Optimize This
Optimize This is everyday philosophy for burnt-out eldest daughters.
After years of optimizing everything — her schedule, her skincare, her marriage, her mood — one exhausted, overworked elder-millennial woman realized that no new hack was ever going to fix what was actually wrong. So she's spending the next 100 weeks doing the opposite: taking one real, messy moment from her own overloaded life each Friday and finding the philosopher — classic or modern — who already thought it through.
No hustle. No 5-step frameworks. No new routine to abandon by February. Just smart, honest, occasionally profane conversations about what it actually means to be a woman doing everything right and still feeling like you're failing at all of it.
Optimize This
Latest Episodes
Episode Four: It's just us and Mitochondrial Eve.
My two grandmothers both died within a couple of weeks of my birthday on two different years. I'm forty-two now, and I'm still often ambushed by the memory of them — once, uncontrollably, over a spool of thread in a craft store aisle. ...
Episode Three: He was raised by one.
I had my first son at 22 and made myself a promise: I was going to raise a good man. I didn't know yet how heavy that promise would get, especially through a second son, a divorce, two households, and a world that's only gotten harder to raise ...
Episode Two: Workin 5 to 9, and we're tired.
Dolly Parton just left us, and the whole world is playing "9 to 5" again, but the workday she sang about in 1980 isn't the one we're living now. Today it starts at 5 am with school lunches and time-zone emails, and it doesn't end at 5 pm, or 9 ...
Episode One: No one touches us for free.
A rough week, a facialist's table, and one offhand comment that cracked something open: "For most women, this is the only time they're lovingly touched by someone without being expected to provide anything in return."In this epi...
Trailer: Wtf are we supposed to be optimizing now?
What happens when you realize the productivity hack, the workout plan, and the eleven-step skincare routine were never going to fix the actual problem? This is the trailer for Optimize This — a new podcast bringing philosophy to the real, ungla...