I didn’t appreciate how essential calf muscles are until I tore mine doing front kicks. Standing in the shower felt like a baby shark was chewing off my leg.
Or how important hand ligaments are, until I sprained my thumb and couldn’t eat with my dominant hand.
It was nearly impossible to get out of the car or walk up stairs with an MCL knee sprain.
And tweaking the neck or an ankle? Just wow.
As human beings, we’re naturally attached to every bit of our bodies. And after taking damage, you realize something pretty quickly.
Everything is connected. There seems to be no body part you can do without.
There’s that scene from Logan’s Run
The book, not the movie.
The Sandman, Logan, is on the run from his human hunter colleagues with the girl, Jessica.
A gang has captured them.
The price to survive the moment? Logan has to take a knife and cut an ounce of flesh off Jessica.
One ounce. Anywhere.
How do you choose?
Then there’s the game kids play, “Would you rather…?”
Would you rather go blind…or lose your hearing? Lose an arm…or lose a leg? Die from cancer…or diabetes? Daaang, that’s a tough one, bro.
The answer, of course, is NONE OF THE ABOVE.
The body is a complex assemblage of interlocking parts, with a distinct lack of spares.
Ask the question, and your lizard brain shouts back, I’D RATHER NOT LOSE ANYTHING.
But then there are people or pets without parts
Life finds a way.
We can adapt, without parts. Sometimes literally after a shark attack.
If anything, this highlights the counterintuitive, holographic complexity of biology.
You can take out entire parts that you would think, INCONCEIVABLE to do without, and make do without.
Pets do it all the time, with zero fanfare.
Complexity can signal delicacy. All these tiny parts, take out just one and everything implodes.
But it can also mean resilience. All these supporting systems, take out a few and the backups swing into play.
The contradiction that is biology
Everything feels indispensable to the fearful primate monkey brain. The ankle bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone’s connected to the thigh bone, and the thigh bone’s connected to… everything else.
But for biological systems like human beings and paraplegic dogs, that apparently doesn’t mean fragile.
Swiss watches stop working if you smash them and bend one spring. Smash a person and they can reinvent themselves.
The problem is that the monkey brain thinks you’re a Swiss watch.
And as such, it’s very interested in sales copy offering a fix for your broken life.
The promise of repair
As a doctor, I’ve seen the rise of ads to simplify, simplify, simplify.
- Do these 3 things to get rid of stubborn belly fat
- Perform these 2 lifts twice weekly instead of spending hours in the gym
- Buy our workout machine to do strength, cardio, mobility, and stress relief!
It’s the basic marketing tactic: start with a pain point and provide a targeted solution, preferably with adjectives like “easy,” “new,” and “free.”
And because modern life is full of pain points—physical, financial, relational, familial, professional, emotional, and now technological (AGI and ASI)—and not enough mental bandwidth to deal with them, you have a target-rich sales environment for solutions.
But life, particularly human life, is complicated. Not just the biology, but the totality of our social experience.
The mind wants simplicity and craves certainty, yet reality is anything but.
As human beings, we are the opposite of simple and certain.
95% of people trying to lose weight by dieting will fail. In 2 decades, 2/3 of America will be obese. More than half of us will develop Alzheimer’s dementia by the time we reach our 70s. One in three American adolescents suffers from an anxiety condition.
Health and the human condition are many things, but simple they are not.
Solutions based on simplifying reality are doomed before they start.
You have to do it all
This is the nature of reality.
You can’t “have it all,” if that means being a Nobel prize-winning neurosurgeon philanthropist billionaire poet, with a well-adjusted nuclear family and 2 happy dogs. You can’t roar down the boulevard while standing on the brakes. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
The sales pitch that promises your complex life will be tons better if you adopt their new simple solution, in exchange for your money, time, or allegiance?
That’s a fantasy.
Because a) reality, biology, and human life in particular, are COMPLICATED, and b) we are more like Terminators than delicate clockwork prototypes.
Subatomic physics is NOT billiard balls on a pool table. We’ve had immune systems since before we were one-celled organisms in the primordial ooze; biology is billions of generations of compounded DNA complexity. And the human mind and trauma wounds? My gawd, just ask your spouse about you and your mom.
And David Goggins is right: we can accomplish way more than we limit ourselves thinking we can. We see proof of this in those who’ve been forced to go beyond conventional limits.
There is no “simple” in how the world works, other than how we wish things would be.
If you want to chase your grandkids, avoid dependency, assist others, and fight off an attacker, you will need to do more than walk every day.
You will have to do cardio, work strength in all directions, mobilize and counteract stiffness every single day throughout the day, and practice, practice, practice responses to being assaulted. And this is humanly possible.
If you want to live a long, vital, and disease-free life, you will need to do more than take a handful of supplements.
You will have to cut out processed foods, maintain a consistent calorie deficit to lose weight, avoid stress-inducing behaviors, and prioritize recovery and sleep. You’re capable of doing all this, too.
The more seriously you try to improve, the more you have to contend with. The never-ending nature of inquiry applies not just to healthcare, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or philosophy—that’s how life works. The loose thread on the sweater doesn’t lead to a suspicious pot of gold, it leads to more fuzz on the sweater.
That’s how you know that the sweater is real.
Can the 10,000 things be managed?
I took a class on Japanese Buddhism in college, and the instructor pointed something out.
There are more and less active practices to develop enlightenment. Tea ceremony (chadō) is much less strenuous than The Way Of The Sword (kendō). Martial arts have arguably more data points for your senses to work with, like distance, timing, and the weight of the blade.
But you are no less in the real world while sitting holding a cup of tea (or arranging flowers or meditating on a cushion) than you are wielding a katana.
Biohacking your life is based on the idea that certain parts of the real-world experience are a waste, and we’re going to blow right past those to get to “the good stuff.”
But that heuristic approach is problematic in a complex world. A mug of microwaved water and a bouillon cube is not the same as a home-cooked meal by a family friend in Bourgogne, France. There’s no way to distill reality without losing things in translation.
What about optimizing infrastructure?
That works.
If you guarantee that certain critical, foundational processes get prioritized, you make it much more likely that certain outcomes will happen.
If you make movement, eating right, moderating stress, socializing, and guarding recovery the foundational pillars of your personal infrastructure, odds are high that you will be sound of body and mind.
Though I’m not a political or social scientist, I imagine that if you make clean water, reliable electricity, education, public transportation, childcare, and healthcare priorities for public infrastructure, odds would be high that you’d have positive societal outcomes, too.
Improving infrastructure works because it acknowledges the complex nature of reality and uses consistent effort to match that complexity.
It doesn’t try to sell you on an easy, simplified version, no matter how appealing that would be. Optimizing infrastructure is like steering a cruise ship to Puerto Vallarta using navigation, nautical charts, and an experienced crew instead of crossing your fingers for landfall. It makes a particular outcome more likely, but it’s not a shortcut, and you’re ignoring nothing.
Reliable outcome, yes. Simplifying the world, no.
Action items
Consider the levels: basic reflex (conserve the seemingly critical), understanding redundancy (there are workarounds), the appeal of simplicity (a marketing appeal), and the appreciation of complexity (i.e., reality).
Then consider whether society’s reductionist message to simplify your way out of overwhelm, especially for a subscription price, is truly helping you.
Finally, consider initiating an infrastructure change to your daily workflow. It’s not sexy, but dialing in fundamentals is very supportive of better outcomes.
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