Why Being a Bit of a Mess Might Actually Be Fine

They wake at 5am and journal. They meal prep on Sundays. They have morning routines and evening routines and skincare routines. They've optimised their sleep, their productivity, their relationships.

You're eating cereal standing up over the sink, wearing the same shirt as yesterday, answering emails at midnight.

Maybe that's fine.

The Optimisation Lie

Social media sells curated highlights. Comparing your reality to someone's highlight reel is rigged. Behind every perfect morning routine is a person who also sometimes can't be bothered.

The people posting about their optimised lives are posting about their best days. They're not posting about the days they skipped the gym, had toast for dinner, or scrolled their phone for two hours instead of doing anything meaningful.

Functional Mess vs. Dysfunction

There's a difference between "my life is chaotic and I'm managing" and "my life is falling apart and I'm drowning." Research on adaptive functioning shows if you're paying your bills, maintaining relationships, and getting by—even imperfectly—you're doing okay.

Not everything needs to be optimised. Not every area of life needs improvement. Sometimes good enough is genuinely good enough.

The Case for Mess

It's authentic. Living a human life is inherently messy. Pretending otherwise is exhausting.

It's sustainable. Optimisation requires constant effort. Research on perfectionism shows accepting some chaos preserves energy for things that actually matter.

It's flexible. Rigid routines break under pressure. A life with some slack can absorb the unexpected.

It's honest. You're not performing a version of yourself. You're just living.

What Actually Matters

Are you okay? Not perfect—okay. Are the important relationships tended? Are you surviving, and sometimes even enjoying things?

Then maybe the mess is fine. Maybe productivity culture has convinced you that your normal life is a problem when it's just... a life.

Cereal for dinner is a valid choice. The person judging you for it is probably also tired.

References

1. Bowie, C. R., et al. (2008). Predicting schizophrenia patients' real-world behavior with specific neuropsychological and functional capacity measures. Biological Psychiatry, 63(5), 505-511. View study
2. Curran, T., & Hill, A. P. (2017). Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 410-429. View study