Nietzsche's Last Man Wears a WHOOP Band
How the mustachioed thinker and other philosophers predicted our sickly obsession with health
A few years ago, I was on my usual morning walk around the neighborhood at 6 AM. The street was quiet except for an Amazon delivery van making early morning Prime drop-offs.
I stopped in the middle of the street and looked up at the dawn sky.
I wasn’t praying or meditating on nature’s beauty.
No, I was trying to get “low solar angle photons” to hit my retinas to entrain my suprachiasmatic nucleus to release a timed pulse of cortisol and sync up my circadian rhythm so I could sleep better at night.
At least that’s what modernity’s oracle of health, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, said would happen if I stared at the morning sky like a 19th-century Millerite awaiting the Second Coming.
You see, I had been having some trouble sleeping. I used to sleep like a baby, going to bed at 10:30 PM and waking up at 7 AM without a single interruption to my rounds of blissful nightly unconsciousness. But when I turned 40, I started waking up at 4 AM and had trouble going back to sleep. I was willing to do anything to get a full night of sleep. Even staring at the rising sun.
Sadly, the photons didn’t help my sleep (though listening to fake radio baseball games did).
Looking at the morning sky to improve my sleep wasn’t my first foray into “biohacking.” Over the years, I’ve experimented with a bunch of tactics and gizmos to improve my “wellness.”
Nootropics? I’ve tried a few.
Cold showers? I wrote an article about them way back in 2009, a decade before cold exposure hit mainstream popularity.
“Greens” supplements? I’ve swigged them. They taste like how my grandpa’s barn in New Mexico smelled. That is, like hay.
Tracking devices like WHOOP bands and Oura rings? I own them. They largely sit in my desk drawer unused.
I’ve tried all this biohacking stuff in the hopes that it would improve my health and vitality, but I’ve been an ambivalent practitioner. In fact, I’m embarrassed about it. When I take a step back and look at my biohacking efforts through the lens of Adam Smith’s “Impartial Spectator,” I think, “This is kind of weird.”
The weirdness extends to the culture at large. I’m hardly alone in my health experiments. There’s been a lot of popular interest in the last decade in how to optimize one’s workouts, diet, and sleep, and extend the lifespan. People are not only increasingly focused on how to improve their health, but they’re paying more attention to what may be going wrong with it. Feeling unaccountably unwell, they wonder if toxic mold or Lyme disease is to blame, and chase cures that promise to restore their vitality.
This all-consuming focus on health hasn’t arisen randomly, but because of a particular set of cultural circumstances.
And it’s a phenomenon that philosophers predicted — and warned against — for centuries.
