optimization is optional

what I thought would make me a happier mom--and what actually did

Months ago I began writing an article; it reached 2,700 words and still lives in shame in my drafts. Its title was winkingly provocative: “Sorry moms, it’s your damn phone.” (I could never sincerely blame phones for all the shit moms deal with) Still, I had had an epiphany I couldn’t help but share. I had been in a real rut, until a fortuitous encounter with a podcast episode taught me that my constant pursuit of dopamine hits was to blame for my if-mama’s-not-happy situation, and radically reducing my scrolling and sugary treats did, in fact, solve all my attitude problems!

Even though I had chosen my title with tongue firmly placed in cheek, I guess the universe saw fit to knock me down a peg or six.

Travel back with me to October 2025. I was preparing for a long weekend trip with my husband when I started having chest and arm pains, lightheadedness, and weird hot flashes that maybe I should have seen a doctor about but really felt like it was probably just my body trying to tell me I was not doing great. All my stressors of course melted away during the five days I was on vacation with no responsibilities (our parents and my brother took turns watching our kids, a thousand thanks to them!), but the sensations returned with a vengeance when I was back in charge of what felt like everything. Several mornings, alone with my two youngest kids, I fell into total motionlessness. I wrote:

I was sad, demotivated, and completely overwhelmed by the amount of responsibility I was coming home to (the usual amount, btw). This feeling reached its peak on a Friday morning, when I had planned to take my 2 youngest children on a bike ride, but instead sat completely unable to move from a dining room chair, completely unable to stop crying. I don’t remember ever experiencing such acute inability to function. The usual things felt completely impossible. I’m just totally responsible for these children? I’m supposed to fight both of them into their shoes? I’m supposed to locate their hats and bikes and snacks while they hurt each other and destroy things? And when we come home, I’m supposed to look at this bed-sized pile of laundry and this sink full of dishes and say “Okay, now I’ll make you lunch!” and just do that forever?

On top of the intense overwhelm, I was confused by why it was happening now. Why was I feeling so debilitated? Why was I feeling so debilitated when I’d just come back from vacation? I ought to be recharged, and overjoyed to see my children!

I was feeling a bit naturally better my the time I encountered the aforementioned life-altering podcast and from there went on a binge of related podcasts and audiobooks, which together constituted my education in dopamine. I had long been interested in better understanding the concept of dopamine addiction, and vaguely aware that the way in which this idea was dealt with in popular culture was likely an oversimplification. But I wasn’t actively pursuing said better understanding when I pressed play on this podcast. Among many revelations it bestowed upon me, one of its most relevant was the concept of “cheap dopamine.” In it I understood that by constantly feeding myself on easy rewards, I was diminishing my enjoyment of everything else in life that isn’t effortlessly pleasurable.

I was highly motivated to reset everything. For two weeks, I was able to mostly abstain from scrolling and drastically reduce my sugar consumption—and it felt strangely effortless! Also, I was in a great mood. I had fixed myself. With enormous relief I recognized that I wouldn’t have to follow up with those two therapists I had emailed after coming home from my trip!

Alas, it could not last. I had already crashed back to earth, returned to scrolling compulsively first thing in the morning and resenting my lot in life (except it was ten times worse now, since at that point I knew I’d had the secret to happiness in my hot little hands, and I was just too foolish to hold on to it!!) by the time I began reading Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals in December, which begins: “This is a book about how the world opens up once you realize you are never going to sort your life out.” Promising. But I really knew I was in trustworthy hands from these words in the introduction:

“Shifts in perspective fade depressingly quickly: for a few days, everything seems different, but then the overwhelming momentum of the usual way of doing things reasserts itself once more.”

I didn’t encounter that many ideas in this book that felt revolutionary on their own—I felt like I already believed all of it. However, just having Burkeman’s voice in my head (in audiobook form) over the course of the following weeks enabled me to see more clearly a lot of the thought trenches I’ve spent years digging for myself to live in. Though I certainly don’t identify as a perfectionist, I began to see the many ways in which I actually had oriented my life toward some future time when perfection would be attainable. Recognizing and releasing that has, as Burkeman promises, made a noticeable difference in my ability to experience pleasure.

Being a full-time caregiver to young kids is, I maintain, very hard. I will never, never try to tell a mother to just stop self-victimizing, or to cheer up and remember that she is responsible for manufacturing the magic of childhood. I’ve spent a lot of time feeling completely unable to do those things. I now find myself feeling generally much more capable, but I don’t think I could have rushed the process. It happened because I was ready. If it’s helpful to anyone, I want to share some of the realizations and reframes that have helped me stay reliably happier in the past several months.

