This week on Don't Praise the Machine, we're asking the question nobody in the productivity space wants to answer: is optimization culture actually making your life worse?

When a clip of Steven Bartlett went viral, explaining how three glasses of wine with friends "ruined him for three days," the internet didn't push back on the sobriety. They pushed back on the measurement. The Whoop band. The sleep scores. The idea that a normal Thursday night had become a biometric failure.

We dig into whether treating your life as a quantifiable system to be hacked and continuously improved is quietly destroying the things that make life worth living. Friendship, spontaneity, and the occasional loaded fry.

If you've ever felt guilty for enjoying yourself, this one's for you.

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