From Optimisation to Orientation, Leaving the Economy of Happiness
The contemporary discourse on happiness is inseparable from the logic of optimisation. This is not an accident, nor a benign misunderstanding, but the predictable outcome of a civilisation that has generalised economic rationality into every domain of existence.
Happiness, once understood as a byproduct of living well, has been transformed into a target state, a measurable output, a variable to be maximised under conditions of scarcity. The result is not flourishing but exhaustion, not clarity but chronic dissatisfaction disguised as ambition. To speak of leaving the economy of happiness is therefore not to reject well being, but to withdraw it from a system that can only metabolise it as fuel.
Optimisation presupposes a closed system with stable metrics, a clear objective function, and a horizon of convergence. None of these conditions apply to a human life. The self is not a system that converges, time is not a resource that accumulates value through efficient allocation, and happiness is not a state that can be reached by iterative improvement. Yet the language of optimisation continues to colonise inner life, presenting itself as neutral technique rather than as ideology. One is invited to optimise habits, emotions, relationships, sleep, attention, productivity, rest, even spirituality, all under the implicit promise that enough refinement will eventually yield a durable condition of satisfaction. This promise is structurally false, not because humans fail to optimise well enough, but because the object of optimisation does not exist.
The economy of happiness functions by manufacturing lack. It defines a moving baseline of adequacy, then sells the means to exceed it. This is the psychological correlate of late capitalism, in which desire must remain permanently unsatisfied in order to sustain circulation. The hedonic treadmill is not merely a feature of human neurobiology but a structural requirement of an extractive system that depends on continuous escalation. Satisfaction must be brief, fragile, and reversible. Otherwise consumption slows, attention stabilises, and the subject becomes ungovernable. Optimisation is therefore not a path to well being but a discipline of dependency, training individuals to experience their own lives as perpetually improvable projects rather than as sites of responsibility and meaning.
Orientation offers a fundamentally different grammar. Where optimisation asks how to increase, orientation asks where to stand. Where optimisation measures, orientation judges. Where optimisation promises future payoff, orientation insists on present alignment. Orientation is not concerned with maximising positive affect or minimising discomfort. It is concerned with living in a way that remains coherent under pressure, loss, ageing, and death. This is why orientation cannot be outsourced to techniques, apps, experts, or metrics. It is an existential stance, not a method.
To reorient life is to abandon the fantasy of control without collapsing into passivity. It is to accept that uncertainty is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited. This resonates with the ancient Greek distinction between pleasure and εὐδαιμονία / eudaimonia (human flourishing), where the latter names a form of life ordered by reason and excellence rather than by sensation. εὐδαιμονία is not optimised, it is enacted. It is visible not in peak experiences but in consistency of conduct, in the capacity to act well regardless of circumstances. This requires ἀρετή / aretē (virtue or excellence), understood not as moral decoration but as functional integrity of character.
The economy of happiness has no use for virtue, because virtue cannot be scaled, quantified, or sold. It produces no guaranteed returns and resists external validation. It demands time without promising speed, effort without promising reward, and discipline without spectacle. As such, it is incompatible with a culture that equates value with visibility and success with acceleration. Orientation, by contrast, is slow, often invisible, and structurally anti performative. It unfolds across decades, not quarters. It is confirmed not by metrics but by endurance.
Buddhist analysis reaches a parallel conclusion through a different epistemic route. The identification of दुःख / duḥkha (unsatisfactoriness) as a fundamental feature of conditioned existence is not a pessimistic claim but a diagnostic one. It names the impossibility of stabilising satisfaction within impermanent conditions. The attempt to do so generates craving, and craving perpetuates distress. Liberation, articulated as निर्वाण / nirvāṇa (unbinding), is not an optimised state of happiness but the cessation of the demand that life deliver what it cannot. This is not withdrawal from life but release from illusion. It is the end of the economy, not the end of care.
What replaces optimisation is not apathy but orientation toward what endures. This includes ethical coherence, depth of attention, responsibility toward others, and fidelity to truth even when inconvenient. It includes the capacity to suffer without resentment and to enjoy without clinging. These capacities do not maximise happiness, but they render life inhabitable. They allow one to remain present without bargaining, without deferral, without the constant internal negotiation that characterises the optimising self.
Orientation also clarifies the political dimension of well being. The injunction to optimise oneself functions as a displacement of structural critique. When suffering is reframed as a personal failure to manage stress, cultivate resilience, or maintain positivity, the conditions that generate suffering are naturalised and protected. Leaving the economy of happiness therefore entails refusing to interpret distress exclusively through psychological lenses. It involves recognising the ways in which precarity, surveillance, overwork, and commodification erode inner life, and refusing to treat adaptation as virtue. Orientation restores the distinction between what must be endured and what must be resisted.
This refusal is not noisy. It does not announce itself as rebellion or identity. It manifests as selective disengagement, as the withdrawal of belief. One stops treating happiness as a goal and begins treating integrity as a requirement. One stops asking whether an action feels good and asks whether it is aligned. One stops consuming promises of transformation and begins cultivating capacities for presence. Over time, this produces a form of well being that is quieter, less spectacular, and far less marketable. It also proves far more durable.
