Derek Thompson
Today’s essay—it's a big one, maybe my favorite thing I’ve written all year: AMERICA'S CULT OF SELF ENHANCEMENT I think we can all see it. Something vast and significant has changed with how Americans think about their health in the last few years after the pandemic. It’s not just the surge in fitness trackers and biomarker dashboards and diagnostics ... or the GLP-1 micro-dosing and peptide stacks and supplements ... or the boom in testosterone therapy and hormone replacement therapy and preventative cosmetics and Botox ... or the record high gym memberships and running clubs and annual all-time records in exercise time... or even the celebrity status of 2020s health influencers and the commensurate rise of a Nietzschean ubermensch mentality among the business and tech elite. It’s all of it, all at once. And it’s changing our relationship to our health, to our bodies, to the way we think about socialization, mortality, and what really matters in life. Diet, exercise, and discipline are virtues—period. Longer lives are better—period. But if we're honest with ourselves, America’s new health craze is not entirely healthy. At the extreme—and the extreme is awfully common here—it verges on a cult of not only self enhancement but selfish enhancement, which pulls us into ourselves and away from other people. Healthy living is good. But the cult of the enhanced self can easily slip into antisocial delusions of immortality, a futile attempt to outrun death that saps the life out of life. https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-cult-of-the-enhanced-self