On Energy

How often do you think about energy efficiency?

I started taking it seriously when I noticed my worst decisions clustered in the last few hours before bed. I ate things I shouldn’t have eaten, I bought things online I shouldn’t have bought, and sent messages I ended up regretting.

So I made a rule. A few hours before bed, I stopped making decisions. I got into bed, read a book, or watched a movie. It worked. I didn’t ruin my sleep with midnight snacking. No more strange purchases. No more weird messages. Life got better.

I focused on treating it as an energy problem.

Our brains have a finite energy budget. It is always running. Even when you are just sitting and reading this, your brain is operating very close to its maximum energy capacity. Muscles are different, they can ramp output dramatically when needed. But the brain's "max power" is only about 5–10% higher than its resting state. By the end of the night, your brain has effectively been running at for 16 hours straight. It is still active, but worse at filtering bad impulses, which is why its hard to resist eating the wrong thing, buying the wrong thing, or sending the wrong message.

The same principle shows up with motion, we assume performance comes from producing more of it. But really it comes from wasting less. Speed is not mainly about top speed, but about momentum. Going fast is mostly about not slowing down.

Energy in Daily Life

Energy allocation is the big question of adult life. It shapes work, relationships, and family.

How tired do you feel after work? What can you still do with the hours that remain? Do you have enough left for a side project, a social life, a workout?

Consumption is the answer modern life gives to it. After work, commuting, stress, errands, messaging, most people are left with enough energy left to consume.

This is part of why remote work became so popular. It’s not about saving time. It gave people energy back by removing the commute. The same is true of the three-day weekend. People dream of it because it changes the whole energy math of the week. If the weekend only really has one recoverable day (saturday), then adding a third day does not increase rest by a third. It doubles it.

Energy efficiency comes up with dating all the time. The energy mismatch couple. One person wants more more novelty and stimulation. The other wants more quiet and stillness. Sometimes that difference works. Other times it breaks the couple down because it’s so annoying.

But if you really want to feel energy allocation acutely. Start a family. Especially in the present day. Classical parenting resembles modern pet ownership. Modern parenting resembles endangered-species conservation. Parents do not just lose free time. They lose windows where energy used to be restored. The weekend no longer recovers you. It becomes another site of expenditure. It’s all worth it of course. But energy allocation is a very serious business when you enter different life stages.

The Energy Business

Zoom out a little, and you’ll notice what we call health industry is really the energy business.

Every protocol, supplement, influencer, and drug company is essentially making you the same promise, I will give you less fatigue and more energy. This is an enormous market. Ask people what they want from their body and, sooner or later, the answer is usually the same, more energy.

For good reason, modern life demands energy across many fronts at once. Work, social life, body, status, money, information, self-presentation. People in the past often lived hard lives, but life was slower. Modern life is broader.

So we get a stimulant boom. Coffee is everywhere, Adderall, energy drinks, peptides, creatine, high protein products, nicotine pouches, TRT, supplements. At their core, they're all attempts to extend energy output beyond what the system naturally produces.

And what you eventually notice is that even the most prominent health influencers are often on some kind of therapy for energy themselves. The whole culture converges on the same energy problem.

These interventions do work. But most of them do not create energy in the literal sense. They do not generate ATP, the cell’s actual energy currency. What they do is change your relationship to fatigue and borrow against the future.

Caffeine blocks fatigue signaling. Adderall intensifies alertness and drive by pushing catecholamine systems harder. Nicotine stimulates the nervous system while adding cardiovascular stress. TRT wrecks your lipid metabolism. There’s always a trade-off.

Progress Just Means More Energy

The richer we get, the more energy we demand from our society, our infrastructure, and our bodies. Data centers are the new example. They consume astonishing amounts of electricity to sustain the always-on, high-computation world we are building. The AI future.

This might be what we really mean by progress. A perpetual expansion of energy

Even the washing machine raised the standard of cleanliness and the volume of laundry. More energy doesn't produce rest. It produces new obligations that require more energy. The civilization runs this way. So do the people inside it

If you trace stimulant use alongside technological progress, the relationship is not perfectly linear, but it is clearly structural. As societies become more energy-intensive, people gravitate toward stimulants and the need for more energy.

This is true of modern life. The feeling of never having enough energy is not a personal failure, or even only a medical problem. It may be a sign that we live inside an energy-hungry civilization. We begin by building systems that consume enormous amounts of energy. Then, over time, those systems reshape us in their image. We become energy-hungry too.

the irony is, modern systems require enormous energy, but human pleasure often lives at a lower tempo. I’d rather ride a bike and walk than drive a car to the destination. In the car I’m trying to take the shortest route possible. On a bike I like taking the longest or more scenic route.

Which means the fix is probably not more input. It's better allocation.

Energy Allocation

For years, mitochondria were described mainly as the cell’s power plants. But that metaphor now seems incomplete. We are now learning they do not just sit in the background generating energy. They help the body track expenditure and help determine when the organism needs to shift into another state. They may help govern it.

Martin Picard, a Columbia researcher who studies mitochondrial psychobiology, has a theory that if we can just move energy around better, we can solve mental health problems, or other diseases. He has a good podcast on this subject.

Essentially he argues, the body has an energy budget. It is finite, and different processes compete within it. When you get sick, your appetite drops. It’s part of a broader sickness response. The body shifts to fighting infection and away from ordinary routines. Where energy and metabolic resources are directed matters.

You can keep adding inputs, but if the system is already spending its budget on chronic inflammation, stress, or psychological strain, the extra inputs mostly feed the overhead.

This is why low grade stressors harm our health. They are metabolically expensive. Energy spent on chronic stress is energy not spent on repair, resilience, immune function, or long-term maintenance.

Stress steals from the systems that keep us healthy and slows their ability to preserve us over time.

Picard's prescriptions are deliberately ordinary, eat less, move more, foster meaning and connection. The foundations of better energy allocation are behavioral, psychological, social.

Anti-Overhead Technology

A lot of traditional behavior starts to make more sense once you see life as an energy-allocation problem.

Spirituality is an anxiety-reduction technology. Not every problem is yours to carry. You fulfill your obligations and leave the rest to God, or the gods. It places a boundary around rumination and gives the mind permission to stop spending energy on what it cannot control.

Keep yourself feeling light

Vows work the same way. You make a vow and now you never have to expend energy debating other options. A lot of men become very succesful after they get into a relationship because they can now spend all their energy on work.

Rituals in general are energy-saving devices. Hospitality is one of the oldest. Host-guest roles, expected gestures, they all reduce social ambiguity and lower the energy cost of encounter. The culture has already solved the problem in advance.

The Odyssey is organized almost entirely around this principle. Every arrival of Odysseus to a new land/person is a test of whether the ritual continues, or if something will go wrong because the established framework is not being adhered to.

Now you can ask yourself questions.

What am I spending my energy on?

Does it make me money? Ok, this is important enough to expend energy on

Does it make me happy? Ok, this is important enough to expend energy on

Does it give me meaning? Ok, this is important enough to expend energy on

But for other things in life, if it just saps up your energy, it may not make sense.

A person with a reason to get up is already running a better energy budget before the day begins. The people who seem to have the most energy are rarely the ones running the fastest. They are the ones who have decided what deserves their effort.