Practical Daydreams: Self-Optimization through Consumer Lifestyles in China

Abstract

The ethos of self-optimization calls on people to imagine a desirable future state of existence and to approach this desired state by adjusting aspects of their everyday lives. This ethos depends on a specific capacity for fantasy. Therefore, this article argues that the concept of self-optimization applies not only to entrepreneurial self-making but also to consumer lifestyles and that it provides a useful critical lens for investigating cultural constructions of labor, leisure, and desire. China has been depicted a place inimical to fantasy, where dreams are denied by social and political pressures. However, in today's China personal dreams symbolize modern subjectivity. Drawing on ethnographic and textual research on self-help psychology in China, this article traces links between self-optimization and various actors, including entrepreneurs, marketers, activists, and authors, who are teaching Chinese youth to craft explicit visions of their ideal life. The article contextualizes projects of self-optimization within China's exploding consumer culture, and in a society where markets are entangled with interpersonal networks and encompassed by state policies. Within these constraints, the logic of self-optimization shapes modest and often commodified pursuits of the good life.