Beyond Self-Optimization

Sobornost And The Case For Integration

Last week I ended with a question that has stayed with me:

Is it self-optimization we’re after, or self-image optimization?

When our attention becomes too narrowly focused on the self, we risk losing the relationships and shared meaning that make improvement worthwhile in the first place. Dostoyevsky’s character Raskolnikov offers a useful lens here. His name comes from the word raskol, “to split,” and captures how an obsession with the self can produce both an internal fracture and a wider schism between a person, their community, and their culture.

If that is the condition, then it’s worth asking what an alternative orientation might look like.

One such idea is sobornost. It resists clean translation but points toward wholeness; within ourselves, within our communities, and in relation to something larger than the individual. This isn’t an ideological argument, but it is an idea worth exploring.

Sobornost

Self-optimization can be corrupted to the point of rationalized vanity. Sobornost represents an alternative orientation—one that is desperately needed in health and performance arenas.

As we collect more performance data, tools, and techniques, it’s worth pausing to ask what they are actually orienting us toward. Do they help us become more integrated, not just in service of the image we hold of ourselves, but in our roles as parents, partners, neighbors, coaches, and teachers? And do they bring us into closer alignment with a meaningful ethical standard, or simply chase outcomes that are ultimately hollow?

If we apply this to the arena of sport and physical culture, sobornost is an alignment with an ethic, a mission, and a tribe. For sport, this means that coaches incentivize performance outputs as well as communal success and ethical ideas like fair play and sportsmanship. This may seem obvious on its face, but I ask all of us to be honest with ourselves about where we place our attention.

For me personally, this has been the greatest lesson I’ve learned from working with special operations groups. People think it’s that each individual man is just a lone badass. But when you’re around them long enough, you realize it’s their shared bond to mission, service, and team that gives them the strength we all so admire. In my experience, it’s the thing they respect the most in others too. When the time comes, who shows up for the team and does the right thing?

Mir

I want my meaning to be clear here. I don’t see the desire to strive for improvement as a wholly negative thing. When we appropriately integrate ourselves with our families, communities, and cultures, improving ourselves doesn’t just remain in the shallow end of the pool. It becomes something deeper.

We develop ourselves not just to idolize our individual potential, but to become more aligned within-to be better attuned to our own nature-and without, to be attuned to the physical and social environment of which we are a part.

This integration is, in my view, better than optimization.

It is peace.

Thanks for reading,

Rob