The Paralyzing Comfort of Optimization
The tweezers in my hand are shaking, just a fraction of a millimeter, which in the world of high-end horology is the equivalent of a magnitude 7.3 earthquake. I am trying to seat a balance wheel into a movement that hasn’t seen the light of day since 1963, and my brain is currently screaming. Not because of the technical difficulty-I’ve done this 43 times this month alone-but because I decided, in a moment of profound personal negligence, to inhale a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream during my ten-minute break. The resulting brain freeze is a jagged, frozen spear behind my left eye. It is a sharp reminder that sometimes, the things we do to optimize our comfort end up paralyzing our capacity to function.
I look at the watch, this tiny, mechanical heart, and I think about my sister. She’s currently on a conference call. Not a work call, though she is a VP of something involving logistics and supply chains. No, she is on a strategy call with a private college consultant, a professional essay editor, and a ‘leadership coach.’ Her 17-year-old son, the supposed ‘product’ of this high-stakes assembly line, is currently in the next room attending a mock UN meeting, likely wondering if he’s a human being or just a collection of data points designed to appease an admissions officer in a windowless office. My sister has become the Chief Operating Officer of his life. She’s managing a Gantt chart for his SAT prep, oversight of his ‘community impact’ project, and the 23 separate deadlines for his early-action applications.
From Nurturers to Project Managers
We have shifted, almost without noticing, from being nurturers to being project managers of ‘Project Get-Kid-Into-Harvard.’ This is the professionalization of parenting, and it’s a disaster. We are outsourcing the organic, messy, beautiful growth of a child to a series of consultants and managed workflows, replacing family relationships with a production cycle that would make a Silicon Valley startup blush.
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When you try to align a teenager with that kind of mechanical rigidity, something snaps. Usually, it’s the kid’s sense of self. You cannot force a fit where there is no natural alignment.
As a watch movement assembler, my job is precision. If the hairspring is off by a hair, the whole thing loses time. I spend 53 hours a week ensuring that everything is perfectly aligned. But humans aren’t watches. I remember back in ’93, I was just starting out at the bench, and I tried to force a crown onto a stem that wasn’t quite right. I thought I could make it fit. I pushed. The stem shattered. It was a $153 mistake, but the lesson was free: you cannot force a fit where there is no natural alignment.
In the modern parenting landscape, we are all pushing the stem. We look at a child and see a series of inefficiencies to be corrected. Does the kid like to paint? Great, let’s get a private tutor and aim for a Scholastic Gold Key so we can check the ‘Artistic Achievement’ box. Does the kid enjoy soccer? Let’s get them on a travel team that requires 13 hours of driving a week and a $3,333 commitment so they can ‘demonstrate grit.’ We take the joy and the curiosity-the very things that make a life worth living-and we turn them into KPIs.
[The Spreadsheet is not the Soul]
Tracking Performance
Developing Internal Beat
My sister’s spreadsheet has 83 columns. I am not joking. It tracks everything from volunteer hours to the tone of the ‘thank you’ emails he sends after college tours. She thinks she’s being a good mother. She thinks she’s securing his future. But what she’s actually doing is telling him, every single day, that he is a project to be managed rather than a person to be known. She is the COO, and he is the junior associate who is failing to meet his quarterly performance targets.
The Beauty of Imperfection
This managed childhood creates a terrifying kind of anxiety. It’s a production cycle where there is no room for error, no room for the accidental interruption, and certainly no room for a brain freeze. When every moment is optimized, the child never learns how to handle a vacuum. They never learn how to be bored, or how to fail when nobody is watching, or how to figure out what they actually want when the ‘Team’ isn’t there to tell them. They become high-functioning automatons, brilliant at following a rubric but paralyzed when the rubric is taken away.
The Soul of the Machine
Modern Mass-Produced
Perfect timing. Flawless efficiency. No character.
Vintage/Hand-Adjusted
Slight irregularities. Character that lasts. Beautifully imperfect.
I see this in the watches I repair. The modern, mass-produced ones are perfect, but they have no soul. The old ones, the ones built by hand with all their slight irregularities, they have a character that the new ones can never replicate. There is beauty in the slightly imperfect beat of a hand-adjusted escapement. There is beauty in a child who spends an entire Saturday afternoon trying to build a treehouse that eventually falls down, rather than one who spends it in a pre-approved ‘leadership seminar.’
The Framework for Self-Direction
I’m not saying we should just abandon our kids to the elements. I’m not a monster. I’ve made plenty of mistakes myself-I once accidentally dropped a pallet fork into a cup of coffee and didn’t realize it until I hit the bottom. We all fail. But the answer to the chaos of the modern world isn’t more management; it’s better systems that encourage autonomy. We need frameworks that aren’t about ‘doing’ for the kid, but about providing the arena where the kid can do for themselves.
There’s a balance to be found here. We want to give them the tools to succeed without becoming the person wielding the tools for them. It’s about moving away from the COO model and moving toward a model of ‘structured empowerment.’ This is why I actually like some of the newer, more innovative educational pathways that focus on real-world skills and entrepreneurship without the suffocating micromanagement of the traditional Ivy-league-or-bust pipeline. For example, a program like
provides a structured environment where students can actually explore their own ideas and take ownership of their projects, rather than just checking boxes for a parent’s spreadsheet. It shifts the burden of management from the parent back to the student, where it belongs. It allows the kid to be the protagonist of their own story, not the product in someone else’s marketing plan.
The Shift to Internal Timing
When we step back and stop being the COO, something incredible happens. The child starts to develop their own internal ‘movement.’ They start to tick on their own.
They might lose 13 seconds a day. They might forget a deadline or write a mediocre essay about their love for sourdough bread. But it will be *their* mistake. And in that mistake is the beginning of a real person.
The True Measure: Love, Not Logistics
We are so afraid that if we don’t manage every second, our children will fall behind. We are obsessed with the 43rd percentile and the 1533 SAT score. We treat the college application process as the final exam of our parenting, a grade on our own performance as COOs. But the true measure of our parenting isn’t where they go to school at 18; it’s who they are at 33. Are they capable of making a decision? Can they handle a setback without calling a ‘consultant’? Do they know how to find joy in a task that doesn’t have a reward attached to it?
I think about my nephew. I want to tell him to delete the spreadsheet. I want to tell him to go get a brain freeze of his own. I want to tell him that his mother’s 83-column tracking sheet is a symptom of her love, but a poison for his growth. But I am just the aunt with the tweezers and a penchant for expensive ice cream. I have my own movements to worry about.
We’ve professionalized the one area of life that should remain amateur-in the literal sense of the word, from the Latin *amator*, meaning lover. Parenting should be an act of love, not an act of logistics. We need to fire ourselves as COOs. We need to dismantle the production cycle. We need to let the watches tick at their own pace, even if they’re a little slow, even if they skip a beat every now and then. Because a life that is perfectly managed is a life that has never actually been lived.
The Movement is Seated.
I finally seat the balance wheel. It gives a little kick, a tiny mechanical shrug, and starts to beat. *Tick. Tick. Tick.* It’s not perfect, but it’s moving. And for now, that is more than enough. I’ll check the time again in 23 minutes, not because I need it to be perfect, but because I want to see how it handles the world on its own terms.