Do We Know How to Live?

biotenders, assemble!

Ezra Klein spent an hour with Gary Shteyngart last week, talking about how we are living inside Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story. A hypervisual, looks-obsessed, wellness-crazed world where everyone is staring at screens and grading each other by metrics while the country falls apart around them. Sixteen years ago, it was satire. Now it’s a Tuesday.

I, like many of you, have been collecting my own field notes on these archetypes of “success.” When I was entering my founder journey, I read a Medium post (remember those?!) by a founder who tracked his life in 15 minute increments for two years and published the dataset. My favorite Bryan Johnson story (legend has it; I, of course, was not invited): a dinner party for a room full of Hollywood people, one or two Kardashians included, served brown rice, broccoli, and a small ceremonial pile of seeds, then everyone invited to leave at 7:30 because that’s when he goes to bed. When asked about his interiority, Marc Andreessen said he does zero introspection: “as little as possible” and that “great men of history don’t sit around and do that stuff.” And Clavicular, the looksmaxxing streamer with more reach than most senators, publicly talks about smashing the bones in his face with a blunt object so that they heal stronger, and sharper. You can’t make this stuff up.

Now here’s a question for us, dear reader: why does it feel safer to watch someone restrict than to watch someone enjoy?

Are we more afraid of living than we are of dying?

I don’t think we’re afraid of decline, exactly. I think we are more afraid of someone visibly, unguardedly enjoying their life without a protocol attached to it. So we hand these people millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of views, and what they’re selling, underneath the protocols, is the permission to stop wanting things. If that’s what Bryan Johnson is putting down, 4 million of us are picking it up.

A small, related data point: 1 in every 8 Americans has now taken a GLP-1. A quick caveat, because this isn’t a dunk on the drugs, they’re a genuine medical tool for people who need them (certain chronic diseases, obesity, addiction). But there’s a difference between treatment, and microdosing one to lose ten pounds before a wedding. The Cut wrote about the flattening that can follow, the dulled interest and energy users didn’t sign up for, calling it “Life in Beige.” Let's sit with that for a moment: the side effect of the drug built to help us want less food also makes us want less. Period.

This is the thing I’ve been circling around, and I finally have coined a word for it: biotending.

Biohacking treats the body like a system to debug, every appetite a glitch, every pleasure in need of a tracker to justify it. Biotending is the literal opposite. A body, like a garden, doesn't need debugging. It needs weather, attention; leave the occasional weed alone and it can turn out to be a wildflower.

I’m almost embarrassed to share this (truly, this is like showing you my underwear drawer) but I’ve started doing something I call Wonder Walks. I wake up, drink my coffee, and walk to the park with no headphones (properly rawdogging it, as the kids say) and just trying to fall in love with the world a little. I listen to the birds. I look up. Have you noticed how rarely you look up? You will now. There’s probably a parasympathetic, cortisol-dropping, nervous system regulating explanation for why this feels good. But the part I actually love has nothing to do with that: I’m just there. Fully, stupidly alive. I don’t need to turn it into meaning, or content, or this very Substack post (welp) for it to “count.”

(the sunrise hitting my favorite Dr. Seuss tree on my Wonder Walk)

Bryan Johnson has his Don’t Die Summit. Conference rooms, bright lights, biomarker and blood tests, longevity gadgets.

What if we had a:

Let’s Be Alive party.

Leave your Oura ring (which I am addicted to) at the door. Bring something you made with your hands and are slightly embarrassed by. Bring a friend who still believes in fun and human connection. We’ll drink too much wine and eat delicious food and feel crappy about it the next day, on purpose. We’ll stay up past our bedtimes. Somebody will cry a little while somebody else busts out the best/worst dance moves.

Who’s in?

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