The Modern Myths of Professional & Wellness Culture

They say: “You can’t take it with you.”

Well, that may be true to an extent, but you also can’t make more time.

Professional and wellness culture are obsessed with efficiency and optimization. So much so, one could be left with the impression that these two things are virtues in and of themselves. But we have to remember one important thing, and that’s the scope of efficiency and optimization: you can’t make more time than what you are allotted.

Modern life encourages us to see life itself as a problem begging to be solved. An equation longing to be balanced. From these pseudo-virtues come tantric Instagram’isms: eat clean, train hard, sleep eight hours! The output? Decades of extra runway.

No one is saying discipline doesn’t matter. But discipline is not the goal itself. It’s a means—an albeit important one—to a more holistic end. It is not a formula to parse all of life.

Having been socialized to think this way, perhaps this is why so many of us feel like we’ve been set up, feeling a strange kind of guilt when things don’t go that way.

In a recent reflection on Sūrah al-An‘ām, the Sixth Chapter of the Qur’ān, one verse stood out.

Allāh, and Allāh alone, appoints a person’s lifespan by decree (qaḍā).

The takeaway: life is not a mechanism by which one endeavors to find the magic lever to pull, extending one’s life and granting one’s every wish.

Two people can follow opposite rulebooks — one reckless, one meticulous — and the outcomes can still surprise you either way.

This isn’t an argument against discipline. We should eat well, as the Qur’ān extols us to do. The same goes for training and sleep.

Do the things that are within your control, because they’re worth doing on their own terms. But hold the outcome loosely—or more emphatically, hold our expectations of outcomes loosely. That variable is not within our grasp or capability to control as we so desire.

I see and experience this the most when I worked in corporate settings and academic institutions. The result:

I saw a lot of people burning themselves out chasing (un)certainty over things — timelines, outcomes, other people’s decisions — that were never fully theirs to control in the first place.

What did I learn? Responsibility and discipline over what’s been bestowed to me.

And trust over what isn’t.