TL;DR
- Optimisation is the deliberate effort to make something work better. It is useful when a man applies it to a clear problem, such as poor sleep or an unmanageable workload. He can change what he does and then judge whether the change helped. The difficulty begins when he treats the result as a judgement about himself. A poor result no longer means that one approach failed. It begins to mean that he has failed or is no longer good enough.
- As he applies optimisation to more areas of his life, monitoring can become part of almost everything he does. During a conversation, some of his attention remains on the other person. The rest is occupied with what he should do next or whether he has used his time well. He may also stop noticing what is happening within him, including interest, enjoyment, discomfort or disappointment. By evening, he has completed his tasks and recorded his progress. The day still feels flat because he spent much of it measuring his life instead of living it.
- When his self-respect depends on good results, each setback can affect how he sees himself. A mistake at work may lead him to question abilities he has demonstrated across many different situations. One disappointing outcome is given more authority than years of experience.
- Rebuilding his identity gives him a stronger basis for understanding who he is. His achievements still matter, although they are no longer the only evidence he uses. He also begins to recognise himself through the values he lives by, the relationships he maintains, and the responsibilities he chooses to carry.
- He begins rebuilding his sense of himself by giving more attention to what is happening within him and around him. Instead of measuring every experience by whether it improves him, he notices what interests him and what leaves him feeling detached. He becomes more present in conversations and more thoughtful about the commitments he accepts. These experiences help him recognise what he cares about and how he wants to live. His identity then grows through his participation in life, rather than depending on the next result to confirm his worth.
Life optimisation improves specific parts of life
At breakfast, he reviews his meetings and the gym workout he planned for the evening. The day looks demanding, but experience has taught him to organise difficult work and keep his commitments, even when his energy dips.
His colleagues trust him because he handles difficult tasks and keeps his word, even during demanding weeks. Yet he moves between meetings with little interest, and by evening he remembers completed tasks more clearly than he remembers conversations.
His days are full, and he is still doing what he expects of himself. Completing everything no longer gives him the satisfaction he expected. One question keeps returning: “I have done everything right, so why do I feel like this?”
Optimisation gives a man useful ways to address practical problems in his life. The difficulty begins when he starts using the same approach to manage his whole life. He pays closer attention to targets and results than to his own feelings or the people in front of him. A new target may give him a temporary sense of progress. The target does not return his attention to what is happening within him or to the people around him. Rebuilding his identity requires a different kind of attention. He begins by noticing what is happening within him. He then lets that awareness shape how he participates in his relationships and how he chooses to live.
When achievement becomes the basis of self-worth
Once optimisation becomes the focus of a man’s life, he can read a disappointing result as evidence that something is wrong with him. Missing several training sessions may lead him to question his discipline. He responds by tightening his routine before considering why his plans changed.
He missed one session because a close friend needed his company after a separation. He spent another evening helping a family member through a difficult situation. The fitness tracker can record the exercise he did not complete. It cannot record why he changed his plans or what those choices reveal about him.
If he judges himself mainly through measurable progress, the missed sessions look like personal failures. He pays less attention to the care and loyalty he showed while he was away from the gym. He begins to give the tracker’s result more authority than his own understanding of the choices he made.
His reaction shows that physical improvement has become one way he proves his discipline and worth. Psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Lora Park (2004) describe this as contingent self-worth. A person feels better or worse about himself according to how well he performs in an area he uses to judge his value.
Completing every session may reassure him that he remains disciplined and in control. Missing a session can bring the doubt back, even when he changed his plans for a reason he respects. The result no longer tells him only how much exercise he completed. He also uses it to decide whether he is living up to the man he thinks he should be.
Over time, his understanding of himself becomes a report on his progress. He can describe how much his fitness has improved and how closely he has followed the routine. That record tells him little about the care or judgement behind the choices that took him away from training. Each new target offers another chance to feel good enough, while the basis of his self-worth remains unchanged.
Question: When does optimisation stop being only a useful tool?
Answer: A sleep score is useful when it guides a change to his bedtime after several poor nights. When one poor night makes him doubt years of proven discipline, he has asked a measure of sleep to decide how he sees himself.
More optimisation can still leave a man feeling flat
A good result can improve the area of life being measured. Harkin and colleagues (2016) found that monitoring progress can help people reach a clear goal. A training plan may increase his fitness, while a budget may give him more control over his spending. These changes can make life easier. The satisfaction they provide may still fade once the improvement becomes normal.
