The Unbearable Sadness of the Health Influencer

Longevity and anti-aging is all around us these days. Living for as long as possible is becoming a goal. It’s hard not to notice. Most older famous people seem to be on something.

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Aging while staying healthy is an elite preoccupation at this point. That’s probably because the majority of the population doesn’t seem to be healthy.

It’s hard not to notice the impact of our environment on peoples’ health. People seem unwell, unhealthy, bothered, and generally dissatisfied. Many of us turn to health influencers for guidance. Health influencers are persuasive and appear to have cracked the code to better living. We sift through their content, hungry for any nugget of wisdom that might make a difference. Our challenge is to figure out what advice is good and which one is not. It can be daunting. But almost everything is like this now, including Chess.

However, what you often encounter with health influencers is a descent into madness that borders on parody. It seems this phenomenon is more rampant in the health sphere than in others. You'll come across a tweet that's garnered thousands of likes and is taken at face value, yet it teeters on the edge of being a complete joke.

You find asking yourself whether you truly want to live like this everyday. It seems so bizarre and unnatural. The deeper you go the worse it gets.

They all have these very consistent routines that that they do everyday. These routines are done without much joy or happiness. It’s this slog through life. There is an unbearable sadness to these videos. This doesn’t seem at all like the good life, in the Philosophical sense.

It's reminiscent of the ancient Greek myth of Tithonus. He was a mortal beloved by the goddess Eos, who requested Zeus grant him immortality. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth. Thus, Tithonus was cursed to live forever, aging and deteriorating. His existence turned into a burden, an endless longing for death that would never arrive. He eventually transformed into a cicada, eternally chirping, a symbol of his joyless, never-ending life.

Similarly, the modern health and fitness influencer peddles discipline alongside misery and isolation. Many resort to tactics like harsh self-criticism and constant self-deprecation. What you may notice about these people is that they are helpful at one point, but the approach becomes no longer suitable in the long term. It’s a textbook example of a high-functioning neurotic—self-abusive, with a mindset that could lead to lasting damage. It's a mentality that's far from advisable for those around you.

I look at people like 92 year old William Shatner. He plays with animals, rides horses and bicycles. He talks about having life force, a vitality and genuinely enjoying his time on earth. Something that is missing from the debate on health and longevity that most health influencers don’t discuss.

You can see the same type of life force and vitality from other men who are still alive. It’s not this extremely strict adherence to routine. 92 year old Clint Eastwood (still making movies), 99 year old Charlie Munger (heavily trading before he recently passed), or 80 year old Mick Jagger (still doing shows). I’m sure they all have health routines but nothing like a health influencer has. Or even someone like Donald Trump, he doesn’t look healthy but somehow he has this vitality and life force that keeps him here and going.

It’s inevitable that we will probably follow (some) health influencers. There are some very important things I have noticed that they tend to miss. Take the good but leave the bad.

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1) Filtering of Time: Health influencers focus almost entirely on contemporary research studies which have the side effect of making blind to the benefits of food that have been filtered by time. They are blind to the Lindy Effect

2) The Stress Problem. The business of the influencer is to stress you out about every move you do in life. But in studies of longevity the oldest people in the world cope with stress the best. .

3) “Aging” is not Lindy: What we think of as aging is a modern condition. What ended up happening in the past is you would be functional until the last year or so of your life and then die. Today, we live in a slow descent of frailty.

They Forget About The Lindy Effect

Neomania is the celebration of the new over the old. It engulfs people in a pathological celebration of ignorance, dulling their senses to the point where history and experience fade into oblivion. This blinding obsession with the new, a perverse inversion of the Lindy effect. It usually finds its adherents among technology enthusiasts or social ideologues who do not see the downsides of changing society. But it is also prevalent among health influencers.

Consider the archetype of the modern health influencer, fixated on the latest research studies, yet oblivious to the enduring wisdom of the Lindy effect. This principle suggests that the true test of a food's (or drink's) safety and efficacy lies in its historical longevity. If a food has been consumed for centuries, if not millennia, it's likely not harmful; in fact, it's probably beneficial.

Take, for example, Paul Saladino's stance on broccoli. This vegetable has graced our tables for centuries. It is even mentioned in Pliny's "Natural History." If it were truly detrimental, we'd have known by now.

Here this influencer makes the fundamental mistake not taking into account time and filtering. You can’t group cigarettes with coffee and alcohol. Coffee has been drunk for 500 years. Alcohol for thousands of years. Cigarettes were known to cause cancer already by the 1930s and 40s.

Or take this example of eggs

You’ll constantly see this over and over. There are videos with millions of views on the dangers of Olive Oil even though this is a liquid that has been consumed for thousands of years. Or take the modern obsession with abstaining from alcohol. While excessive alcohol consumption is obviously bad, it’s not clear that moderation levels are bad.

The neglect of the time-tested wisdom in favor of recent research studies is a concerning trend. This reliance on new studies over traditional knowledge is driven by a desire to appear informed and intelligent to the public. However, this approach overlooks the fact that time-honored practices have proven their value over generations, whereas scientific studies are frequently debunked and revised.

Additionally, health influencers often focus on a specific niche to stand out in a crowded market. This specialization can lead to inflexibility, as they tailor their advice to fit their chosen niche rather than considering a broader range of perspectives and evidence.

The Stress is What Will Kill You

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