The Lock-In Lie: How optimization culture was built to keep you chasing

Self-WorthWhite Supremacy CultureCapitalismPlanning + Organization

Sep 18

The Lock-In Lie: How optimization culture was built to keep you chasing — and what quiet rebellion looks like instead

If you’ve doom-scrolled on TikTok or Instagram lately, you might’ve seen “The Great Lock-In” pop up on your For You Page. Perhaps you’ve been inspired by it, or are choosing to participate in it. Maybe you’ve no clue what I'm talking about. If you don’t, here’s a quick summary:

The Great Lock-In is a viral TikTok movement that begun to make waves in late 2025. The point? Commit to hyper-focusing on your personal, career, financial, and any other goals you have from September 1st to December 31st so you can close the year out strong and “get ahead of everyone else waiting for the new year to crush their goals.”

By its definition, it sounds wonderful. Who wouldn’t want to hunker down and re-commit to the goals they set in the New Year and finish the year out strong? Most of us set goals because we desire growth and improvement in our lives, and that’s not inherently a bad thing. And, goals require focus. Commitment. If you want to move your health or your career in a certain direction, you have to make a dedicated commitment to doing the work that make that happen. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Having a few goals is one thing. Always trying to re-invent your life, or your identity, is another. That is the primary language around these “lock-in” or other productivity challenges. We are being told that our current selves—our current identities—are perpetually in need of re-invention, and if we aren’t spending every moment of our lives committed to fixing ourselves, we are not only behind, but essentially useless. And for that, we should feel ashamed.

Additionally, we are conditioned to see everyone else around us as a threat to our progress or success. Instead of looking at our goals as something to commit to for ourselves, the rhetoric we are fed is to “get ahead of everyone else,” as if we are all in a grand race to success and there’s only room for one person to snag it.

Society has normalized being in constant pursuit of optimization, spending your entire life fixated on the human parts of ourselves that we’ve been told are flaws.

As a result, we are always “locking in” to some degree. It’s not just September to December. There’s the New Years lock-ins, the “reset for spring” challenges, and the “get ready for summer“ sprints. Everything is a race, a chase, and a performance. We’re told to make every decision as the version of ourselves that will meet us on the “other side” of whatever lock-in or sprint we are participating in.

The catch is, our “future selves” are always waiting, but we never actually catch up to them. They seem to always be just out of arms reach as trends and standards change the moment we feel we find our footing or have finally “reinvented ourselves.”

We are being told that our current selves—our current identities—are perpetually in need of re-invention, and if we aren’t spending every moment of our lives committed to fixing ourselves, we are not only behind, but essentially useless. And for that, we should feel ashamed.

And we think this is normal. We’ve confused positive growth and development with chronic dissatisfaction, discontentment, and stillness, or even “regular-ness,” as failure. If you’re not progressing, you’re regressing. Never mind the fact that stillness is necessary as a human, and everything we’ve been taught to see as a failure is typically just part the ordinary human experience.

We think that our happiness is on the other side of a flatter stomach, a million dollar business launch, a flawless face, the perfect wardrobe, a new career title, a home renovation, the perfect morning routine, new supplements, 1,000 grams of protein, etc. While certain life upgrades can certainly affect our mental health in positive ways—unfortunately, money does buy access in our capitalist society— if we are always chasing a future, idealized version of ourselves, we will never actually become the person we keep chasing.

And that's the point.

We’re never supposed to feel satisfied or fulfilled. If we did, how would we keep consuming the next thing that promises to fix us?

We wouldn’t.

And our capitalist society can’t survive, or maintain its social hierarchy, if we finally flourish, can it?

And we think this is normal. We’ve confused positive growth and development with chronic dissatisfaction, discontentment, and stillness, or even “regular-ness,” as failure. If you’re not progressing, you’re regressing. Never mind the fact that stillness is necessary as a human, and everything we’ve been taught to see as a failure is typically just part the ordinary human experience.

This Didn’t Start With TikTok

Okay, enough sarcasm. Let’s get to the meat of this.

This is where I get really passionate about this work, because there are so many layers behind why and how society operates the way that it does. Most people can understand the capitalist layer, but freeze—or get defensive—when white supremacy is mentioned.

In their defense, it’s kind of understandable. The connection between white supremacy—which we are more familiar with in the systemic sense—and “lock-in culture,” isn’t exactly obvious.

It wasn’t obvious to me, either. This culture of hustling, striving, continuous betterment, and perpetual discontentment with the self is not only a normalized standard of living in our society, but an honored one. A celebrated one. The only true accepted way of living. It’s engrained into our beings as early as kindergarten as the key to true fulfillment, happiness, and security. So, naturally, we all comply and begin chasing, because who doesn't want fulfillment, happiness, and security?

