Existence before Efficaciousness.
Exist Before Optimizing
On a quiet morning, the world doesn’t ask too much of me, I like those mornings. The sun cuts a slow, amber line across the floorboards. The steam rises from a freshly brewed cup of coffee, dispersing into the air without an agenda. It is a moment of pure, unadorned presence.
And then, my internal narrator revs up like a jet engine taxiing on a designated runway.
Did you journal yet? Have you done your ten minutes of silent breathwork? Did you track your mood? Are you drinking enough water?
Suddenly, the quiet morning is no longer a space to inhabit; it has become a canvas of expectations. We have taken the sacred, ancient concept of tending to the soul and mapped it onto a sterile, leadership productivity model.
“Self-care,” is a hot topic over the last decade, but if we are honest with ourselves, it often feels like a second job—one where we are both the demanding boss and the exhausted employee, constantly monitoring our own performance.
I often feel like I have fallen into the trap of believing that peace is something I must earn through flawless execution. I have a feeling I’m not alone.
The Panopticon of Wellness
Ironically, there exists a strange, modern anxiety in trying to cure our anxiety. We purchase the journals, download the meditation apps, and curate our winding down routines with the precision of an archivist.
We treat our lives like an intricate puzzle—or perhaps an impossible bottle, where we are desperately trying to build a perfectly shipshape, calm interior life through a ridiculously narrow opening, using only the rigid tools of self-improvement.
But true healing cannot be engineered, it must be experienced. When we turn mindfulness into a checklist, we are practicing a subtle form of self-surveillance. We are constantly stepping outside of our own skin to watch ourselves “heal,” asking: Am I doing this right? Am I calm yet?
This is the tyranny of putting essence before existence. We try to construct a rigid, idealized identity—the “mindful person,” the “healed person,” the “balanced person”—and then we force our wild, unpredictable human selves to squeeze into that narrow mold. We spend so much energy polishing the exterior of who we think we should be that we forget to simply be. We try to be optimized, productive and busy before simply being. This construction is a prison of our own making, a panopticon of wellness.
Introducing Invention into Existence
When we find ourselves trapped in the loop of performative wellness, we must remember that freedom does not come from a more disciplined routine. It comes from the willingness to drop the script entirely. It comes from being authentic to our true selves.
In his landmark work Black Skin, White Masks, the existential philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote a line that cuts straight to the heart of what it means to reclaim one’s own life:
“I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.”
What it means to apply Fanon’s wisdom to our modern inner lives is to realize that we are not prisoners of our past patterns, nor are we bound to the scripts of the wellness industry.
The real leap is not finding a better system to fix yourself. The real leap is invention. It is the radical act of stepping into the present moment without a plan. This true sense of authenticity and leaning into our truest selves. I’ve been trying to allow myself to be unfinished, messy, and entirely alive. To be authentically myself, but it is a practice, one day at a time.
We have to treat ourselves as human beings, not human doings. The idea of getting to an ordained finish line must be dropped from our lexicon and we must lean into the experience of the journey.
Letting the Coffee Get Cold
What if, tomorrow morning, you did absolutely nothing to improve yourself?
What if you didn’t meditate to lower your heart rate, and simply sat because the chair was comfortable?
What if you wrote in a notebook not to “process your shadow,” but because you liked the feel of the ink scratching against the paper?
What if you let the day be completely unoptimized?
True mindfulness is the courage to meet yourself exactly as you are—even if who you are in this moment is tired, distracted, or beautifully disorganized. It’s nonjudgemental and appreciative of what is here, now.
Put down the checklist. Close the apps. Step out of the surveillance tower and back into your own skin. You do not need to perform your healing to be worthy of your own life. Let go of the need to do it perfectly, and just be.