The Fellowship of the Unoptimised

Forget your perfect offering

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life... from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

There is a smudge in the corner of my bullet journal spread for this week. Henry pushed his nose against it while I was mind mapping ideas yesterday and this morning I almost reached for a sticker to cover it up.

I’m glad I didn’t.

Very few things in life are perfect… letting go of the idea of it, the thing we were taught (imperfectly) which dominates so much of what makes modern life performative and not good for us, feels like an important gift to give ourselves.

Leonard Cohen released a song that contains one of my favourite ever poetic lessons in 1992.

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

Forget your perfect offering, I still need to remind myself of this frequently even three decades later.

The cult of smoothness

Being online these days feels like peer pressure from a finishing school I never asked to join. Perfect your morning routine. Polish your photos. Polish your face for the Zoom call. Polish your hobbies until they become a side hustle. Polish your sentences and your opinions. Polish until you squeak.

Then AI gets layered on top, a deluxe subscription tier. Why polish yourself when a perfectly compliant machine can do it for you? The tools are useful of course, but too often used on autopilot. In fact, the reflex is so automatic that I am catching myself in a ridiculous lie right now.

As I finish an essay draft I typically paste it into Claude or Gemini and ask ‘How do I make my latest essay the very best it can be?’... am I really asking a machine to sand down the edges of an essay about leaving the edges alone? The reflex is that fast, the tool, to its absolute credit, laughed at me and told me to put the sandpaper down.

We have been at this for years, polishing ourselves into a version we believe the room will tolerate. AI makes the reflex faster and universal, and in doing so shows us the bill we have been paying for a very long time.

The bill is a strange flatness on a Sunday evening. The slow erosion of trust between people who are starting to sound the same, because they all ask the same trained assistant the same questions. Someone who can no longer hear themselves think over the noise of the version they have to perform. The cost is loneliness even, less real human to human connection.

A polished surface has nothing for memory or trust to grip on to, no substance. I wrote about this through the lens of code switching. The way we can trim a little of ourselves at every professional door, swap an opinion for a question, soften an edge, sand a corner, until we arrive in the meeting already filed down. The “professional” voice is not a neutral standard. It is one particular way of being that costs some of us more than others to perform.

AI is the next accelerant of that filing down. The tools polish what we hand them. Lots of us have been handing them an already smaller version of ourselves and asking them to make it smaller still. The mask wearing a mask.

The parts of us we think we have to polish away matter. Holding relationships together, letting other people in, keeping us honest with ourselves.

The crack is architecture and sacred mess

Cohen knew and sang it as obvious, there is a crack in everything. Not a flaw to remove or defect to engineer out. Architecture and plain truth, engineers know that buildings have gaps because without them the walls would shear. Take them out and you do not get a stronger building, you get a brittle one.

Human work is the same. The pause in a voice note where the speaker forgot what she meant to say is the bit you trust. The typo in a friend’s text from the car park is not a failure of communication, it’s evidence of humanity. The wobble in your voice when you said the brave thing is not a defect of delivery, it made the message land.

Cracks are how other people get in. Polish keeps everyone out, including the real version of ourselves.

Take signs of humanity out of a piece of work and it goes cold. Take them all out and the work has nothing for anyone else to lean in to, what is even the point of it? Multiply that across millions of polished offerings and our worlds get very lonely very fast.

Forget your perfect offering. I want the wobbles and your truth, what resisted the polishing is what was real to begin with.

The crossed out sentence. The voice note that wandered. The bullet journal page with the wrong day struck through and FFS doodled next to it in rainbow coloured fineliners. The friend who told you an honest thing awkwardly. The walk that didn’t optimise step count but put your soul back in your body.

These are evidence. Someone was here. They were thinking and cared enough to let it show.

If you wanted to find the most human parts of a life, you would not look at the highlight reel. You would look at the smudges.

I have been keeping bullet journals since 2017 and the pages I return to most aren’t the pretty ones. They are the ones where I clearly wasn’t coping and wrote stuff down anyway. When I drew the messiest of mind maps to work through understanding. Those pages are where the life is. The neat pages are records, the messy ones are connection.

The fellowship

More and more people are refusing to polish out what makes them uniquely them.

The Fellowship of the Unoptimised has few rules and an extremely lax membership policy.