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Desiring those things is human nature. But, our society has taken what is a natural human desire and turned it into a marker for worth, value, and a primary tool for maintaining a hierarchy that pedestalizes whiteness by defining its opposite against Blackness. The way we experience this in modern times doesn’t look like an obvious connection to white supremacy, but once you peel back the layers of society to it’s earliest days—and then add each layer back one-by-one, connecting every dot—the link between the standards of then and the standards now becomes glaringly obvious.

So, let’s do a bit of that right now. (Without accidentally writing my second book right here on Substack 😂)

This culture of hustling, striving, continuous betterment, and perpetual discontentment with the self is not only a normalized standard of living in our society, but an honored one. A celebrated one. The only true accepted way of living.

The Racial Roots of American Work Ethic

One of the primary attributes of lock-in culture is its sense of urgency. If you’re not optimizing your life, your’e failing as a human. If you didn’t start yesterday, you’re behind. There is no in-between. This is derived from American productivity culture, which was built on a moral framework that has always been racial. Work ethic, as defined in America, wasn’t simply practical or a way to ensure a higher quality of life. While having a strong work ethic is definitely a positive, early white Protestant Americans redefined work ethic by adding “civility” to it.

To justify racism and enslavement, a certain “work ethic” was seen as being “more civilized.” White Europeans spread false rhetoric around Africans being uncivilized, and therefore, deserving of enslavement. “Work ethic” became how white people were taught to differentiate themselves from Black people as a way to uphold their moral superiority and justify oppressive treatment.

The Protestant Work Ethic was built around these beliefs, and this became the foundation of American hustle culture. Moral worth is defined by your amount—not quality—of labor and productivity, and that level is defined and set by white people, more specifically, white men.

Of course, the true labor of the enslaved Africans is completely omitted from this definition. Enslaved Africans were falsely depicted as lazy, childlike, and worthless, yet white Americans felt no remorse stealing their labor to build their wealth and superiority.

They used these beliefs to continue forcing labor—berating into the enslaved that the more they labored, the more valuable they are. (And literally attaching monetary value to their productivity.)

There are more layers to dissect, but again, I’ll have to save that for book number two. Nevertheless, it’s vital to understand that this belief-system and practice did not disappear once the enslaved were emancipated. It simply evolved—from Black codes and vagrancy laws, to the school to prison pipeline, to withholding access to education, jobs, and housing while blaming it on “lack of cultural work ethic”—this has all but disappeared.

When Productivity Becomes Morality

As we move through history, the connections become clearer: capitalism—which also took root on the Plantation—helped maintain the race-based hierarchy our society was founded upon, with productivity at the center of how we determined who was worthy, valuable, and “good.”

This also absolves society from bearing any responsibility of injustice caused by brutal systemic racism and carried forth through these cultural beliefs. If we instill the ideas that everyone is responsible for their own fate, and it’s simply up to whether you were “optimized every moment of your life and reinvented yourself every season,” we can conveniently forget about every systemic barrier society intentionally placed in front of marginalized communities to preserve white supremacy. We can chalk community disparities to lack of collective productivity and cultural “deficiencies” rather than admit to intentional systemic failing.

That said, over time, hyper-productivity has become our way of life in America. The performance of it has changed throughout the generations, but the belief is the same: if you’re not incessantly productive, you’re failing. If you’re not relentlessly productive, you’re useless. If you’re not “locked-in,” you’re not proving yourself. If you’re resting, you should feel guilty.

Again, productivity itself is not bad. I believe we are designed to desire worthwhile and fulfilling work in our lives. As much as we all love to say we dream of a life where we don’t have to work, society would not run without each of us assuming roles that contribute to the greater good.

But that’s exactly the point. In our society, we are not concerned with contributing to the greater good. We are all just trying to inflate ourselves, stroke our egos, and hope to one day finally feel fully worthy.

And since the plantation, human worth has been attached to your level of productivity and labor. Racist structures have been built by assuming one racial group is more worthy than the other, based on productivity and as “proven” by outcomes that were already predetermined by systemic racism.

Consequently, we cannot simply be. We cannot simply exist. We are afraid to slow down and allow our humanity to breathe. While we were created to do good work, we were never created to base our entire virtue on that work. We were created to live, and to allow our work to gently support that, not become our entire identities. Our worth is inherent, no matter what we are doing, or aren’t doing, at any given moment.

While we were created to do good work, we were never created to base our entire virtue on that work.

