The hidden cost of self-optimisation

We usually reserve the term objectification for the process of sexually objectifying a person. When we do this, we can only see them as an object of desire or aversion.

But there is a wider meaning to the term. It includes any way of seeing ourselves or others as a tool—a means to an end.

Relating to yourself in this way might be useful for ramping up your work performance or training for a race. It helps you see things through a performance lens, bolstering strengths and identifying weak spots. The more you can optimise and perfect these qualities, the better you perform.

Of course, usefulness is real. What you do and your value to others are valid concerns. But they are not all you are.

The issue is that this way of seeing yourself eclipses everything else. You become addicted to being a better tool. Praise, achievement and attainment become signs that you’re performing well. Your entire sense of meaning contracts around addictive loops or comparison and performance, and you lose touch with any sense of the “being” in human being.

Objectification is an example of a convenient fiction that makes sense on some scale (resource allocation in project management), but harms us on another (finding meaning in life).

Objectification depends on divorcing being from meaning. The depth and dynamism of being is reduced down to a set of performance metrics, whether physical strength, political power or emotional toughness. This utilitarian gaze further omits things like connection, belonging, peace and love—the things that matter most to us.

Seeing the folly of objectification is one way of breaking free of the spell. A more radical option is to see how objectification is actually not possible. Because we are always both subject and object, seer and seen, objectification means relating to an imagined abstraction, instead of a living person. It’s a hallucination.

The way out of this is not to abandon all sense of usefulness or to privilege being over everything else. It’s to reject a narrative that casts you as your outputs alone, and to let life fill in the gaps.

Beneath the striving and self-surveillance is something quieter and more enduring: the simple, sacred fact of being.