I optimised everything — and still felt hollow

Editor’s note: This article was reviewed and updated in May 2026 to meet The Vessel’s latest editorial standards.

I was standing in my apartment in Singapore, sunlight cutting across the floor in clean, expensive lines. Everything in the room had been chosen deliberately — furniture, art, objects that suggested a life well-curated. The air was still. My phone was off. There was nothing to do but be here. And in that stillness, I felt it — a kind of ache I couldn’t name.

It wasn’t unhappiness, exactly. It was more like vertigo. Like I had climbed the wrong mountain and wasn’t sure when I took the wrong turn.

This is the part where I’m supposed to say that none of it made me happy. But that’s not quite true. It did make me happy — for a while. When the money started to come in, and I began to stretch out into a new kind of life, I felt like I was finally becoming who I was meant to be. Me, but unencumbered. Me, but better.

Looking back, I think we all have those threshold moments — the first purchase, the first upgrade, the first tangible sign that the work is paying off. You tell yourself you appreciate the craftsmanship, the quality, the quiet elegance. And maybe you do. But you also like what it says without speaking: I’ve arrived. I matter.

The trick is subtle. Modern life doesn’t offer lies. It offers beautifully packaged proxies — objects, habits, identities that resemble fulfillment just enough to make you chase them. And once you start chasing, it’s hard to stop.

I kept chasing.

The optimization trap

At one point, I had five different tracking systems running. My time, my sleep, my workouts, my screen time, even my mood. I built dashboards. Optimized my mornings. Removed friction from my workflow. It all felt powerful — like I had finally wrestled life into submission. But over time, something strange began to happen: the more I optimized, the more hollow I felt. I was becoming efficient at living, but less alive.

That was the first crack: realizing that optimization had stopped being a tool and become a worldview. Every moment was something to be maximized, and anything that couldn’t be measured started to feel indulgent. Rest, joy, randomness — they didn’t fit into the system. So I stopped trusting them.

I didn’t know then that I was outsourcing my instincts to algorithms. That I was trading spontaneity for control. All I knew was that the dashboard looked good, and I didn’t.

The hunger to be seen

And then came the hunger to be seen. Not just admired — understood. The paradox of online life is that you can build a version of yourself so convincing that even you begin to believe it. I crafted narratives. Carefully selected moments. Shared my insights. I told myself I was being vulnerable, but I was performing my inner life as content. I don’t blame myself for it. In a culture where attention is currency, we all learn to spend ourselves in ways that look like connection.

But deep down, I knew. I knew that the version of me being praised was more coherent than the real thing. That the truth was messier, needier, lonelier. And eventually, the applause started to feel like static — loud but meaningless. I could no longer tell whether I was being affirmed or just successfully mimicked.

The mirage of the perfect relationship

I tried love, of course. Or something like it.

There was a period — I think of it now as a kind of spiritual fever — when I became convinced that what I needed wasn’t less, but one thing that was everything. A person who would mirror back the self I hadn’t yet managed to become. I looked for intensity in the silences. For people who felt psychologically textured, a little dark, a little hard to reach. It felt romantic, even noble: I want depth, not ease.

What I didn’t realize then is how easy it is to confuse depth with difficulty — and how quickly longing can become a way of avoiding yourself. The more mysterious she was, the more meaning I projected onto her. I wasn’t falling in love with someone. I was falling in love with the idea that someone else might redeem the incoherence I felt inside.

And like all mirages, it faded. Not in drama — just erosion. A quiet noticing that even intimacy had become another performance. Another structure to support a story of who I thought I was supposed to be. We talked about freedom. But what we meant was control.

Movement as meaning

When relationships ended, I told myself I was fine. I doubled down on my life. Traveled. Worked. Created. The digital nomad fantasy had already rooted itself by then: movement as meaning, escape as evolution. If I didn’t feel right in one place, I simply moved to another. Bangkok. London. Ho Chi Minh City. I told myself I was building a life. But I was actually avoiding building a home — in myself or anywhere else.

There’s a certain misery in perpetual motion that you don’t notice until you stop. It’s not loneliness. It’s displacement. Like being in a long-term relationship with your own potential but never actually arriving. Everything is always just beginning. The next project. The next launch. The next revelation.

I remember arriving in Ho Chi Minh City once, walking into a bright, bare apartment I’d rented for the month, and feeling the sudden weight of my own illusion. I had freedom. I had time. I had money. And I had no idea what to do with any of it. I didn’t need more novelty. I needed roots. But I didn’t know how to plant them.

When novelty becomes compulsion

Novelty is addictive in a neurological sense, not just a metaphorical one — research shows that dopamine enhances the perceived value of novel stimuli, which is why the pull toward the next thing can feel less like choice and more like compulsion. And compulsion keeps you from sitting still — which is precisely where the truth tends to arrive.

There’s a point where that reaching becomes a kind of suffering. When wanting isn’t hunger anymore, but compulsion. I didn’t realize I had crossed that line until everything I touched — even the things I loved — began to feel like obligation. The chase had stopped being exciting and started being structural, a habit of mind I couldn’t switch off even when I wanted to. And still, the world cheered me on. Modern life will always applaud your performance, no matter how miserable it makes you — especially if you look good while doing it.

The end of self-improvement

Eventually, you run out of things to optimize. You stop downloading new habit trackers. You stop trying to fix the way you sleep, or eat, or work, as if the next system might finally fix the part of you that still feels like it’s holding its breath. You stop reading articles about morning routines, or quarterly goals, or dopamine detoxes. The systems don’t stop working — they just stop mattering in the way they once did. What drove you to build them in the first place was never really inefficiency. It was the need to feel in control of something, at a time when the more interior questions felt too unstable to face.

That recognition is quieter than you’d expect. There’s no dramatic moment of clarity — just a slow withdrawal of energy from the whole apparatus. And in its wake, a strange, unfamiliar openness.

Sitting with yourself

In that pause — in the absence of striving — something unexpected happens. You hear yourself. Not the curated version. Not the optimized version. Just the raw, confused, quietly aching version that was there all along, underneath the dashboards and the carefully chosen furniture and the stories you told the internet about who you were becoming.

That version doesn’t arrive with answers. It arrives with a different quality of attention — less oriented toward fixing, more willing to simply notice. The discomfort it carries isn’t a sign that something is wrong. It might be the first genuinely honest signal in a long time.

The way through

I don’t have a clean resolution. I’m still figuring this out. I still live in Singapore. I still build things — Ideapod, The Vessel, Brown Brothers Media. I still wrestle with ambition, with the pull of novelty, with the voice that says more when what I really need is here.

But I’ve stopped pretending the ache is a problem to be solved. I’ve stopped trying to buy my way out of it, optimize my way past it, or move fast enough to outrun it. The ache, I think, is the signal. It’s what happens when you’re finally paying attention to your own life instead of performing it.

Modern life is brilliant at convincing you that the next thing will complete you. The next purchase. The next relationship. The next city. The next identity. But the things that actually make us miserable aren’t the things we lack — they’re the things we chase to avoid sitting with who we already are. That sitting is uncomfortable. It’s also, as far as I can tell, the only place where anything real tends to begin.

Some themes in this article touch on patterns that can be associated with anxiety, burnout, or emotional disconnection. If what you’ve read feels close to home in a way that’s causing distress, we’d encourage you to speak with a therapist or counsellor.