We’ve optimised everything. We’re not happier for it

Modern life came with a promise: measure more, improve more, feel better. We took it seriously. We track our sleep, count our steps, log our calories, and score our productivity before 9am. Our leisure time has a purpose. Our rest has a metric. Even our holidays have content strategies.

The evidence suggests it isn’t working.

In research conducted by Nord Anglia Education across more than 500 parents in the UAE, 53% believe that constantly tracking and optimising aspects of their lives including sleep, exercise, and productivity, is making them more anxious. Only 8% believe it makes them happier. These are not the numbers of a population thriving under optimisation culture. They are the numbers of one exhausted by it.

The economist Charles Goodhart put it plainly: “When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” We have turned the whole of human experience into a target. And in doing so, we may have lost something harder to quantify – the ability to simply enjoy being alive.

Awareness is not the problem

What makes this particularly striking is that awareness isn’t the problem. In fact, 91% of parents surveyed say play and enjoyment are important for adult wellbeing. They understand this. They believe it. Yet more than half feel guilty spending time on activities that serve no productive purpose. Nearly 8 in 10 feel pressure to use their free time productively. We know rest matters. We just can’t bring ourselves to stop performing long enough to experience it.

Dr Ruba Tabari, Consultant Educational Psychologist, identifies the central irony here: we are attempting to achieve wellbeing through constant measurement. But intuition, presence, and the capacity to trust our own experience cannot be quantified. In outsourcing our sense of direction to external indicators, we risk losing touch with our internal ones. As she notes, in our efforts to extend life, we may sometimes lose sight of how to enjoy it.

There is a useful contrast available to us, and it sits closer than we think.

Watch children enjoy themselves

Children don’t play to improve their metrics. They play because it’s enjoyable, full stop. They don’t separate play from learning, or creativity from achievement, or enjoyment from growth, because for children, these things are not in opposition. Building something, imagining something, solving a problem with a friend, these are not breaks from development. They are development.

What educators observe daily is that the skills children build through play – communication, resilience, collaboration, and creative thinking – are the foundations that support long-term capability and wellbeing.

Yet 82% of parents agree that adults have forgotten how to play and enjoy downtime in the way children naturally do. The same proportion say it is harder to switch off today than when they were children themselves. It’s not a coincidence. It reflects a cultural shift in what we believe justifies our time.

Parents prioritise children’s happiness

Research from the Pew Research Center shows that parents overwhelmingly prioritise their children’s happiness and wellbeing over academic or financial success. Most would resist raising a child whose worth is measured in outputs. And yet, that is increasingly how adults measure their own. The permission we extend to children to explore, rest, play without purpose, is rarely the permission we extend to ourselves.

That gap is worth examining. Not because play is a productivity tool dressed in different clothing, though it does support creativity, connection and resilience. But because some things are valuable precisely because they resist measurement. The activities most people remember from childhood, the ones that shaped them, were rarely optimised. They were simply lived and enjoyed.

The global smart wearables market is predicted to reach $280 billion by 2030. The infrastructure for tracking every facet of our lives is only expanding. Which makes the case for occasionally stepping outside that infrastructure more important, not less. Switching off is not a failure of discipline. It may be the most human thing we can do.