Let me start with kale. Nobody actually likes kale. This is not a controversial statement. Kale is bitter, fibrous, and unsexy. And yet there it is, on menus, in smoothies, cunningly tucked into every grain bowl. People eat kale not because it brings them joy, but because someone told them it was good for them. And in the interest of health, people consume it with gusto. There is a scene in the movie This is 40 where Leslie Mann, who looks to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is explaining to her family over a lunch she has just prepared, that they’re now going to be eating healthy, and that kale will be a regular staple of their meals. She has thrown out all junk food in the pantry and has forbidden her husband, Paul Rudd to eat cupcakes. He and the two children are looking at her like she is a monster, because she is. Kale has turned her into a domestic tyrant.
Leslie Mann’s character is the embodiment of the whole argument: so consumed by the project of optimizing her family’s health that she’s forcing kale on everyone and making them miserable. The kale isn’t making anyone healthier, it’s making lunch a joyless ordeal. We have traded the pleasure of eating for the optimization of eating. We have turned the table into a laboratory of macronutrients. This is not a small thing. It is, in fact, symptomatic of a civilizational disease that the philosopher Julian Baggini has called the Instrumentalization of Everything—the creeping compulsion to do nothing purely for its own sake. Baggini notes that you can play a very long game of suggesting things people value in their own right, searching for even one that hasn’t been retrofitted with a health, wealth, or wellbeing justification, and your search will be in vain. Churchgoing is recommended not for communion with the Divine, but because it reduces depression. Forest bathing because it lowers cortisol. Sex because it protects the prostate. Now that’s just sad.
The writer Walter Kerr saw this coming as far back as 1962. In The Decline of Pleasure, he argued that modern Western man had lost the capacity to enjoy anything he could not simultaneously justify as productive. A drama critic for the New York Times, he found himself not being able to enjoy a show because he was taking notes for his column. We had become, Kerr wrote, so thoroughly committed to the work ethic that we no longer knew how to stop working, even at play. Sixty years later, we have not solved this problem. We have weaponized it and posted it to Instagram.
The world of measurement is built on quantification and proof. The world of possibility is open-ended and unmeasurable. Joy lives entirely in the world of possibility. The moment you try to measure it, track it, optimize it, you’ve collapsed it by dragging it into the world of measurement. That’s the preemptive answer to the optimization bros: You’re asking the wrong question. You’re trying to measure something that exists in a domain where measurement itself is the problem.
Efficiency and joy aren’t actually at odds, they’re asking different questions entirely. Efficiency asks, how do I maximize output? Joy asks, am I present? Those are incommensurable. You can’t shut down the efficiency argument by proving joy is more efficient, because that just pulls joy back into the instrumental frame. Instead, you have to ask: efficient at what? Efficient toward what end? If the end is a life you’ve actually lived rather than merely optimized, then presence—which feels inefficient to the optimization mindset—is the only thing that matters. The cold plunge bro at 5:00 AM is being efficient at becoming someone who endures cold plunges (and wants us to know about it). He’s being remarkably inefficient at joy.
I live in Chiang Mai, which is ground zero for a particular strain of this affliction. The city teems with digital nomads, gym bros, biohackers, and what I can only describe as Wellness Warriors of every denomination. These are the kind of people who have hacked their sleep, optimized their morning routines, and relocated their laptops to more photogenic latitudes. But my favorite is the Spiritual Influencer, whose qualifications consist of a collection of bowls, crystals, beads and essential oils. She drags a friend to a waterfall so she can be photographed in lotus pose, mudra-perfect, eyes serenely closed, broadcasting a performative enlightenment she has clearly curated for her followers. The joke, of course, is that the moment you are performing presence, joy has already left the building.
The digital nomad is a related species. The whole promise of the movement is freedom; work from anywhere, live by your own terms. But the laptop is still running the show. The inbox still owns the morning. Geography has changed, the cage is the same. What looks like liberation is just servitude with a better view.
