The Cost of Personal Optimization

The self-optimization culture, priestly formation, AI futures and more in this week's digest.

There will be no digest for the next two weeks. We are taking a family vacation starting next Thursday, and I will not be posting until after the 4th of July weekend.

This week I’m featuring several stories about meaning and formation - and what happens when we don’t have them.

The Self-Optimization Cult

Derek Thompson is a former Atlantic writer who left for Substack. He co-authored the widely discussed book Abundance with Ezra Klein, which I’d love to get him on the podcast to discuss at some point.

He has a great new piece out on self-optimization that asks, when does it become unhealthy to become overly obsessed with health?

The [Oura] ring improved my life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls me away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

He talks about the decline in alcohol consumption, then writes:

The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides (injectables that affect inflammation and gut health and are also the “P” in GLP), and the continued growth of supplements. More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what is not wrong with them. At the layer of leisure, the tendrils of the Enhanced Self touch the white-hot rise of fitness in American life. A record 77 million Americans belonged to a gym or studio in 2024, up 20 percent since before the pandemic. Running clubs on the fitness app Strava nearly quadrupled in 2025 alone. If you don’t believe the industry data, perhaps you’ll believe the federal government: according to the American Time Use Survey, Americans today exercise and play sports more than at any period on record.

He links this obsession with health and personal optimization to declines in socializing.

At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism. At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization, which I have previously called the anti-social century. While running clubs and morning workouts are booming—and I am positive that these are highly social events for at least some of their participants—nightclubs are closing and parties are withering. Young Americans spend about 35 percent less time socializing and 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the century.

I’ve drawn a distinction between what I call the Techno-Industrial Stack, or Acceleration, and the Human-Social Stack, for Formation. With his focus on topics like Abundance, Thompson seems mostly focused on Acceleration. But he’s also attuned to Formation questions as well. So far as I know, he’s not a religious person, but he sees how previous eras of self-improvement derived from a religious or moral background that channeled them in pro-social ways that transcended the isolated individual.

These earlier iterations of self-improvement drew their power from religion, community, or characterological projects to promote civic virtue. Temperance, for example, was not just about individual health; it was a social movement to improve the culture, to rescue women and children from alcoholic husbands, and to build a better republic. (That it failed in myriad ways is not to deny that some of its goals were virtuous.) The Muscular Christianity movement of the 19th century paired New Testament virtues with an ethic of manly strength in a way that wouldn’t be so out of step with modern MAGA and MAHA machismo.

But the age of the Enhanced Self is different, not only because many of its elements are distinctly of the 2020s—including peptide shots, social media, and biometric scanners—but also because it does not particularly seek to build anything outside of the self. For all its sins, the temperance movement was focused on national change. But the typical adherent to the Enhanced Self—say, a 50-year-old with a peptide stack and a Whoop—is not trying to improve the country. He’s just trying to improve his score.

The history of alcohol abstention offers another way to see how the Enhanced Self is a truly modern phenomenon. For a long time, abstinence was associated with religion or personal histories, such as addiction recovery or pregnancy. But in the new health culture, abstinence is not about faith or addiction; it is about bodily perfection.

He goes on to talk about what he calls the “three pillars of the enhanced self” and “enhanced selfishness.” There’s a lot of good material in there, so I’d encourage you to click over and read the whole thing.

I’ll just conclude with some of Thompson’s final thoughts about the meaning of death in our culture.

The novelist Karl Ove Knausgård once wrote that an irony of the modern world is that we are obsessed with cultural representations of death and yet terrified of the real thing…At bottom, enhancement culture is a disposition toward death—thinking about death, calculating distance from death, worshipping death like some Aztec priest offering sacrifices to appease the angry sun god. Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and company-and-book-inspired Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives. But when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic—how much time will this drink cost me? how much time will that supplement buy me?—many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

We live in a world where all too many people have lost a belief in the transcendent, or connection to any larger sense of cosmic or moral order and meaning. This kind of purely materialist condition produces an outlook that is at some level nihilistic. Perhaps some people can find that larger sense of purpose and meaning from immanent matters like relationships. But empirically, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

Again, read the whole thing.

Forming Priests

I saw the trailer for a three-part docu-series called Traditio, after it made a stir on Twitter. It might have been the most impressive piece of Catholic content I’ve ever seen, so I decided to watch the first installment, which was about the formation of new priests.

This video was put out by SSPX, which is a traditionalist Catholic sect that is viewed as “canonically irregular” (in reality, de facto schismatic) by Rome. This video has drawn 1.1 million views, which is incredible. You can see why this group is successful just from watching this. A Catholic friend wrote to me, “You have to wonder why a tiny and controversial traditionalist order is able to put out a more appealing documentary on the Catholic Church than one of the Church's larger institutional arms. Robert Barron's Catholicism series was nice but nothing like this.”

The two-tier system in Catholicism, with its concept of higher spiritual vocations, lends itself to a heroic conception of the priesthood. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to hear these young seminarians talk about devoting their whole life to the fullest to something bigger than themselves. You also learn about the rigorous, intense, and holistic six-year process they have to go through to become a priest. It’s very institutional and communal as well as individual. Though not discussed in the documentary, apparently only a small minority of initial seminary enrollees make it all the way to ordination.

