Wednesday morning, February 11th. Someone just sat down with a perfect latte, positioned it carefully for a photo, adjusted the lighting, took six shots, edited one, posted it, then finally took a sip. The coffee's lukewarm now. They're scrolling through likes. I wonder if they actually tasted it at all. We've turned experience into content, and in doing so, we've stopped experiencing anything.

The Thesis

The more you optimize for having good experiences, the fewer actual experiences you have. We've been sold the idea that life is about maximizing positive experiences—finding the best restaurants, taking the perfect trips, curating meaningful moments. But the act of treating experience as something to be optimized transforms it into performance. You're no longer in the moment; you're managing it, evaluating it, preparing to remember it. The experience itself becomes secondary to the experience of having experiences. This isn't just about social media or photography. It's deeper: we've trained ourselves to constantly evaluate whether we're having a good enough time, and that evaluation kills the experience itself.

This cuts against the entire self-optimization movement:

  • Track your happiness levels
  • Journal about your experiences
  • Practice gratitude for the good moments
  • Be mindful and present
  • Maximize your joy

All of that sounds healthy. Most of it makes things worse.

Why Experience Optimization Fails

Experience requires unselfconscious absorption:

Think about the best moments of your life. The times you felt most alive, most present, most real. How many of them involved you thinking: "I should really appreciate this moment right now"?

Probably none.

Real experience happens when you're in something, not observing yourself having it. The moment you step back to evaluate whether you're experiencing correctly, you've left the experience. You're now meta-experiencing: having an experience about having an experience.

It's like trying to fall asleep by monitoring whether you're falling asleep. The monitoring prevents the thing you're trying to achieve.

The evaluation destroys the phenomenon:

Quantum mechanics has this thing called the observer effect—measuring something changes what you're measuring. Consciousness has the same problem.

The moment you ask "Am I enjoying this?" you've introduced a evaluator into the experience. Now you're not just eating dinner with friends—you're a person monitoring whether they're enjoying dinner with friends. The monitoring adds a layer of separation. The separation prevents the absorption that makes experience rich in the first place.

And it's worse than that. Because once you've introduced the evaluator, you can't easily dismiss it. Now there's a part of you constantly asking: "Is this good enough? Should I be feeling more? Is this what happiness is supposed to feel like? Am I doing this right?"

The paradox: the more you care about having good experiences, the more you undermine your ability to have them.

We've confused experience with memory:

Here's what really happened: we realized that memories of experiences give us lasting satisfaction. So we concluded we should optimize our experiences to create better memories.

But that reverses the causation.

Good memories come from experiences where you were genuinely absorbed, not performing for your future self. The moment you're thinking "This will be a great memory," you're not actually having the experience—you're rehearsing the story you'll tell later.

This is why the photo kills the moment. Not because there's anything wrong with photos. But because the act of stopping to capture something for later yanks you out of the present. You're no longer experiencing the sunset; you're preparing evidence that you experienced the sunset.

And that substitution—evidence for reality—is the trap. We've trained ourselves to constantly produce evidence that we're living well, and in doing so, we've stopped actually living.

The Intelligence Trap

Smart people are especially vulnerable to this:

If you're the kind of person who reads essays about consciousness and experience, you're probably the kind of person who thinks a lot. Who analyzes. Who notices patterns and tries to understand them.

All of that analytical capacity becomes a liability here.

Because you can think about whether you're experiencing correctly. You can notice that you're not feeling the way you think you should feel. You can construct narratives about why the experience isn't living up to expectations. You can compare this experience to other, better experiences you've had or imagine having.

None of that helps. All of it prevents the unselfconscious absorption that makes experience real.

The smarter you are, the more sophisticated your self-monitoring becomes. The more sophisticated your self-monitoring, the more you live in your head, evaluating and narrating, and the less you actually live.

The mindfulness trap:

This is where mindfulness culture gets it wrong.

The instruction to "be present" or "notice what you're feeling" introduces the same problem: now you're the noticer, separate from what you're noticing. You've created observer and observed, which is exactly the split that prevents genuine experience.

Real presence isn't something you do. It's something that happens when you stop doing the thing where you monitor yourself. It's not achieved through technique—it's what remains when the techniques stop.

But we've turned presence into another thing to achieve, another metric to optimize, another thing to feel inadequate about when we're not doing it right. "Am I being mindful enough?" is just another form of self-monitoring that prevents the experience it's supposed to create.

What Actually Works

Let go of the project:

The solution isn't to experience better. It's to stop treating experience as a project.

You can't force yourself into unselfconscious absorption. But you can stop doing the things that prevent it. You can notice when you're evaluating whether you're having a good enough time, and gently stop. Not by forcing yourself to be present, but by recognizing that the evaluation itself is the problem.

This is subtle: I'm not saying "be more present." I'm saying: notice the voice that asks if you're being present enough, and recognize that voice is the obstacle.

Choose activities that naturally absorb you:

Some activities pull you in. Others require constant self-motivation.

The activities that naturally absorb you—where you look up and hours have passed—those are the ones where real experience happens. Not because you're trying to be absorbed, but because the activity itself is intrinsically engaging enough that you forget to monitor yourself.

This is different for everyone. For some people it's cooking, or rock climbing, or programming, or conversation, or making music. Whatever it is, it's characterized by the same thing: you forget you're doing it because you're too busy actually doing it.

That forgetting is the experience.

Stop curating for an imagined audience:

The hardest part: let go of the person watching.

Not the external audience—that's relatively easy to dismiss. The internal one. The you who's evaluating whether this is a life worth living, whether these experiences are good enough, whether you're doing it right.

That internal observer is trying to help. It wants you to have a good life. But it can't give you one, because its presence prevents the thing it's seeking.

The good life doesn't come from optimization. It comes from forgetting to optimize because you're too absorbed in actually living.

The Real Skill

The skill isn't better experience—it's letting yourself have experiences at all.

We think the problem is that our experiences aren't good enough. That if we could just find the right activities, the right places, the right people, we'd finally feel the way we're supposed to feel.

But the problem isn't the quality of what we're doing. It's that we've learned to stand apart from whatever we're doing, evaluating it, managing it, narrating it, optimizing it.

The real skill is closing that gap. Not through technique or effort, but through recognizing that the gap itself—the observer watching the experience—is what prevents experience from being real.

You don't need better moments. You need to stop treating moments as things to be better. You don't need to be more present. You need to stop creating the separation that makes presence feel like an achievement.

The experience is already there. You're just standing in your own way.

Takeaways

Stop treating life as content. The moment you experience something as material for a story you'll tell later, you've left the experience. Let things happen without preparing to remember them.

Notice the evaluator. When you catch yourself asking "Am I enjoying this enough?" recognize that question as the problem, not the solution. The evaluation itself is what prevents the experience.

Choose absorption over achievement. Find activities that naturally pull you in, where you forget to monitor yourself. That forgetting is what experience actually feels like.

Let go of the observer. You don't need to be more present. You need to stop creating the split between experiencer and experience. The gap is the problem, not something to be overcome through effort.

Accept that you can't optimize this. The harder you try to have good experiences, the more you prevent yourself from having any experiences at all. The only way to win is to stop playing the game.

Today's Sketch

February 11, 2026