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MfM is largely about the freedom that comes from honestly accepting one’s limitations. My own limitations are, at this point, things I can conveniently blame on my children. This creates resentment, towards them and others. It enables me to tell myself my husband is not limited in the same way, and neither is anyone else in this world who has a mere job, and therefore doesn’t understand what a great excuse I have for operating so far below my true capacity.

Though I don’t think of myself as a person plagued by comparison to others, or pummeled by unreachable societal expectations for moms/women, I realize I do actually have a lot of loud voices in my head other than mine. These voices—an imaginary composite of cool internet moms, and more capable mothers of generations past—are always telling me what I should do, or should be able to do (keep my house clean, lose weight, get my kid to wear a coat in January, etc.) According to my conscious self-concept, I don’t live under a lot of cultural pressure—after all, I left the Mormon church of my childhood, and that required me to give up caring what anyone in my life would think of me. But maybe those expectations are still much more insidious and present than I realize.

Also, it exposed to my conscious mind how much I’m unconsciously oriented toward optimizing—or figuring out what the right and best thing to do would be. But optimization, as is now quite clear to me, is wholly optional. What if I relieved myself of the expectation of doing the right thing, and just did what felt right in any given moment? Not in a hedonistic way, rather in an “I can’t possibly invest the required amount of research into figuring out what the optimal thing to do would be, let alone muster the will/find the time to implement an optimal plan, so I just have to do something, whatever feels best right now, and that’s going to be fine” type of way.

It exposed how often I orient myself toward fixing a problem long-term, rather than just doing one small piece of work on it right now. I go to get a load of laundry out of my washing machine and think “I really need to start cleaning my washing machine every month.” But since implementing such a monthly schedule is #88 on my list of priorities, if I’m honest with myself, I know I’m not actually going to do that. Instead it would just be a thought that weighs on me occasionally, making me feel bad. Instead, I should decide to clean it one time, right now—or don’t.

On a small scale, anti-optimization thinking looks like: I’m probably actually not going to take the time to rethink the whole organization scheme of this hugely messy room later, but I can throw away the two pieces of trash that are next to my foot right now. (Embarrassingly, I think that my orientation toward implementing-optimal-systems-in-the-future actually has deterred me from taking even such minuscule actions as this. I’d rather try to schedule “clean bedroom” in my planner than just put away a handful of things in my bedroom now.)

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But I’m realizing optimization thinking plagues me on a larger scale as well. This is related to the common problem of searching out a “story,” or an explanation, for why I feel the way I feel. I seem to assume that if I can come up with a persuasive articulation of the reason for my suffering, I will change the world, and also justify all the resentment I have felt in the years since I became a mother. I have generated and collected partial articulations aplenty. None seemed entirely satisfactory.

The search for this One True Story is, inevitably, informed by online discourse: virally controversial videos and comments that feed on division (between working moms/stay at home moms, between moms and dads, between parents and child-free people) but which I cannot help but consume in search of some explanation. The Internet says parenting is so hard because moms don’t have a village or help from family. (Except I do). It says parenting is hard because they don’t have a supportive/equal partner. (I do). It’s hard if your children have special needs, or if you have two under two. . . But I have none of these, and it’s still REALLY HARD for me. And it seems I have no excuses for this.

The story I realize I’ve settled on is this: parenting is hard because I am just not suited to it. I don’t have the temperament; I prefer the life of the mind; I lack empathy, et cetera. But if I’m not suited to it, I have to ask myself, why am I doing it? Why did I “sign up” for this in the first place, the imaginary arbiters in my head demand to know? Because I didn’t know what I was getting into?

Well, yes, I answer.

Does this make me irresponsible? Did I make reckless, ill-informed choices?

Well, I say, so what if I did?

What if I simply accepted every charge these imaginary people are leveling at me: Yes, I was unprepared. No, I didn’t do the thing that made the most sense, and I still am not doing the thing that makes the most sense! But I’m not capable of doing the thing that makes the most sense, because identifying what that thing is would require resources I didn’t then and still do not have. I’m just doing the thing that I’m doing. And actually—if I get outside of my own head and objectively look at how it’s going—it’s going great. My kids are loved, and loving. They are fed, healthy, clean (most of the time), and clothed. They don’t even use iPads! They are, I think, happy with their lives.

I’m conscious now of how much my inner dialogue has been devoted to explaining why my life is so hard, like way harder than I expected and way harder than anyone else can comprehend. Various sources will confirm that this struggle is justified: I listen to a podcast on parental burnout that tells me the stress of parenting young children is comparable to the trauma that causes PTSD, because you’re averting disaster that is not constant but intermittent and unpredictable, and I think: Yes! That’s what’s destroying my mind and body! It’s unbearable, because I (never my husband) will wake from a deep sleep when I hear my child roll over in the middle of the night. Because in the process of tying one child’s shoe, I can reach out the other hand in a split second to catch the toddler who is toppling on his tricycle. But my superpowers come at a cost: my brain is fragmented, I no longer function in any of the ways that used to make me feel capable.