Then We Turned Ourselves Into Projects

Productivity culture and self-improvement culture often go hand-in-hand, but they are not the same. And in today’s culture, I’d argue that our obsession with self-optimization is having more of a moment than generalized productivity or hustle culture.

Many believe that social media and the rise of influencer culture are responsible for our self-optimization craze. From habit stacking to “maxxing everything,” obsessive optimization feels inescapable. Social media has risen optimization culture to extreme levels in a short amount of time, but it didn’t just pop out of nowhere. Self-improvement culture has quite the history, and that history is rooted in Social Darwinism and eugenics.

It Started With Eugenics

Yep. Eugenics. The Big E. The belief that you should optimize yourself into a better human being comes directly from a 19th century framework that assumed some human begins were “more evolved” than others—and “more evolved” was simply code for “white.”

In 1883, Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, coined the term eugenics. His argument was that human beings could be improved through selective breeding and self-cultivation, and the capacity for who could self-improve, was based on race. White Europeans were deemed capable of self-mastery and civilization. Black and Indigenous people were deemed incapable, thus being another justifier for enslavement, mass genocide, segregation, and other means of “civilizing” people who couldn’t “civilize themselves.”

The early American self-improvement movement was filtered through this framework, and essentially reserved just for white men. The baseline for self-improvement was specifically a white, upper or middle class male, and standards were set based on traits specific to white men if you wanted to have even a sliver of a chance at success. Every structure within society was also designed to serve the livelihood and protect the success of those white men. The difficulty women and People of Color face within society, especially when it comes to access to certain privileges that would make success more attainable, are not an accident.

And when the “ideal” human being is built around a white, male standard of uninterrupted productivity, anyone whose life doesn’t fit that model is going to feel the friction.

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I know This Because I Live it

There’s a reason my husband has been able to continue growing his career while I’ve made the difficult decision to stay home to raise and educate our children. Continuing a full-time career became unobtainable once my children were born, and I’ve battled with figuring out how to meet the demands of motherhood and grow a career from home ever since.

Yes, I’ve made a choice to homeschool my children, but that choice was made as a response to the barriers I face due to societal structures rooted in racism—most specifically, educational barriers. Having access to quality schools without the racism, or schools with ample diversity and resources to educate properly, is nearly impossible. Homeschooling became the only viable option, and since I had to make sacrifices when my children were little because of the astronomical prices of childcare, naturally, I became the primary homeschooler.

These are just some of the barriers I face while society tells me I should be performing and producing at a rate only available to privileged white men who have wives, nannies, and housekeepers that make that success easily available to them. (I don't have time to get into the white privilege and racial barriers I’ve faced trying to grow my career, but again, keep your eye out for book # 2. It will be in there.)

Yet, culture continues to tell me that if I just “hyper-optimized, biohacked, and maxxed-out my life,” I’d unlock my key to success. If I really wanted it, I’d sacrifice sleep, my health, and being present with my children to make it happen. And because I often find myself desperate to feel valuable, I often fall for it.

Staying home to educate my children and squeeze out a mere few hours of unpaid hopeful work after I’ve tended to everything and everyone else doesn’t feel significant, because society has deemed only monetary-producing work as worthwhile. More specifically, what’s considered to be “skilled labor,” as valuable. (Blue collar jobs also mean very little to this society, but that’s another essay.)

Basically, according to society, if you are not maximized and optimized, you are not the ideal human being. You’re not valuable, you’re behind, and you’re not enough—the very same ideals that self-improvement culture was based upon.

There is an ideal human being, and that human being is based on a white European male because they have been deemed more capable of self-mastery. If you want to be ideal, too, you must be like them. But, you can’t—or you inevitably struggle to—because so many barriers have been put in your way to prevent you from being “ideal,” and society has made it feel like it’s your fault because you just didn’t “optimize enough.”

See the cycle?

While the standards themselves have evolved over time, the roots have always been the same: the belief that the disciplined, optimized, and maximally productive human being is the ideal human being. And the default ideal human being is a white male.

The result? We believe we are endless problems to be solved and projects to complete, not human beings to simply be. We’ve normalized believing that our natural, unoptimized, human self is somehow insufficient. And I don’t believe we were created to exist this way.

So What Do We Do With This?

I think one of the reasons a lot of my work doesn’t resonate as much with many people (except from the fact that I probably don’t have the “right language and marketing tools to make it “trendy) is the fact that naming these systemic barriers and historic reasoning can sound a lot like accepted helplessness and defeatism. Or, perhaps it sounds like making excuses for not working harder or absolving oneself of personal responsibility and accountability for their success or the path their life takes.

Besides, we’ve all been sold a version of the “American Dream,” right? This is the country of “no excuses.” Anyone can “become someone” no matter how little you start with, right? If you have a shred of determination, resilience, and discipline, then no barrier should hold you back to begin with.

