Optimisation Is Killing Us
The beergut manifesto.
If you are a man of a certain age, your relationship with your morning routine is a masterpiece of low-input-low-output. You wake up at 7:15, groan like a Victorian floorboard beneath a fat elephant, drink a mug of instant coffee that tastes like wet gravel, spend eleven minutes on the toilet reading Wikipedia pages about niche naval battles in the War of Spanish Succession, all before leaving the house to the life you swore you’d never settle for.
Not one calorie is misspent. You’re a potato with a mortgage and a slightly elevated cholesterol level and a family WhatsApp group you’ve long since muted. It isn’t glorious, it’s not going to win you any awards on Instagram, but it is a system that has sustained human civilization since the Bronze Age. We built railways, fought wars, and wrote great literature on a diet of toast, tea, and mild existential dread. Brunel didn’t have a magnesium spray. Shakespeare didn’t check his readiness score before writing Hamlet. Churchill defeated the Germans and was pissed the whole time; he didn’t need a vibrating smart-ring to tell him the Luftwaffe was bombing his house.
Leave it to the internet, with its hyper-anxious middle managers, silicon-valley algorithms, and deep-seated terror of being un-productive for six consecutive seconds, to convince us that simply existing as a normal biological mammal is a failure of discipline. Apparently, being tired is now a mortal sin, and having a nice little sit-down is for pussies.
This is the doctrine of optimisation.
I: The Habits
For a growing legion of young men, living normally is no longer an option. You don’t have habits; you have “protocols.” You don’t drink water; you “optimize your hydration stack. You don’t have a chat with a mate; you “regulate your nervous system.” And whatever you do, you must protect your “dopamine baseline” at all costs.
We are not talking about getting a decent eight hours of sleep, eating an apple, doing the odd jumping-jack, or going for a brisk walk around the park. No, no. That requires leaving your house without a wearable diagnostic laboratory strapped to your wrist, telling you how poorly you slept. Which you already knew, because you were there. Afterall, nothing improves your morning like receiving a numerical breakdown of why it’s going to be shit.
Here are just a few rituals of the new age.
The 4:30 AM Solar Stare: Waking up in your blacked-out, lightless bedroom, before bee-lining to your garden and staring directly into the sun to “reset your circadian rhythm.” They call it “early morning sunlight exposure”; in Britain, it means staring at the shiniest cloud you can find.
Cold Plunging: Spending £2,000 on a custom, stainless-steel ice chest - a luxury wheelie bin for people with LinkedIn Premium - so you can sit in near-freezing water at 5:00 AM, hyperventilating like a panicked walrus, shivering uncontrollably while your neighbors watch through the blinds thinking you’ve finally lost your mind.
Monk Mode: A practice where young lads intentionally isolate themselves from human contact, ban music because it “causes unnecessary emotional spikes,” refuse to eat anything with flavor, and journal their reflections twice a day. No partying, no friends, no girls, it’s like highschool except this time it’s a fucking choice.
And lastly, Continuous Glucose Monitors: This is blokes who don’t have diabetes, wearing a plastic sensor stuck into their tricep that texts their emergency contact if they eat a banana, because the natural sugar spike might cause a 0.4% dip in their cognitive output while writing an email to accounting.
These strange rituals, which may or may not work, commandeer and shape the lives of those who enact them. It’s OCD draped in a Gymshark shirt. It’s religion for men who don’t believe in anything. All the guilt, all the ritual, and none of the choir boy action.
II: The Hero
Every trend has its logical conclusion. This one, in typically dull fashion, is called Bryan.
Bryan Johnson is a 48-year-old American tech millionaire who, in 2013, sold his payment processing company for hundreds of millions of dollars. If most normal blokes got £300 million, they would buy a yacht, a villa in Spain, a couple of sports cars, eat expensive ham, and get slightly rounder around the middle, while enjoying life. You’d die at 71 with a tan and a boat named after one of your first wives.
Not Bryan. Bryan looked at his massive fortune and decided that the best course of action was to spend two million dollars a year trying to reverse his biological age.
He calls it Project Blueprint. Under its commandments, his daily routine is a terrifying glimpse into what happens when an algorithm takes over a human soul:
He wakes up at 4:30 AM every single day. The only people who have any right to be awake at 4:30am are fishermen, burglars and people still off their nut on ketamine. Brian would never do that as ketamine is fun. So I’ve been told…
He takes 111 pills a day - pills for his heart, his liver, his skin, his hair, his kidneys, and probably a pill or two to cope with the stress of taking 111 pills. If he falls down the stairs it sounds like maracas.
He eats a daily bowl of gray, blended vegetables and lentils called “Nutty Pudding” that looks like wet cement mixed with garden mulch.
He stops eating entirely for the day by 11:00 AM. That’s right -no dinner. Ever. He goes to bed every night with an empty stomach and a heart full of metrics.
He has even exchanged blood plasma with his 17-year-old son to “rejuvenate” his circulatory system - becoming the world’s first billionaire vampire. Every woman’s dream. The trade-off is he’s sterile and made of porcelain.
He doesn’t go to the pub, he doesn’t eat a pizza, he doesn’t stay up late watching a good film, he doesn’t laugh until his stomach hurts over a stupid joke. He sits in a sterile room, monitoring his nocturnal erections on a digital sensor.
And what has two million dollars a year achieved? He has successfully transformed himself into a haunted mannequin made of marble and cream cheese. He looks less like a rejuvenated 18-year-old and more like a sentient milk bottle.
Bryan, a man with more money than he could ever spend, has managed to turn staying alive into the most miserable, full-time administrative job on Earth. He has optimized away every single reason to actually be alive in the first place. That’s not living; that’s just maintaining a flesh engine. He has extended his lifespan by removing everything that makes time pass quickly.
III: The Heresy
Here is the dark paradox at the center of the biohacking craze: It consumes the very life it claims to optimise.
These lads spend four hours every single morning preparing their mind and body to “live at 100%,” which leaves them with zero hours left in the day to actually do anything remotely interesting. They have optimized away spontaneous pints on a Friday afternoon, bacon rolls on a Saturday morning, staying up late talking bollocks with their mates, and the simple, divine pleasure of doing absolutely nothing for an hour.
They think they are conquering mortality. They think they are becoming elite, high-performing Alpha males. In reality, they are just turning human existence into a corporate audit where they are both the cruel manager and the overworked employee. He has given himself a boss, and the boss is him, and the boss is a psycho.