Okay, that was me indulging in some explaining—but while the explanations feel good for a moment, I see now I’ve been overvaluing them. Henceforth I renounce them: I will feel my feelings without trying to justify them. Without trying to hone them into a perfectly convincing diatribe, rife with illustrative examples and powerful metaphors, for why I am so beaten down. I’ll never be able to use this explanation anyway. It doesn’t help me. And no one will ever ask me for it.

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An interlude

While my intensive dopamine education led me to what I now think of as a false epiphany, I did learn several valuable reframes that continue to improve my experience of life. Here are some:

Phone-free workouts. Understanding the utility of avoiding scrolling first thing in the morning, especially while exercising, has helped me stop reaching for my phone during my morning workouts in a way that I have never previously been able to sustain for more than a week. Maybe working out is supposed to make you feel good because it’s hard. Don’t keep escaping the hard with a fun little scroll, or googling every single thing that crosses your mind in between sets. Let your mind truly rest (and your body work) during a workout. This has really helped me appreciate my workout time more and experience it as valuable me time, rather than feeling like it’s just one more thing I have to schedule/do before the 445,299,328 other things I have to schedule/do.

Not treating myself to constant treats. In the months before my dopamine epiphany, my consumption of fun little treats was at a lifetime high. I deserved these, I told myself, because my life is hard, it’s all I have to look forward to! But there is a pleasure-pain balance your brain works to maintain; when you over-consume pleasure, your brain tries to rebalance by doubling down on pain. This is why one Kit Kat from my daughter’s Halloween basket (please don’t tell) will never be enough. The pleasure it affords is immediately followed by pain—the pain of no longer having a Kit Kat in my mouth, which I reason will be alleviated if I have just one more KitKat! And so on. By contrast, a painful experience demands that your brain rebalance by generating its own pleasure. (The logic of the cold plunge).

Remembering everything is hard. This is as it should be. Doing hard things is good for your brain. While I always would have said I believed hard is good, I think understanding it in the context of brain chemistry makes the truism convincing—a concrete scientific reality rather than some abstract moral principle that I merely hope is true. Dopamine plays a role evolutionarily in getting humans to do the hard work that sustains their lives, and we try to sidestep this at our peril. Whatever allows you to escape pain for a while will itself end up causing additional pain. Better to practice welcoming pain into your life as well as you can—and let yourself be consoled that some amount of pain is healthy.

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It’s been months now since I read Meditations for Mortals, and its lessons seem to have stuck. Now the key, I think, is leaving plenty of room for feeling everything, bad and good, without letting the bad feelings cause me additional distress because of what I allow them to mean. Without letting them signify something is wrong with me or that I should have done something different with my life. The problem with my dopamine epiphany was that I had valued it for its ability to transform my mood. Of course that was not going to last. Of course I was going to be in a bad mood again, and what then? That story could not be true anymore.

My new story, I think, goes something like this: it feels hard, as Dr. Becky says, because it is hard. There’s no mystery here, and no one even needs to believe me when I tell them. Feeling like I’ve chosen a lifestyle that’s very hard for me does not mean that should have chosen something else.

I still feel angry and annoyed many times each day (though less frequently overwhelmed, I think). I’m not letting the fact that I feel bad mean that something is wrong. It just means that there are multiple people screaming in my vicinity at all times. It means that I just spent twenty minutes bargaining with someone who refuses to put pants on and it’s not even 8 am. In other words: it’s the appropriate response to the stimulus. Feeling justified in feeling bad means my bad moods pass much more quickly: I apologize to my kids when I need to, which is often, and I move on. The moods don’t accumulate into stories of failure, victimization, and wasted potential.

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I recently heard “Both Sides Now” again, as if for the first time, and have played it many times since. I’m not the first to find comfort in the wisdom of this verse:

Oh, but now old friends, they’re acting strange

And they shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed

Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained

In living every day

I like giving myself permission to say that I actually have lost something by choosing the life I’ve chosen—just as everyone cuts off other options by making any choice, simply by “living every day.” My kids have taken a lot from me (“autonomy and vitality,” in the words of Molly Millwood, which I think of perhaps too often). I can just say that without adding but they’ve given me the greatest joy I can imagine!—I don’t want to put that burden on them. I want to just let them be what they are. My reward is that three new people exist in this world. And I get to observe their lives at intensely close distance—which is both delightful and punishing.

So I like this ambiguous calculus of Mitchell’s: “Something’s lost but something’s gained.” Not something’s lost but so much more!! is gained—they’re both just something. You can’t quantify it, therefore you can’t optimize it: you can’t know in advance that you’ll come out better off.

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