By Saturday evening, he may have completed everything he planned. He trained in the morning and finished several jobs at home. He also prepared for the coming week. His day was productive, yet he feels flat and disengaged. He can describe what he completed, but struggles to articulate what gave the day personal meaning.
This sense of flatness and disengagement develops when keeping everything organised takes so much attention that he has little left to experience the life he has organised. He completes his responsibilities without noticing how he feels while doing them. Even when he is with people he cares about, part of his attention remains on the next task. Managing his life remains important. The problem is the lack of attention left for his own responses and for the people with him.
Over time, he becomes more familiar with what he should do and less with what matters to him. His days remain full. Fewer experiences reach him deeply enough to spark interest or connection. Life begins to feel like something he administers. He rarely feels fully inside the experience.
This is also where the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic worth becomes important. Extrinsic worth depends on evidence outside himself. A completed goal or another person’s approval reassures him that he is doing well and remains valuable. That reassurance lasts until a result disappoints him or someone else performs better.
In this article, intrinsic worth means that his value as a man is not decided again by each result. He can still care about succeeding without asking a poor result to reduce his value. He also learns about himself through how he treats people and the choices he respects. These parts of his identity remain present when there is no result to measure.
Without that inner foundation, an ordinary day can feel empty because it offers little proof of his worth. Rest may feel wasted when it yields nothing. Time with another person may receive only part of his attention because it has no visible achievement attached. He keeps searching for reassurance in progress, while the experiences that could help him feel connected remain at the edges of his awareness.
The flatness is therefore more than boredom. It can be the felt experience of living at a distance from himself. His routines continue, but his feelings and values have too little influence on how he lives. He also has less room to be affected by others or to respond openly to what happens around him.
Further optimisation leaves this emptiness untouched because it offers him another way to measure his performance. It does not give him a secure sense of worth or restore his connection with his inner life. That change begins when he pays attention to his own response. What he notices can then influence the people and activities he gives his time to.
Question: Why can better results leave the empty feeling unchanged?
Answer: Better results improve the part of life being measured. The empty feeling can remain when achievement is his main source of worth, and he pays too little attention to his own experience. Another success may reassure him briefly, but it does not change that pattern.
When achievement no longer tells a man who he is
When another achievement no longer changes how he feels, the problem has moved beyond performance. What has weakened is the connection between what he does and the man he understands himself to be.
His identity is his understanding of who he is. It connects the man he has been with the man he is now. It also shapes the future he can imagine for himself. His work and relationships contribute to this understanding. So do the things he has achieved, although none of them can carry it alone.
For many years, achievement may have given his identity a clear foundation. He knew himself as someone who worked hard and solved problems. Other people could rely on him. Those qualities were real, and the results he achieved proved it.
His responsibilities continue, but completing them no longer gives him the same sense of purpose. He still knows how to perform the role that shaped much of his identity. What he has not developed as fully is an understanding of himself beyond that role.
He expected years of effort to give him practical success and a lasting sense of worth. He also expected the life he built to hold his interest. When the flatness remains, he may assume he needs to work harder. The repeated pattern raises another possibility. Achievement has become one of the main ways he knows his worth, while his values and personal responses have had less influence over the life he built.
His flatness can therefore signal a growing distance between the life he has organised and the person living it. The commitments in his week may have made sense when he first accepted them. Some may still matter deeply, while others may remain because they belong to the man he needed to be earlier in his life.
The philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1951) helps explain why another optimisation can’t resolve this. Marcel distinguished a problem that can be studied and solved from a mystery that can be understood only through participation. A faulty machine is a useful example of a problem: a man can study it and decide what needs changing. He cannot stand outside his own identity in the same way, because the way he feels and relates to other people is part of what he is trying to understand.
This means he cannot discover who he is through measurement alone. He begins to understand himself through how he participates in his life. A relationship tells him something when he notices whether he can speak openly and remain present. A responsibility tells him something different when he sees that he now carries it from habit or fear. Those responses provide information that a score cannot.
Psychologists Dan McAdams and Kate McLean (2013) describe identity as an evolving story that connects a person’s past with the future he can imagine. This does not require a man to reject what he has achieved. It helps him see how those achievements fit within the larger story of his life.
He may recognise, for example, that his career gave him a place to demonstrate responsibility and sound judgement. Those qualities remain part of him even if his relationship with work changes. He can decide where else those qualities belong and how much authority his career should have in the years ahead.
The question has now changed. He is no longer asking only how to improve his performance. He is deciding which parts of the man he has been still belong in his life and what needs room to develop now. Rebuilding begins when those decisions start influencing how he lives.