This is the messaging we’ve not only inherited, but accepted without question. And there is some truth to it. We shouldn't allow barriers to hold us back, and there are many success stories of people having pried their way out of poverty, homelessness, and more with sheer determination, grit, and good old fashioned hard work. And, it’s true—we all have a level of personal accountability we must take for our lives. If there is something we want, we must go after it. No one will hand it to us.

Yes, AND.

We’ve confused ambition with assigning virtue to your existence. And we've confused exhaustion, burnout, and chronic self-dissatisfaction as requirements for access to a quality of life that every human deserves. And yes, we're continuing to perpetuate the very systems that built this culture when we participate without questioning.

By believing in this, we are upholding the system that operates on the premise that there is a more virtuous human being. We believe that the only way to be enough is to chase standards that were set for for elite white men—never questioning the fact that the majority of ordinary people cannot even fathom accessing that success, let alone chasing it.

Not only do these belief systems feel normal, they feel correct. And that’s where the problem lies. White supremacy culture has been sold as the “correct way of living” for so long that choosing to oppose that feels dangerous. Or, at the very least, irresponsible.

It also feels scary, like choosing to forfeit the only way you know how to survive in this society. Rebelling white supremacy culture, for many people, can be a matter of life or death. Myself, included.

So why try? Why even talk about this, acknowledge it, or (try to) build a whole career around writing about it? If adhering to the rules of white supremacy culture is a matter life and death, why waste time trying to tell everyone how harmful these rules are and how choosing differently would free us all?

Good question.

I used to believe my work had the power to disrupt the whole system. I thought that if I just got my book in enough hands, the ripple effect would last for generations—eventually demolishing the system.

I had hope. Belief. Plans.

My approach has changed a bit since then. It’s not that I don’t believe the system its disrupt-able—I do. History has shown us that oppressive regimes and toxic systems are possible to dethrone at some point. However, to do so, the majority of its constituents must believe that something harmful is happening. We haven't gotten to that point in society, yet. Remember, the majority of us think white supremacy culture—i.e. our dominant culture—is good, true, and the correct way to live. No one is concerned with dismantling something they believe in.

So how do you survive living in a maleficent society while tying to rebel against it at the same time?

That is where I am shifting this work. I realized that the entire system will likely not be overthrown in this lifetime. This culture isn’t going anywhere any time soon. It’s going to take the entire society and culture causing complete and total demise of its citizens before collective dismantling can ensue. (I think. I hope I’m wrong, but enough people have to realize how much they are being harmed by a regime before it is dismantled.)

So where does that leave the few of us who no longer want to subscribe to this toxicity?

That’s where Quiet Rebellion comes in.

Quiet Rebellion is the daily, deliberate practice of refusing those standards within yourself — not because personal freedom is the end goal, but because you cannot dismantle a system you are still unconsciously serving.

The truth is, we are living inside a cycle we cannot escape. But, we can do the work to internally unsubscribe from it. You can refuse to participate in every challenge and self-optimization sprint. You can refuse to see yourself as a project to be fixed rather than a human to be lived. You can plan your days, weeks, and months in a way that is deeply decolonized rather than organizing your life around urgency, extraction, and endless becoming. You can set goals, but refuse to make their completion your identity. You can unplug from social media and get back to what’s truly normal and human, like bodies that jiggle and need rest. And you can use your time working toward localized collective liberation that starts small, bur ripples outward.

You may feel like the odd ball out, but you will feel so much freer.

I’m currently working on a Quiet Rebellion practice that can help both you and me do just that. Imagine a different way of approaching life that works with your humanity instead of against. Imagine being able to approach life with little anxiety about getting ahead and overwhelming joy about simply being in accordance to your own humanity. Imagine loving the version of yourself you are right now, instead of waiting for some future version of yourself to never arrive.

And imagine that simple, daily practice transforming the lives of those around you—from your family, friends, colleagues, and even your local leaders.

I believe it is possible to live and thrive within a society that was built to keep us chasing. It won’t be easy, but I believe it is possible.

The quiet rebellion starts here. Not loudly. Not perfectly. Just deliberately — one ordinary day at a time.

More to come. If you hung out for the entire essay, thank you. I hope something not only resonated with you here, but flipped a switch in your brain.

If this work benefits you in any way, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Liberation Letters. Your paid support allows me to continue this work, especially as a full-time homeschooling parent. If a paid subscription is not possible at this time, please consider purchasing a copy of my book or buying me a coffee.

And don’t forget to download your FREE Liberation Audit, here!

Grateful for you!