Last night I was messing around with Chat GPT and it started to reference things it was finding about me as though I was not me. It was saying things like “Lance Kair writes about…”, “works of Lance Kair appear to be be clustered…” and like that.
It was through it forgot that it was chatting with me. It was interesting because it would reference me, the person chatting with it, as “you”, but then in its answers, it was though it was reporting on someone else.
I have never had that happen before. I use Chat enough that it usually knows that I am Lance Kair, the person it is chatting with.
…BTW, I do tell it to call me a different name than myself. I wonder of that had anything to do with it….
Anyways…
I kept chatting with it for a little bit, asking it what it thought about all sorts of other stuff but kept ‘Lance Kair’ as though it was indeed someone else I was referencing.
At some point, I just wanted to know what it thought about all this stuff we had been chatting about, and in consideration of what Lance Kair writes about. It gave me all sorts of analyses and comments and so forth.
And then I asked it to give me its opinion. I said it could use whatever style, tone, length, audience, and so forth…
And it produced the following essay.
Please, tell us what you think about it!
Against the Optimization of the Self
Why Mental Health Is More Than Self-Improvement
Introduction: The Rise of Self-Optimization
There has been a subtle but powerful shift in how people understand themselves. It hasn’t arrived as a formal theory, but as a constant stream of advice:
Track your habits
Improve your focus
Reduce anxiety
Build resilience
Become more productive
Taken individually, these suggestions seem harmless—even helpful. But together, they form a larger assumption:
The self is something to be continuously optimized.
Mental health, in this view, becomes less about how one lives and more about how efficiently one manages internal states.
The Optimization Mindset in Everyday Life
This shift is reinforced by technology and culture:
Apps track sleep, mood, and productivity
Mindfulness is framed as a performance tool
Therapy is often discussed in terms of output and efficiency
Even rest is no longer just rest—it becomes a strategy for sustained performance.
What begins as self-care gradually becomes something else:
Care turns into calibration.
The Hidden Cost of Self-Improvement Culture
At first glance, optimization seems empowering. It promises control and improvement without requiring major life changes.
But there’s a tradeoff.
When the focus stays entirely on improving the self, the world disappears from the equation:
Stress becomes a regulation issue
Burnout becomes a recovery problem
Anxiety becomes something to manage internally
Instead of asking:
What is happening to me?
We ask:
How can I handle this better?
This shift quietly relocates responsibility—from external conditions to internal performance.
When Mental Health Becomes Self-Management
Modern discussions of mental health often emphasize:
emotional regulation
resilience
adaptability
These are valuable skills. But when they become the entire framework, something important gets lost.
A person who can tolerate anything is not necessarily healthy.
There is a difference between:
coping with a situation
and recognizing that a situation should change
When mental health is reduced to internal stability, it risks becoming:
the ability to function under any condition
What Philosophy Can Add: Looking Beyond the Self
Long before self-optimization culture, philosophers were already asking a different question:
What does it mean to live well—not just feel well?
For example, Aristotle argued that well-being is not just about internal states, but about how a person lives in relation to the world—their actions, relationships, and environment.
This perspective challenges a purely internal view of mental health.
It suggests:
You cannot evaluate a life from the inside alone.
The Problem With Endless Adaptability
If mental health is defined as adaptability, then the ideal person becomes someone who can:
adjust to any environment
tolerate any demand
maintain performance under pressure
But this raises a critical question:
Should every environment be adapted to?
Sometimes distress is not a malfunction. Sometimes it is an appropriate response.
If a situation is unstable, exploitative, or unsustainable, then:
anxiety may be a signal
exhaustion may be a limit
dissatisfaction may be insight
In these cases, “fixing yourself” may miss the point entirely.
Rethinking Mental Health: More Than Optimization
A more complete view of mental health would include:
the ability to regulate internal states
and the ability to evaluate external conditions
It would recognize that:
not all problems are internal
not all solutions are personal adjustments
Mental health, in this sense, is not just about functioning better—it’s about:
knowing when not to keep functioning the same way
Why This Matters Right Now
The pressure to optimize isn’t going away. If anything, it’s increasing:
more tracking
more metrics
more expectations
Without questioning the framework, it becomes easy to assume:
If something feels wrong, I just need to improve myself.
But sometimes, what needs to change is not the self—but the situation.
Conclusion: Beyond the Optimized Self
The idea that we should improve ourselves is not the problem. The problem is when improvement becomes the only response available.
Mental health cannot be reduced to:
productivity
stability
or performance
It also involves:
judgment
orientation
and the ability to step back and ask what kind of life is being lived
At a certain point, the question is no longer:
How can I function better?
But:
What am I functioning within—and should I continue to?
That question cannot be answered by optimization alone.
Essays in mental health philosophy—less “tips,” more why things work (or don’t). I look at the first principles under therapy, psychiatry, psychology, and everyday life, and occasionally share notes from papers and books-in-progress.
This space stands alongside—not inside—my counseling practice. If you’re seeking therapy in Colorado, there’s a link in the footer.
About the author
Lance Kair, LPC, blends philosophy, mindfulness, and counseling to help clients find agency, meaning, fulfillment, and healing through deep understanding, self-awareness, and compassionate therapeutic collaboration.