Rebuilding identity beyond achievement
Rebuilding a stronger sense of identity begins when a man stops asking achievement to provide his whole answer to who he is. His career remains part of him. So do the discipline and competence he developed. He begins to place those strengths within a fuller understanding of the man he has become and the life he now wants.
He can begin by considering what his achievements allowed him to express. Work may have shown him that he can take responsibility and use sound judgement. It may also have given him a way to contribute to something important. Those qualities belong to him. They do not disappear when his work changes or when a result disappoints him.
This gives him continuity with the man he has been. He does not need to reject the years spent building his career or shouldering demanding responsibilities. He can recognise what those years have developed in him and decide where those qualities belong now.
Rebuilding also requires him to pay attention to experiences he has pushed aside. When boredom keeps returning, he can ask what it is connected to. A commitment may still be worthwhile. It may also occupy so much of his week that there is little room for the relationships or interests that bring him into fuller contact with his life.
His feelings do not make every decision for him. They provide information that performance measures cannot. Interest can show that he is engaged with something. Resentment may tell him that a responsibility deserves closer examination. He then brings that information together with his judgement and the responsibilities he must still carry.
The rebuilding becomes real when this awareness changes how he participates in his life. A friend invites him to meet for a walk. He accepts because the friendship matters, and he gives the time his full attention. During the walk, he notices that he feels more open than he has during much of the week.
The conversation shows him that his company matters to his friend. He does not have to solve a problem to have a place in the relationship. That experience adds something to how he understands himself.
Question: What is being rebuilt if his capability and discipline are still present?
Answer: He is rebuilding the way he understands and values himself. His capability remains part of his identity. His relationships and lived choices also show him who he is. They reveal the values he wants his life to express. Achievement becomes one expression of the man he is and no longer carries the full burden of proving his worth.
How everyday choices help rebuild identity
Presence begins when he gives an experience enough attention to notice what is happening around him and within him. During a conversation, he listens to the other person. He also notices his own response to what is being said. His plans still matter, but they no longer occupy his full attention.
Participation takes him further. He responds to what he hears and allows the conversation to develop in a direction he did not plan. He may answer more honestly or stay with a subject he would usually avoid. Through that exchange, he learns something about himself that he could not discover by analysing the friendship from a distance.
One Friday evening, he notices that a musician he once enjoyed is performing nearby. He usually keeps Friday free to finish whatever remains from the week. This time, he buys a ticket and goes.
During the performance, he leaves his phone alone and listens. Some songs hold his attention, while others stir memories he hasn’t thought about in years. He notices that he feels interested and emotionally involved without needing to achieve anything.
One evening at a performance does not rebuild his identity. It shows him that this part of himself is still present. His interest in music has received little attention because it offered no clear result and always seemed less urgent than his responsibilities.
If he decides the experience mattered, he can make room for music again. He might attend another performance or spend an evening listening at home. The choice becomes life-affirming because it gives him time for something that helps him feel involved in his own life.
The next performance may disappoint him. He may decide that the particular musician or venue did not suit him. That outcome does not mean his interest was false or that he cannot trust his choices. It gives him more information about what engages him now.
As he continues to make choices like this, his interests begin to shape how he spends his time. He no longer knows himself only through his responsibilities and achievements. He also begins to recognise the parts of himself that respond with interest and emotional depth.
This is where lived experience differs from optimisation. He acts on an interest and notices how he responds while he is taking part. His response helps him decide whether the experience deserves another place in his life. A disappointing evening remains information about that evening; it does not become a verdict on his worth.
As these choices continue, his values begin to show in how he actually spends his time. Music now has a place in his week because it gives expression to an interest he had neglected. His calendar begins to reflect more than duty and achievement.
Question: How do ordinary choices help a man inhabit his life again?
Answer: Ordinary choices give what matters to him a real place in his week. By paying attention and participating fully, he learns about himself through lived experience. Over time, these choices build a stronger identity that does not depend entirely on achievement or external approval.
Living without asking every result to prove his worth
Optimisation still has a useful place in his life. He can use it when a problem has a clear purpose, and he can tell whether a change helped. Its job is to solve a practical problem. It cannot decide what the result says about his worth.
His earlier question—why life still felt flat when he had done everything right—now has a clearer answer. Optimisation had been doing two jobs. It helped him develop skills and solve practical problems, and he also expected it to provide lasting proof of his worth. That reassurance could never last because each disappointing result raised the question again.
The change appears gradually in the way he lives. He gives a conversation his attention because the person matters to him. He makes room for music because it allows a neglected interest to return to his week. When an experience disappoints him, he learns from that experience without turning it into a judgement about the whole man.