I’m queuing this up to a ten minute section on the SSPX US seminary in Dillwyn, VA. I highly recommend sampling at least this section. Be sure to turn on the subtitle captioning.

It’s very impressive, even if listening to these young men talk about their conception of what the priesthood is reminded me once again of why I’m Protestant.

The Political Economy of AI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted some interesting thoughts on AI. His take is related to Brent Orell’s admonition to make sure AI doesn’t become the next NAFTA in terms of its human, social, and political impact. Nadella writes:

The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see. If all the value is accrued by only a few models, the political economy will simply not tolerate it. There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries.

Think about what happened in the first phase of globalization where entire industrial economies were hollowed out by outsourcing. The GDP numbers looked fine on the surface, but the displacement was real and the consequences are still being felt. Let us not bring that dynamic into the AI era, with a small number of AI systems capturing all the economic returns, while entire industries find their knowledge commoditized right out from underneath them.

In my view, our priority has to be building a frontier ecosystem, not just a frontier model, so value flows broadly across every company, every industry, and every country.

Nadella’s company does not have its own frontier model, so this is somewhat self-interested. Nevertheless, it does get at the potential for political disruption if there’s too much industrial and labor force disruption.

Globalization primarily hurt industrial workers without college degrees. AI appears to be more likely to impact the higher educated. This group of people is much more able to mobilize politically in favor its interests, so the political impact of AI driven white collar disruption could actually be much greater than that of blue collar displacement.

The Future of Online Intellectual Discourse

Very popular economics writer Noah Smith has some interesting reflections about being an online intellectual in an age of populism and AI, wondering if anything he writes matters anymore. He notes that being an intellectual is a liability in an age of populism.

This [Trumpist] state of affairs will eventually end, of course. Whoever succeeds Trump won’t have his cult of personality, and will have to rely on ideologies and ideas that will be ripe for debate. And if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, ideas will be back on the table, as they were during the Biden administration.

But even on the left, the trend is away from open intellectual debate. Zohran Mamdani and the other socialist candidates who are winning primary races in blue cities are interested in ideas, but only from people within their own clique. Leftism in America is fundamentally a factional movement disguised as an ideological one; bloggers who aren’t on the team will simply be ignored, except for the occasional denunciation.

This is just populism. Populism isn’t really about doing stuff that’s popular; it’s about putting factional and tribal conflict above the national interest or the general public good. The goal is always to “own” the other side, and economic and social outcomes become subordinate to that goal.

Intellectualism thrives in times of relative social peace. This isn’t one of those. Hopefully, the tide of populism is receding in America, but the experiences of other countries suggest that these times of factional struggle can go on for a very long time.

This is completely correct. I’ve noticed that America is now factionalism all the way down. There’s very little of the high-minded spirit that used to exist - or at least was aspired to - in the era in which a mainline Protestant ethos still shaped the country.

Smith goes on to talk about AI, the impact of Substackification, etc.

I’m of course interested in this because I work the same territory. The reality is that every aspect of our society is very dynamic. I’m not going to be able to keep doing the same thing I’m doing now for the next 20 years, anymore than anyone else in this economy is. We all have to figure out how to adapt with the times. I was pleased to see that the tool he used to track influence in AI weightings has me in the top 4%. That’s not bad. My influence will increasingly show up via the output of AI models. In fact, I’ve noticed rising referral traffic from AI chatbots at the same time traditional search traffic is going down.

Even though it’s a bear market for high-minded intellectualism, that’s what I’m going to continue to aspire to create. My goal is to help people build lives, institutions, and a society that flourish in today’s world. My focus is the human, cultural, and institutional foundations of that flourishing. I want to be committed to discerning and aligning with the truth, providing deep insight you can’t get anywhere else, building up not just tearing down, and trying to be constructively forward looking during a time of American transition. I want to model the kind of person and thinker we need to see in this world. I don’t always get it right, but I at least want to aspire to that.

I hope you value what I do. And I hope you’ll financially support me by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. Paying subscribers are the only way that I’m able to continue doing what I’m doing. Thanks so much for your support.

Best of the Web

NYT: ‘Both Parties Kind of Get It Wrong’: The Young Men Who May Swing the Midterms (gift link) - Many Gen Z men who voted for Donald Trump are dismayed by his time in office. But they say they are not hearing an appealing pitch from Democrats, either

Priyanka Desai: The Millennial Midlife Crisis is Going to be a Barbell - Millennials are hitting the dip with no Corvette, no house, and, for the first time in consumer history, no appetite (see: peptides)

Oren Cass: ‘The Vibes Are Not Good’ - Two college students discuss America’s broadest challenges.

Helen Andrews: How Yuppies Changed America

New content from me this week: The Evangelical Business Mindset - Evangelicals are remarkably good at making money and remarkably bad at turning it into cultural power.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: Bryan Johnson by Katriece Ray/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0