Leaving the economy of happiness does not mean abandoning joy. It means no longer demanding that joy justify existence. Joy becomes episodic, contingent, and therefore precious. Sorrow becomes intelligible rather than pathological. Life ceases to be a performance and becomes a practice of orientation under conditions of uncertainty. This is not a solution, because there is no problem to solve. It is a stance. And once adopted, it renders optimisation unnecessary, if not incoherent.
What remains is not happiness as a commodity or a metric, but a life that can withstand itself. That, and nothing else, is the measure that matters.
The passage from optimisation to orientation also marks a deeper ontological shift, one that cannot be captured by a mere change of habits or priorities. It is a movement away from an algorithmic mode of existence toward a lived, situated, and irreducibly narrative relation to time. The algorithmic life treats existence as a sequence of inputs and outputs, where flourishing is inferred from proxies, biomarkers, productivity indices, mood scores, or behavioural consistency. Even εὐδαιμονία / eudaimonia (human flourishing) is hollowed out and repackaged as a composite metric, a dashboard abstraction that mistakes correlation for meaning. In this configuration, life is no longer lived from within but monitored from without, as if the self were an external system requiring constant calibration. Orientation, by contrast, cannot be computed. It unfolds temporally, through commitment, memory, and consequence. It assumes that a life has a direction not because it is efficient, but because it is answerable to something that exceeds measurement.
This algorithmic reduction of life finds its philosophical articulation in what Martin Heidegger named Gestell / Gestell (enframing), the technological mode of revealing in which all beings appear primarily as Bestand, a standing reserve available for ordering, extraction, and optimisation. Under Gestell, the human being is no longer a participant in meaning but a resource among resources, valued for capacity, performance, and adaptability. Potential itself becomes inventory. The language of optimisation does not merely describe this condition, it enforces it, training individuals to relate to themselves as bundles of improvable traits. Orientation resists this enframing by refusing to treat life as stock. It reintroduces the question of τέλος / telos (end or purpose) not as a target state to be reached, but as a directional coherence that informs action here and now. Telos, in this sense, is not the finish line but the reason one walks at all.
The tyranny of the metric emerges precisely where telos disappears. When ends are no longer interrogated, means proliferate endlessly. The economy of happiness thrives in this vacuum, offering ever finer instruments of self measurement while carefully avoiding the question of why any of it should matter. This is not accidental. Metric fixation functions as a political technology, internalising neoliberal rationality by converting the subject into what Michel Foucault described as human capital. One becomes both enterprise and employee, responsible for generating positive affect, resilience, and motivation under conditions that systematically erode them. Failure to do so is moralised as poor self management. Distress is reclassified as inefficiency. Orientation interrupts this loop by reasserting judgment over measurement. It restores the legitimacy of asking whether a life is rightly ordered, rather than merely well optimised.
Here the concept of resonance, as articulated by Hartmut Rosa, becomes crucial. Resonance names a mode of relating to the world that is neither controlling nor passive, but responsive, dialogical, and unpredictable. It cannot be engineered or guaranteed. It arises when one stands in a receptive yet committed relation to people, practices, ideas, or places, allowing oneself to be affected without attempting to dominate. The economy of happiness is structurally hostile to resonance, because resonance resists scheduling and refuses quantification. It involves vulnerability, delay, and the possibility of silence. Orientation aligns with resonance because both accept that meaning is something encountered, not produced on demand. To live orientationally is to accept that the world answers in its own time, or sometimes not at all.
This acceptance brings one into contact with what Miguel de Unamuno called the Tragic Sense of Life, the recognition that finitude, loss, and contradiction are not defects to be engineered away but constitutive features of human existence. The pursuit of constant happiness is, at bottom, a denial of tragedy. It seeks to smooth over the roughness of being alive, to anaesthetise the awareness of death, contingency, and irreversibility. Leaving the economy of happiness therefore entails a rehabilitation of suffering as meaningful without romanticising it. Suffering becomes intelligible as a signal of depth, of care, of exposure to what matters. Orientation does not promise relief from pain. It promises a way of bearing it without falsification.
Phenomenology clarifies how this bearing takes shape. Human life is always already oriented. We are directed beings, turning toward some things and away from others, long before we formulate explicit goals. What matters phenomenologically is not which option is best, but which direction is right. This is where ἀρετή / aretē (excellence or virtue) reappears, not as moral ornamentation but as spatial integrity of the self. A virtuous life is one in which actions, commitments, and attention point coherently in the same direction. Optimisation fragments this coherence by encouraging local maximisation without regard for global alignment. Orientation restores it by privileging fidelity over efficiency.
The contemporary positivity mandate represents the affective enforcement arm of optimisation culture. It demands that individuals perform happiness regardless of context, turning mood into a moral obligation. Those who cannot comply are pathologised, marginalised, or quietly excluded. Unhappiness becomes evidence of maladjustment rather than a potentially lucid response to injustice, loss, or emptiness. Orientation rejects this mandate by revaluing attunement over positivity. Mood, in the phenomenological sense, is not a fleeting emotion but an atmospheric disclosure of how the world shows up at all. Melancholy, gravity, even despair can be modes of truthful attunement. They orient by revealing what is at stake. To suppress them in the name of happiness is to blind oneself.
