The Unhinged Health Space

brutal

Quitting porn, blocking blue light, eating meat, eating raw food, fasting, lifting, running, cutting PUFAs, no sugar, caloric restriction, ice baths, nofap, regular sleeping practices, cutting saturated fat, keto, paleo diet, getting sun exposure, and peating.

Some of these things probably improve your health, but not everybody is built for them.

For example, I find restricting caloric intake, eating a varied diet, avoiding recreational drugs, and exercising regularly to be easy. But I cannot restrict the range of foods I eat, sleep at normal hours, restrict technology use, or jog to save my life. Based on my anecdotal experience, others also differ in their ability to comply with habits.

There is also the question of value — if popular habits are selected for ease and effectiveness, there will be an observed negative correlation between how easy a habit is and how effective it is. The correlation is still imperfect, as there are effective but easy habits like brushing teeth, and hard but ineffective habits like cutting saturated fat (check overall mortality. zero effect). That said, to maximize well-being, it would be best to select the habits for ease and effectiveness — I suspect cutting out all refined sugars would increase overall health, but sugar tastes good, so that must be factored into the utility function as well.

These health influencers are not just crazy, but aggressive and try to guilt you into doing things. I suspect that there is a market that these influencers are trying to appeal to — a low agency or submissive person who wants there to be a strong authority figure to tell them to do things. They can play at that exchange if they want, but I’ll stay away from it.

II.

Paul Skallas had a similar take in his piece The Unbearable Sadness of the Health Influencer:

However, what you often encounter with health influencers is a descent into madness that borders on parody. It seems this phenomenon is more rampant in the health sphere than in others. You'll come across a tweet that's garnered thousands of likes and is taken at face value, yet it teeters on the edge of being a complete joke.

He then grouped Bryan Johnson with the other health influencers. That was a mistake.

I find Bryan more amusing and admirable — he’s a bit of a psycho, has been his entire adult life, but does not intend to hide that. His journey for immortality is not analogous to the Faustian bargain, but quite literally the tale itself. Unfortunately, he’s prbably not going to reach it.

He says his pace of aging is .69 - it’s difficult to convert that statistic into an estimate of mortality but he did say what that was in percentile notation - the 96th percentile of 46 year olds. Assuming a 1 to 1 relationship between pace of aging and life expectancy, Bryan Johnson should be expected to live about 17 years longer than he normally should.

In terms of personality and social effectiveness, he’s superior to the rest of the pack. He’s simply communicating what he is doing — not trying to force anybody into it or trying too hard to get people to buy into it. And I can respect that. I, myself, am imitating a lot of what he is doing.