They're not booing, they're saying huuuuuuuuberman
Rough week for Andrew Huberman, huh?
I’ll be honest, I don’t care about his personal life. History is littered with flawed humans who’ve contributed greatly to society.
I’m more concerned with the life optimization fad that he and others espouse. A repackaged form of hustle culture that focuses less on total output and more on maximum efficiency.
Yes, science is great and can tell us new and useful things. But this intense scrutiny of every action we take, every morsel we ingest, feels less like good living and more like pathology.
It treats our personal lives like a business. One where each input must be screened for its effect on our productivity or our resting VO2 Max.
It treats data like religion. Believing all studies that support the optimizer worldview and ignoring those that leave room for nuance. Worse yet, it fuels the popular belief that data itself is an outright good, despite clear evidence (irony alert!) that much of what passes for rigorous science these days is in fact just weak correlations pulled from poorly designed studies.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Don’t get me wrong. We can learn a lot from well thought out scientific inquiry. It’s one of the best ways to learn, in fact. But in our zest to bend the world to our whims, we often skip the “well thought out” part.
Which brings me back to my primary point. To “optimize” our life, as Huberman and others suggest, we need a steady stream of incontrovertible information to fuel the constant tinkering this lifestyle requires.
Even if that were possible, which I’m not convinced of, is the incessant tweaking of our existence, viewing every instance as a data point to be observed, studied and improved upon really living?
Not to me.
To me, living happens when we surrender to it. When we are in the moment, not observing it. When we are connecting with others, not wondering if that friendly lunch provides enough endorphins to meet our hourly quota. When we are helping people, making them laugh, listening to them, celebrating with them, commiserating with them, hugging them, seeing them, loving them. Doing all of this without a second’s thought to the impact this might have on our oxytocin levels.
We can take time to reflect, to learn from our mistakes, to find the wisdom in the chaos of our day to day. But we needn’t do this down to the microsecond.
That’s what Huberman and others seem to be prescribing, in addition to some of the very helpful bits that come out of their work. Get more sun in the morning? Great. Doing so with a stopwatch and a compass to make sure you’re getting the exact right amount and angle of sunshine at all times to ensure a proper spike in Vitamin D levels? Nah, not interested.
I’ll take my chances that my life is less than optimal, if it means I can actually enjoy it.
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#desuckifywork #coaching #huberman #lifeoptimization #enjoylife