He may still have flat days and periods when he is unsure what matters. He no longer has to resolve that uncertainty by immediately setting another target. He can remain present long enough to notice what is missing and decide what deserves a place in his life.
This is how he begins to inhabit his life again. He spends less time standing outside it and checking whether it measures up. More of his attention returns to the experience in front of him. His life remains something he manages, while also becoming a life in which he can recognise himself.
Key points
- Optimisation is the deliberate effort to make something work better. It is useful when the purpose is clear, and the result can guide a practical decision. Difficulty develops when a man applies the same method to his whole life and uses each result to judge his worth.
- When optimisation becomes his main way of living, he begins treating himself as something that must be continually monitored and corrected. He may organise his life successfully while giving less attention to what he feels and how he experiences the people around him. What matters to him also receives less attention.
- If achievement has become the main source of his self-respect, success provides only temporary reassurance. A disappointing result can bring his doubts back because he is still using external evidence to decide his worth. An inner sense of worth allows that result to remain information about one effort.
- The flatness he experiences may come from living at a distance from himself. His days can remain busy and productive while his interests and relationships have little influence over how he spends them. His own responses are also given too little room. More optimisation adds another target without addressing that distance.
- The issue becomes one of identity when achievement can no longer provide a lasting answer to who he is. His ability and discipline remain real. They have carried more of his identity than they can sustain.
- Rebuilding identity places his achievements within a fuller understanding of himself. He begins to recognise how his choices express what he values. He also sees that relationships reveal parts of him that achievement cannot show.
- Presence allows him to notice what is happening within and around him. Participation gives him experience of what still engages him. Life-affirming choices then give those people or interests a real place in his week.
- A stronger identity develops through repeated lived experience. A disappointing result can remain connected to one situation, while his wider sense of worth remains intact. He can learn from the outcome and decide what to do next without treating it as a judgement on the whole man.
Frequently asked questions
Does feeling empty mean the life a man has built was false or wasted?
No. His achievements and relationships may have been important. The responsibilities he carried may also have been worthwhile. The flatness does not erase what they contributed or the qualities he developed through them.
It may show that these parts of life can no longer form the basis of how he understands himself. He can respect what he has built. He can also make room for people and interests that have received too little attention. Paying attention to his own response helps him decide where that room is needed.
Why can another goal fail to restore his interest in life?
A new goal can give him direction and energy for a while. It may also solve a genuine problem. The effect often fades when achievement has become his main source of worth because each result provides only temporary reassurance.
His lack of engagement can continue when his attention stays fixed on achievement and he gives little notice to his own response. Another target gives him something else to pursue. It does not change the way he has learned to judge his worth.
Does rebuilding identity require a major career or relationship change?
Rebuilding can begin within the life he already has. He starts by paying closer attention to how he experiences his responsibilities and relationships. He also notices what happens when he gives time to a personal interest. This helps him recognise what still matters and what he continues mainly through habit.
A larger change may eventually become appropriate. It can then grow from repeated experience and considered judgement. One restless evening or a sudden desire to escape does not have to decide the direction.
Can a man continue using goals, routines and tracking?
Yes. Goals and routines remain useful when they serve a clear purpose. A man can use a training plan to improve his fitness or a budget to manage his spending without asking either result to determine his value.
A measure has taken on too much authority when one disappointing result changes how he sees himself. It may also be unhelpful when monitoring takes so much attention that he is barely present during the experience being measured.
What if he no longer knows what matters to him?
Years spent concentrating on achievement can make his own interests and responses difficult to recognise. He may need time to notice what holds his attention. He can also pay attention to the relationships in which he feels more open. His response to a commitment can show whether it still feels worth carrying.
He doesn’t have to find one final answer before making a choice. He can give something important a real place in his week. By paying attention while he participates, he can learn from his response. If he still can’t make sense of what he is experiencing, a mentor can help him examine the pattern and consider what deserves a place in his life now.
About David
David Kernohan is the founder of Mentoring Through the Maze®. He provides practical, non-clinical mentoring for men dealing with major life change and questions about identity. His work helps men find direction and rebuild trust in their own judgement.
If this article describes what has been happening in your life, you can explore mentoring services for men in Perth or book a complimentary 30-minute Mapping Call.
References.
Crocker, J., & Park, L. E. (2004). The costly pursuit of self-esteem. Psychological Bulletin, 130(3), 392–414.
Harkin, B., et al. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229.
Marcel, G. (1951). The Mystery of Being, Volume One: Reflection and Mystery. Harvill Press.
McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238.
