
What are hippie turns?