These are not edge cases, they’re the logical terminus of a culture that has lost the ability to do anything for its own sake. Baggini traces one particularly chilling image from Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, in which Rubin describes hugging her husband—for exactly six seconds, she notes—which her research had indicated was the minimum time required to promote the flow of oxytocin and serotonin. A woman holding her husband not out of love, but in order to release hormones. The hug as pharmaceutical delivery system. This is what happens when instrumentalism reaches all the way down into the most intimate corners of human life: it hollows them out, leaving only the performance of a feeling that has long since been evacuated.
Joy cannot survive this.
Which brings me to what I actually want to talk about (besides the insideous creep of kale). In the ongoing conversation about how to live longer, two concepts have dominated. The first is lifespan; simply, how many years you accumulate. The second, more recent, is healthspan; how many of those years are spent in genuine physical vitality rather than managed decline. Healthspan is a genuine improvement on lifespan. It is at least asking something about quality. But it does not go nearly far enough.
I want to propose a third measure: joyspan. Not how long you live, and not even how healthily you live, but how joyfully you live. How much of your remaining time is spent in genuine, unmediated, full-bodied enjoyment of being alive. The distinction matters enormously, and it turns on how we define joy. Joy is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure is transactional. It arrives, burns briefly, and leaves you reaching for the next hit. It’s the dopamine loop that the attention economy was designed to exploit. Joy is something categorically different: deeper, more subtle and durable. It’s not an event, but a quality of attention. It does not require a waterfall, or a photogenic bowl of matcha, or six seconds of scientifically optimized embrace.
In the closing chapter of my recent book The Forgetting Game, I found joy in the simple act of shaving; the weight of the steel razor, the smell of jasmine soap, the familiar face that looks back from a half-cleared mirror. Joy lives in moments of my daughter leaning against me on the sofa, in the sound of sprinklers before the city wakes, in the long exhale of an occasional cigarette on a quiet evening. The sacred, I wrote, dwells in ordinariness.
Here is the philosophical point on which everything else rests. Aristotle observed—and this is so obvious it borders on platitude, which is exactly why we keep forgetting it—that some things have intrinsic value, and some things have only extrinsic value. Intrinsic value is something good in and of itself, as an end. Extrinsic value means the thing is only good as a means to something else. Money has extrinsic value. Kale has extrinsic value, apparently. Joy has intrinsic value. It exists only for its own sake, and the instant it becomes a means to something else—a post, a signal, a metric, a mood-boosting chemical reaction—it ceases to be joy at all.
This is why the optimization culture is not merely joyless but is structurally incapable of producing joy. Joy cannot be optimized because optimization is by definition instrumental; it is always in service of something beyond itself. You cannot schedule joy into your morning routine. You cannot supplement your way toward it. You cannot perform it for an audience, however convincingly. Alan Watts spent a career making essentially this argument: that life is not a problem to be solved, that you are not a project under perpetual construction, that the point of music is not to be found in the final chord. The dance is the point. The song is the point. This, right now, is the point.
Tim Ferriss, who built an empire on the gospel of optimization, has recently and rather publicly begun to question whether the whole enterprise has consumed itself. When the high priest of life-hacking starts wondering if he’s lost the plot, it seems fair to ask whether the plot was ever quite what it promised.
Joyspan is not a wellness metric. It does not require a wearable device or a clinical trial. It requires only a willingness to ask, honestly, what you are actually here for, and whether the life you are constructing in the name of health, productivity, and personal growth is one you are, in any meaningful sense, enjoying. Not how many years are left in your life, but how much life is left in your years.
Eat the kale if you must. It will not make you happy. Nothing designed to extend your life at the expense of your enjoyment of it will make you happy. What might make you happy—what might make the years that remain feel genuinely, irreducibly worth living—is the willingness to stop treating your experience as raw material for some future payoff, and to inhabit it instead. Fully, without documentation or justification.
In the close of The Forgetting Game I wrote:
There is a voice that is usually inaudible, drowned out by the television, the buzz of fluorescent lighting, the quiet roar of tires on the freeway. Sometimes it is a far away whisper. At other times it is present and urgent. It says: find your way here.
Here is not a destination. It’s not a health outcome or a follower count or a five-year plan. Here is this moment, the one you are in right now, before you reached for your phone to document it. Here is where joy lives. And the only way to extend your joyspan is to spend more time in it.