The report was very thorough
The report was extremely comprehensive. People all over YouTube seem to be getting more and more into the idea of self-optimization now. Some of them tell us how to eat our way to happiness, others show us how cold water plunging can be a game changer, another’s pitch us on supplements that can change our lives. There are even the real Visionaries who can manipulate time to to grind harder.
What I’ve done now is I have changed a manipulated time. I now get 21 days a week. Yeah, I’m personally good with my style of having half of a productive day every other day and in one hyper productive day every two weeks. Now, this is all in the name of achieving some mythical Peak Performance which, at first glance, seems good because why wouldn’t we want to get the most from our muscles and neurons.
But when we look closer, we can’t help but ask: are people trying to optimize themselves to live better right now or, at the heart of this phenomenon, are people simply trying to fight the inevitability of death and, if so, is that a fight we can win? Let’s find out in this wise Greg Edition on self-optimization: can we cure death?
To be fair, self-improvement is not a new phenomenon. Humans have been trying to self-improve basically since we had a concept of a self that could be improved. Now, the most notable Improvement has been our lifespan which has doubled over the past 200 years in the United States alone. But, like plenty of good things, having a longer lifespan leads to a whole other host of problems.
Now today, when people die, they always seem to die of something. There’s no such thing as just dying of old age. But, way back in the day, most people didn’t live long enough to experience age-related problems with their bodies. They were too busy dying of extrinsic factors like getting an infection, falling off of a cliff, or getting used as Sushi by a predator.
These folks didn’t have to worry about the diseases that take us out today. According to Andrew Steele, for every extra year you live, your risk of getting cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, and many more terrible conditions increases exponentially. From the perspective of disease risk, at least, it’s better to be an overweight, heavy drinking, chain smoking 30 year old than a clean living 80 year old.
Steele also points out that humans have a risk of death that doubles every eight years, which is hard to Grapple with in a death-avoidant culture like ours. But, hey, maybe as a way to avoid death anxiety, let us know in the comments your ideal death and, if you’re starting to experience death anxiety right now, just take a deep breath, remember that heaven might be real (I mean, it’s pretty unlikely and we haven’t really had any evidence for it).
Now, there’s a long history of humans trying to do stuff to help them live longer, things like inventing vaccines, learning about which foods benefit us, or just sanitizing the water. But, for our purposes, we’ll skip ahead to the most contemporary version of people trying to trick out their bodies so they won’t die. It’s called biohacking and it’s telling that this practice employs the language of hacking, implying the very contemporary Silicon Valley brained belief that when you understand the coding language of anything, you’re able to take control and, in many cases, profit.
According to a gal I went to Sunday school with named Merriam-Webster, biohacking is biological experimentation as by Gene editing or the use of drugs or implants done to improve qualities or capabilities of living organisms, especially by individuals and groups working outside a traditional medical or scientific research environment. In other words, it’s a version of doing science to yourself outside the context of a hospital or laboratory.
Dr Morgan Meyer examined the history of the concept of biohacking, also known as DIY biology, through online discussions, tracing it back to 2008 when its main discussion forum was launched. As Meyer describes it, biohacking was created to make biology accessible to non-sciences. He notes the biohacking preceded internet.