Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases. My following here has doubled over the last month — thank you all for being here. I’m thrilled and hoping to

Optimization Will Not Save You - by Magdalene J. Taylor

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2024-09-14 14:30:02

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases. My following here has doubled over the last month — thank you all for being here. I’m thrilled and hoping to keep up the momentum. Tell your friends. ;)

By now we’re all over the Andrew Huberman story. He’s continued on with his usual content, never even acknowledging the accusations against him. Ultimately, he doesn’t have to. The accusations do not bear enough weight. It really shouldn’t be much of a surprise that a man as handsome, successful and narcissistic enough to be a multimedia health guru also has several girlfriends and behaves selfishly. It maybe shouldn’t even be a story.

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The personal drama of a Stanford neuroscientist shouldn’t ordinarily warrant public attention, but it’s because he’s fashioned himself into this lifestyle figure that the story has made waves. I don’t think Andrew Huberman is a very good person, at least not the type of person we should all aspire to be. The problem, to me, is that so many people (men especially) have looked to Huberman to figure out how to live. In doing so, they’ve undoubtedly received valuable information on how to do things like sleep, exercise, look at the sun. These are crucial components of living, yes, but ones with no real ethos behind them except one pervasive belief: that every detail of our day, our bodies, our minds can be microscopically fine-tuned toward optimization that will in turn make us better people. “Better,” here, is ideologically vague but biologically measurable: the improvements are counted on scales, tech wearables and bloodwork. All those ice baths and supplement stacks are intended to translate into something biologically quantifiable, allowing us to fill out spreadsheets faster and enjoy a few extra reps at the gym. But as Huberman’s own deceptive behavior highlights, none of it will necessarily make us any happier. It won’t teach us how to live.