Poetic dwelling offers a further articulation of this refusal. To dwell poetically is not to aestheticise life, but to inhabit it with attentiveness to what exceeds utility. It is to allow space for ambiguity, silence, and the non instrumental. The economy of happiness impoverishes experience precisely by stripping it of mystery, reducing the world to a set of functions serving subjective well being. Orientation, by contrast, restores disinterestedness as a virtue. Some of the most enduring experiences of meaning arise when nothing is being optimised, when attention is given without expectation of return. Beauty, love, insight, and grief do not appear on demand. They appear when one has learned to remain.
This remaining often entails liminality, the unsettling state of being between orientations, no longer able to inhabit the old metrics but not yet fully grounded in the new. Optimisation culture treats liminality as failure, a gap to be closed as quickly as possible. Orientation recognises it as necessary. To be lost, in this sense, is not to be directionless but to be undergoing reorientation. It is a suspension of false movement, a refusal to convert uncertainty into premature action. Only within such suspension can a direction emerge that is not dictated by economic output or social expectation.
Thus the movement from optimisation to orientation is not a self help pivot but a civilisational correction. It withdraws consent from a system that confuses measurement with meaning and acceleration with life. It affirms that what endures is not what performs best, but what remains answerable to truth, to others, and to time. Orientation does not guarantee happiness. It renders happiness irrelevant. What it offers instead is something rarer and more demanding, a life that knows where it stands, even when standing is difficult.
Some practices
The practices that follow are obviously not techniques for improvement, nor instruments for self soothing.
They are disciplines of orientation, designed to weaken the reflex to optimise and to strengthen the capacity to stand without promise, metric, or compensatory narrative.
One practice consists in a systematic withdrawal from quantification. For a defined period, all voluntary self tracking is suspended. No steps, no hours, no streaks, no scores, no proxies of progress. What replaces measurement is qualitative noticing. One attends to when attention thins, when it deepens, when it fragments, when it steadies. No data are recorded. Memory is allowed to remain imperfect. The point is not insight but de habituation. This practice exposes how deeply the need for numbers has colonised interior life, and how much anxiety is generated not by experience itself but by its constant evaluation.
Another practice involves deliberate temporal resistance. One chooses a regular activity that cannot be accelerated without being destroyed, reading a difficult philosophical text in the original language, maintaining a contemplative physical discipline, copying by hand a dense passage of prose or verse. The activity is undertaken without timeboxing, targets, or optimisation heuristics. Interruptions are neither resisted nor welcomed, they are simply noted. Over time, this practice retrains patience as a mode of fidelity rather than endurance. It restores duration as a dimension of meaning, not an obstacle to efficiency.
A further practice centres on ethical alignment under mild cost. One identifies a recurring situation in which the optimising response would be socially rewarded but ethically hollow, and instead consistently chooses the less efficient but more truthful action. This might involve refusing visibility, declining performative agreement, or accepting inconvenience in order to preserve coherence. The cost must be real but not dramatic. The purpose is to feel, somatically and relationally, the difference between success and integrity. Orientation strengthens only where it is tested.
Another discipline concerns affective honesty. For a sustained interval, one refuses the positivity mandate entirely. No attempt is made to reframe, uplift, or instrumentalise mood. If heaviness, irritation, boredom, or grief are present, they are allowed to shape the tempo and texture of the day without commentary. This is not indulgence but attunement. Over time, one learns which moods are signals and which are noise, which call for response and which for patience. This practice dismantles the reflex to treat discomfort as malfunction.
There is also a practice of resonance without capture. One places oneself regularly in contact with something that cannot be mastered or extracted, a landscape, a demanding work of art, a non instrumental relationship, a living tradition that exceeds personal identity. Engagement is sustained, but ownership is refused. No content is produced from it. No lesson is distilled. The relation is allowed to remain asymmetrical. This practice reconditions the capacity to be affected without converting the experience into capital.
Another practice is narrative abstinence. For defined periods, one does not explain one’s life to oneself or others. No stories of growth, decline, transition, or becoming are rehearsed. Events occur without being placed on a trajectory. Decisions are made without justification beyond necessity and alignment. This practice exposes how narrative often functions as a compensatory structure, smoothing incoherence rather than resolving it. Orientation begins to operate directly, without the mediation of story.
Finally, there is a practice of mortality clarification. This is not visualisation or consolation, but factual confrontation. One regularly considers which current commitments would still be intelligible if time were drastically shortened. Not admirable, not meaningful, intelligible. What would still make sense to continue, even without completion, recognition, or resolution. What would immediately lose legitimacy. This practice does not produce urgency. It produces discrimination. Over time, trivial motion falls away without effort.
These practices do not converge toward happiness. They converge toward legibility. They make a life readable from within, without recourse to external validation or promised arrival. Orientation does not emerge as an achievement, but as what remains once the economy of happiness has been deprived of its mechanisms.