Stop listening to your body

Talk about a clickbait headline. But seriously: stop. The millennial obsession with wearable devices and health optimization is pointless, narcissistic quackery.

This week, a young, healthy man named Steven Bartlett received 25 million views on X as he described the suffering he faced when he pushed his body to its limits.

Bartlett, whose biceps suggest he spends a lot of time at the gym and whose X profile describes him as an “entrepreneur” (such a beautifully elastic word, are we not all entrepreneurs?) climbed K2 ran an ultramarathon swam the English Channel had “a couple glasses of wine.”

The results were horrific. As Bartlett explained to a fellow entrepreneur:

I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day… I podcasted worse. I didn't go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad… I could track all of this on my Whoop.

Hold on a second there, buddy.

Your what?

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(Whoop-assing nonsense! For pennies a day! With your help!)

Or consider a one-time donation? Just this one time?

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The Whoop turns out to be the Peloton of wearable fitness devices, a cool-looking black wristband that monitors calories burned, sleep stages, pulse, temperature, oxygen consumption, and other health metrics (for lack of a better word). It then produces scores for “sleep performance,” “recovery rate,” and the like, and transmits them back to you.

At first glance, nothing may seem inherently wrong with this level of detail. Couldn’t we all use more information about our bodies?

Well, no.

The technology-heavy health optimization craze that Silicon Valley is now pushing depends on several myths.

First, the idea that we need detailed technology to know when our bodies aren’t functioning well. Your body tells you you’re sick in the simplest, most basic way: you feel lousy. You have a fever. You have a persistent cough. You can’t keep food down. Your heart races when you are at rest. You have night sweats. (If you have persistent night sweats, go see a doctor. I’m not saying it’s cancer… but, yeah, it’s cancer.)

Clinical symptoms matter; something is wrong, and your body’s own internal mechanisms are not fixing it. But the Whoop and similar devices are inherently tracking you in ways you can’t feel on your own — subclinical changes that may or may not matter, and may or may not resolve on their own or progress into actual clinical problems you can feel.

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(Big whoop)

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Second, that our bodies are machines that need to be and should be functioning at peak efficiency at all times. We have a lot of slack, and young (and even middle-aged) people can survive for long periods on suboptimal sleep and nutrition in highly stressful environments. Fallujah in 2004 comes to mind.

This resilience doesn’t mean people who don’t take care of themselves for long stretches won’t eventually pay a price. But the short term hits even from obviously dangerous behavior like smoking and excessive drinking matter less than most people realize.

Third, the flip side: that any of this focus on healthy living makes much difference long-term.

Want to see the limits of modern medicine up close? Check out national life expectancy charts for 2026. Nigeria now tops 63; India, 67; Mongolia, 70; Brazil, 72, just four years behind the United States. Outside of Afghanistan and a handful of African countries, no nation is under 60.

As I have written before, the massive improvements in human life expectancy came from sanitation, nutrition, and antibiotics and antiviral drugs. More recently, cutting smoking has helped too. The trillions of dollars rich countries spend on modern medicine and healthcare makes very little marginal difference. Not none, but much less than we all hope.

Unfortunately, people in rich countries do not have much longer healthy lifespans either — particularly past 80, physical and mental disabilities pile up. (In the United States, the obesity epidemic has led to a generation of seriously unhealthy middle-aged Americans; whether the GLP-1s can undo that damage remains to be seen.)

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About that one-time donation…

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So, okay, devices like the Whoop or supplements like peptides are (practically) all marketing hype — Silicon Valley’s version of raw milk.

What’s the harm?

The harm is that obsessing over your health and every measure of your health can make you brittle physically — and will without doubt make you brittle psychologically.

Handling stress, in reasonable doses, helps your body deal with stress. Knowing that your body can recover from stressful situations or illness on its own, without costly interventions or any intervention at all, helps you face and overcome illness. Constantly taking your own inventory is psychologically draining.

Elite professional athletes whose bodies actually are their jobs may need or want this level of detail (although plenty of elite professional athletes treat their bodies less than perfectly).

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(Bartolo Colon, aka “Big Sexy,” winner of 247 major league baseball games, 51st all-time.)

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Everybody else needs to get over themselves.

Get some exercise, get some sun, get decent sleep, don’t eat too much junk (some junk is fine), don’t drink too much, don’t smoke, talk to your friends, and if you do have serious clinical symptoms (like, hypothetically speaking, a drop foot) get them checked.

But stop pretending you are going to live forever, or that you will never have aches and pains, or that narcissistically and obsessively tracking your health will do anything but fuel your narcissism.

Whoop-dee-do.

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(Cheaper than a Whoop! And better for your health…)