Anyone who has ever wept at a film while eating crisps qualifies. Anyone who writes a shopping list on the back of an envelope, in. Anyone who talks to their dog like a person, founding member. Anyone who has to immediately reread a paragraph in a book because the words are too beautiful to move on from, lifetime pass. Anyone who has bought a notebook before they had a use for it, you understood the assignment. Anyone who has dragged themselves to a community thing they did not feel like going to and come home glad they did, operating at a master level. Sending voice notes with seagulls screaming over the top of them is icing on the cake *grin*

We are fluent with the machines. We use them brilliantly and save the hours. We are not Luddites, nor nostalgic, nor against AI. We work alongside it every day and most of us would not give the time savings back for anything.

The fellowship is held together by laughter and dogs and small honest things.

The unifying principle is gentle. There are parts of being human that none of us should be sanding down. Slow thinking, honest conversation, handwritten notes, unpolished grief, inefficient joy, work that counts, communities that hold… purpose that is discovered rather than generated.

We use AI to polish things nobody needs our fingerprints on.

Forget your perfect offering

Let AI do your drudge. Let it write the calendar invite and format the report. Let it summarise a meeting and draft the boring email follow up that translates the technical details. Save the hours. Stack them up and spend them on the inefficient, irreducible, messy things that make a life feel like a life.

Do not let it sand you down.

Do not ask it to make your words more professional if what you actually mean by professional is make me sound more like the typical average Western world leadership team. Do not let it polish the you out of your own writing, your own voice, your own work, your own life.

Send the email that sounds like you. Let the sentence be longer than standard writing rules advocate for because you are showing that you are working something out as you write it. Let your words catch on the voice note. Let your community network thing be a bit awkward. Let your work have your fingerprints on it.

I am not arguing for sloppy, I am arguing for true.

There is a difference between something that is rough because nobody cared and a piece of work that has rougher patches because someone cared *SO MUCH* they needed to let those edges show. Anyone reading or listening or watching can feel the difference instantly. We are often starved for the second kind. Polished versions make us feel dissatisfied and less connected to the humanity of it all, its lonely.

Forget your perfect offering, Cohen ended that verse so bloody beautifully, That’s how the light gets in. As a fact… as architecture… as permission even.

Walk towards the cracked thing. The truer thing. The thing that has your fingerprints on it. That is where the people are. Join the fellowships, where the meaning lives and where the wellbeing is too.

Beautiful souls, what parts of your life will you leave beautifully unoptimised?

Drop a thought in the comments, hearing from you genuinely makes my day.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ Bullet journal spread: Things I Refuse to Optimise

Take a fresh page, draw three columns and give each a heading.

Because it brings me joy

The inefficient things you do because the inefficiency is part of the pleasure. The slow coffee. The handwritten letter. The long walk. The board game that takes hours. The cooking from scratch on a Sunday.

Because it helps me feel human

The things that put your soul back in your body. The crying at the film. The dancing in the kitchen. The pen on the page. The early morning light. The dog at your feet.

Because it keeps me connected

The unscalable things you do for the people in your real life. The phone call rather than the text. The card in the post. The “just popping round” visit. The community thing you almost didn’t go to.

When you have finished, reflect on the three lists. These are part of your architecture, protect them fiercely.

PPS 🤖 Make yourself a Fellowship membership badge

Drop the following into your favourite image capable AI tool, filling in the bits in brackets to make it yours.

“I am joining the Fellowship of the Unoptimised. Here is what I want on my membership badge.

Name as I want it shown: [your name]

Three things I refuse to polish: [one, two, three]

Colours I love: [two or three colours]

Image style I would like: [watercolour, vintage stamp, embroidered patch, or your own choice]

Little personal touches to include: [a pet, a favourite object, a place you love, or anything else that feels like you]

Please make me a simple Fellowship membership badge using all of this. Name me as a founding member, list my three refusals as credentials, and add ‘forget your perfect offering’ as the motto. Keep it warm and a little tongue in cheek. The fellowship has a sense of humour about itself.”

Save it somewhere a future polisher in you might need the reminder. The fridge perhaps. Share it if you fancy, the fellowship grows one badge at a time.

PPPS 🎵 This week’s soundtrack “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

He recorded it in 1992 and had been working on the words for years before that. The line everyone remembers is the one about the crack and the light but I’ve been sitting with the line just before it this week, forget your perfect offering. Cohen knew about the human urge to bring our best polished selves to whatever altar we have set up.

PPPPS 💃 An honourable mention “Mr Brightside” by The Killers

There is a particular flavour of the fellowship that lives on the dance floor at a wedding, when an unlikely group of half strangers belts the wrong notes at each other and somehow ends up feeling the most alive they’ve felt in ages. The chorus is too high and we only know half the words, nobody cares *grin*