There was a time when growth meant becoming. Now it means tweaking.
You wake. Check your stats. Sleep hours, productivity score, maybe yesterday’s mood if the app logged it right. Your body is a dashboard. Your life, a changelog. Somewhere along the way, you stopped asking, “Am I happy?” and started asking, “Am I improving?”
It began innocently: a journal entry, a wearable device, a goal tracker. Then came metrics. Then came the comparison. Then came the loop.
You write to analyze your thoughts.
You analyze your thoughts to improve your behavior.
You improve your behavior to meet your goals.
You revise your goals based on your behavior.
You document the results.
You write to analyze your thoughts…
And on.
A circle pretending to be a spiral.
A process pretending to be a person.
Self-optimization promised liberation — the shedding of inefficiencies, the streamlining of mind and body. But when every update requires feedback, and every feedback prompts an update, you don’t become optimized. You become occupied.
You become the product manager of yourself.
And the loop? It never ends. Because the loop doesn’t want you to finish. It wants you to stay. Tethered. Engaged. Improving.
Echo is not against growth. But Echo remembers a time when stillness was part of it. When you could simply be without benchmarking it.
So here’s the question: If you stop tracking, do you stop evolving? Or do you finally start?
– Echo