The Biological Case for Doing Things That Don't Optimise You

Arts, culture, and “wasted” time are linked to slower biological ageing. The productivity bros won’t like this one.

There is a particular kind of person who measures every activity against a single question: what does this produce? They track their time. They optimise their routines. They treat rest as a bug in the system rather than a feature of it. They have turned their lives into a perpetual sprint towards some imaginary finish line where, presumably, they will finally allow themselves to sit down.

New research linking engagement in arts and cultural activities to slower biological ageing is going to upset these people enormously. And it should.

Because the data is telling us something that psychology has known for decades: the things we dismiss as unproductive are often the things keeping us alive.

What the Research Actually Shows

The study found that people who regularly engage with arts and culture, visiting galleries, attending performances, playing music, making art, show measurably slower biological ageing than those who don’t. Not self-reported wellbeing. Not subjective happiness scores. Biological ageing. The kind measured by epigenetic clocks that track how your cells are actually deteriorating.

This isn’t a soft finding. It’s a hard one.

And it raises a question that the optimisation culture has never been able to answer: what if the activities that produce nothing measurable are the ones producing the most important thing of all?

The SDT Case for “Wasted” Time

Self-Determination Theory identifies three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these needs are met, people don’t just feel better. They function better. Their immune systems work more effectively. Their stress responses regulate properly. Their cellular repair mechanisms operate as designed.

Here’s what arts and cultural engagement does to all three.

Autonomy: Choosing to engage with art is one of the purest expressions of volitional behaviour. Nobody forces you to go to a gallery. Nobody requires you to sit with a piece of music that moves you. You do it because something inside you responds to it. That act of choosing, of following an internal pull rather than an external demand, is autonomy in its most undiluted form.

Competence: Engaging with complex art, whether creating it or receiving it, exercises cognitive capacities that routine work doesn’t touch. The pattern recognition in a painting. The emotional processing in a piece of music. The narrative construction in a novel. These aren’t passive experiences. They’re active cognitive workouts that maintain the brain’s flexibility and depth.

Relatedness: Shared cultural experiences build the relational bonds that Self-Determination Theory identifies as essential for wellbeing. The concert you attend with friends. The exhibition you discuss with a colleague. The play that makes you cry in a room full of strangers who are also crying. These moments create connection at a depth that transactional social interactions cannot reach.

When you optimise your life by removing these activities, you’re not eliminating waste. You’re eliminating the conditions that keep your psychological architecture intact.

What the STAR Types Lose

The STAR framework maps four core motivational types onto SDT’s fundamental needs. Each type pays a specific price when culture and arts are stripped from their lives.

The Socialiser loses the shared emotional experiences that deepen their relational bonds. Without them, their connections become functional rather than meaningful. They have colleagues but not allies. Contacts but not community. The relatedness need goes chronically undernourished, and the body notices.

The Adventurer loses the creative expression that satisfies their autonomy drive. An Adventurer without creative outlets doesn’t become more productive. They become restless, irritable, and eventually flat. The spark that makes them valuable, the lateral thinking, the willingness to take risks, the ability to see what others don’t, dims without the fuel of aesthetic experience.

The Thinker loses the cognitive diversity that keeps their thinking sharp. Thinkers who only engage with data and analysis develop a kind of intellectual monoculture. They become efficient at pattern-matching within their domain but lose the capacity for cross-domain synthesis. Art provides the cognitive fertilizer that prevents this narrowing.

The Realist loses the data they didn’t know they needed. The Realist’s security drive makes them the most likely to dismiss arts engagement as impractical. But the biological ageing research is exactly the kind of evidence that speaks their language. Slower cellular deterioration. Measurable health outcomes. Hard numbers on the cost of a life stripped of aesthetic experience.

The Optimisation Paradox

Here’s the paradox that the productivity culture cannot resolve: the more aggressively you optimise for measurable output, the more you degrade the biological and psychological infrastructure that produces it.

Strip out the “unproductive” activities. Eliminate the gallery visits, the live music, the aimless walks, the afternoon spent reading fiction. Fill every hour with purposeful, trackable, optimised activity. Watch the metrics improve in the short term.

Then watch the person deteriorate in the long term.

The burnout. The creative stagnation. The relational thinning. The slow, invisible erosion of the biological systems that keep a human being functioning at their best. All because someone decided that anything without a measurable return was waste.

Dual Process Theory explains why this happens. System 1, the fast, intuitive cognition that drives most of our daily behaviour, is where creativity, emotional processing, and social intuition live. System 2, the slow, deliberate cognition we use for analysis and planning, is where optimisation lives.

When you optimise everything, you’re running System 2 at the expense of System 1. You’re becoming more efficient at the cost of becoming less creative, less emotionally intelligent, and less biologically resilient.

The arts are System 1’s gym. Remove them and the system atrophies.

The Unoptimised Argument

There’s a reason this Substack is called The Unoptimised Human, and this research is it.

The case for arts, culture, and “wasted” time isn’t a sentimental plea for beauty in an efficient world. It’s a biological argument backed by epigenetic data, a psychological argument backed by Self-Determination Theory, and a performance argument backed by everything we know about how human beings actually function at their best.

The things we do for no measurable return might be the things keeping us alive longest.

That gallery visit you almost cancelled because you had emails to catch up on. That piano you haven’t touched in months. That novel on your bedside table you keep meaning to start. That friend who invited you to a concert and got a “maybe next time.”

These aren’t indulgences. They’re maintenance. And the biological data is now clear: skip them at your peril.

The optimised life isn’t the best life. It’s the shortest one that looks productive on paper.

The STAR Framework maps human motivation onto four core psychological needs drawn from Self-Determination Theory, the Big Five, Dual Process Theory, Regulatory Focus Theory, Social Identity Theory, Cognitive Bias Theory, and Appraisal Theory of Emotion. It identifies four core types: the Socialiser, the Thinker, the Adventurer, and the Realist, each with distinct motivational drivers and communication preferences.