FLOPTIMIZE

I think my Optimizer has floptimized.

Not my algorithm. My Optimizer.

The algorithm notices what I click. The Optimizer has a five-year plan for my life. Every morning it serves me the same carefully curated version of Josh.

First come the gay therapists. They all seem to have veneers. They explain why I’m still single in ninety seconds while somehow conveying that they’ve never been ghosted, breadcrumbed, or been awkward enough to reply “You too” when the waiter said, “Enjoy your meal.”

Then the comedians. Mostly queer, people of color, disabled, Jewish, or all four at once. They’re funny enough that I’ll forgive them for being a little too pleased with themselves. They’re at their best when they make the world more complicated. At their worst, they’re just another branch of the certainty industry. They still get me to laugh out loud, but my Optimizer has become so good at predicting exactly what will make me laugh that even my laughter is starting to feel canned.

Then Portugal arrives. My retirement is apparently waiting in a stone cottage with blue shutters, a pottery studio, and impossibly friendly white neighbors waving as they glide by on vintage bicycles.

Or Oaxaca, when the Optimizer is feeling budget-conscious. I assume the logic is that I’m Jewish and Oaxaca has mezcal, mole, papel picado, near-daily parades, and a five-hundred-year-old rumor about conversos. Somewhere, a line of binary code decided that was my demographic.

Then again, I did spend a month there last summer for La Guelaguetza.

Damn it! Maybe that code does have my number.

The Optimizer thinks I should retire. This is thoughtful, considering half the world already assumes I have. Meanwhile, I’m still in a pulpit, officiating complex weddings, writing sermons, trying to grow a Substack, building a consulting practice, figuring out how to get people to read what I write, and generally hustling my ass off.

Then Israel and Palestine arrive, explained by Israelis, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, historians, journalists, military experts, activists, trauma specialists, one woman with a whiteboard, another guy crying in his car, and several people who have clearly never been anywhere near the region but have somehow solved it.

Then comes the Trump satire, the most scathing stream of the bunch. Watching it is like getting scalded by hot coffee and almost enjoying it because, at least for a moment, I’m feeling something.

I meditate, work out, reframe, breathe deeply, and do the half-dozen exercises my gaggle of gay therapists recommends so I can regulate my nervous system and become my calmest, wisest self. Still, I don’t want to lose the comedians who reassure me that I’m not imagining what I’m seeing.

I don’t want to live in outrage. I’m not especially afraid of losing it. What frightens me more is that, while the Optimizer keeps that part of me well fed, I may be losing my ability to experience wonder.

And finally, the lifters.

Every morning another guy appears in what looks suspiciously like an unfinished basement to tell me everything I know about shoulders is wrong. Every time I become convinced I’ve finally found the right exercise, someone else explains why it will destroy my joints and recommends the one I was doing last week. Apparently, if I perform forty-seven movements five hundred times every morning, I’ll have a six-pack, a pain-free back, and the flexibility of a young Baryshnikov.

I save them. I have a folder. What I no longer have is a workout I recognize. Mine floptimized sometime back in the spring, when I outsourced my judgment to a parade of men with exceptional delts.

Just this week, a woman finally broke into my lifting feed. I followed her immediately, not because I thought she knew more, but because I was relieved to meet someone wearing a shirt.

Then there are the ads. The ads don’t tell me who I am. They tell me what’s wrong with me.

Apparently my testosterone is low, my metabolism has wandered off, my hairline has begun a strategic retreat, and several organs I hadn’t previously worried about are silently failing. Worst of all, my stubborn belly fat has staged a sit-in.

I had six-pack abs once, during a brief bodybuilding phase. They stayed just long enough to establish trust and then ghosted me. Where were the gay therapists when I needed them? Probably getting their veneers.

The strange thing is that I don’t agree with much of what my Optimizer keeps feeding me. Everyone is more certain than I am. I’m beginning to think certainty is its love language. (And I want wonder to still be mine.)

A year ago, a woman kept showing up in my feed whose entire account was devoted to elaborate revenge. Not crimes exactly. Just beautifully petty acts requiring office supplies, patience, and a troubling amount of imagination: glitter bombs, replacing every family photograph with Nicolas Cage, signing an ex up for obscure catalogs until his mailbox suggested he had become deeply invested in alpaca husbandry.

I never acted on any of them. I just enjoyed knowing they existed. I still do.

She wasn’t trying to optimize me. She reminded me there were still versions of myself I hadn’t met, including some who were not especially evolved. I miss her.

Lately, I’ve become less interested in understanding myself than in understanding my Optimizer. Who is paying it? How are the Israelis and Palestinians both finding room in their budgets for this many reels? Portugal’s Department of Targeted American Tourism, sure. Big Testosterone obviously has money to burn. But the Gay Mafia? I thought our resources were already stretched pretty thin. Trump is a no-brainer. He was one of the original Optimizers.

I have no evidence for any of these theories, which has never been the primary obstacle to a good conspiracy.

The funny thing is, I also went to Portugal last year. I liked it. I didn’t fall in love, and I didn’t come home wondering how quickly I could liquidate my assets and begin making artisanal olive oil.

Instagram somehow forgets to show the dumpster just outside the frame of the gorgeous blue-tiled building, along with the construction noise and the couple having a perfectly ordinary argument about where they parked the car.

That’s when I realized I had spent months trying to understand my Optimizer instead of paying attention to my own life. Somewhere along the way, my spiritual practice became trying to outsmart Instagram. Its greatest mistake isn’t that it misunderstands me. It’s that it thinks one or two accurate observations are the whole story.

I don’t think I need a better Optimizer. I think I need a life that’s harder to optimize. Real life has never been optimized.

Thank God. Even for the dumpsters.

But wait there’s more… A special welcome to those of you who are new here. I’m glad you found your way to this gloriously unoptimized little project.

I’d love to know what brought you here, what you enjoy, what stays with you, and what you’d like more of. I write because I care about connection, and your responses help me understand where the writing is actually landing.

I recently wrote about how I use AI, and I hope one thing is unmistakable: these ideas, this voice, and the strange turns they take are mine. Each piece represents hours of reading, writing, arguing with myself, cutting, rewriting, and occasionally arguing with my very patient digital editor. AI has become one tool in that process, much as human editors have been in the past. But the deeper apprenticeship began long ago, with Stephen King, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard and, before all of them, Pat Conroy, my high school writing teacher, who first taught me that voice mattered.

I’m still reading, still learning, still experimenting with how writing is changing and how people connect with one another. Some things I embrace. Some I resist with impressive stubbornness. But the standard remains the same: the work has to sound like me, feel true, and create a real connection with you.

To my longtime subscribers, thank you. Your encouragement, thoughtful comments, and willingness to follow me down wonderfully strange rabbit holes have helped this quirky little project become one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever created.

If something you read here makes you laugh, think, argue, or forward it to a friend with the subject line, “This made me think of you,” I’d be grateful if you’d help spread the word. That’s still the best Optimizer I’ve found.