There are an awful lot of health, fitness, and longevity podcasters out there. If you listen to them, and I frequently do, you’ll find some of these people go to incredible extremes in what they do for health and longevity.
Ben Greenfield has several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of health, fitness, and life-extension equipment in his home. Dave Asprey spends $3,000 per month on 150 supplements a day. Bryan Johnson eats almost the same food every day, and his last meal of the day is at 11 AM:
Although pretty much everybody wants to be healthier, very few people CAN do these things, and even fewer people want to because it’s such an all-consuming effort.
And of course, does it even work? We can speculate, but we won’t definitively know for another half-century.
I thought about this myself because after listening to all these health and longevity shows for years, I had crept up to more than 20 supplements per day. Once you’re taking that many supplements, it is fairly expensive, and it’s just a chore to take that many pills. So, I took the time to research everything I was taking in detail via AI.
Know what I learned?
Not that most of the supplements “didn’t work,” but that most of them had a pretty small effect. Eventually, after doing more research, feeding my labs into AI, and digging deep into it, I ended up on 8 supplements that probably had 90% of the same benefits as the 22 I was taking and were also much cheaper.
As you get older, you find out that a lot of life is actually like this.
There’s doing way too little, doing way too much, and somewhere in between, there’s a happy medium where you get most of the benefits without paying a huge premium for them.
Although there are some areas where being on the raggedy edge pays extreme dividends compared to what everyone else gets (see Elon Musk, LeBron James, and Sydney Sweeney for great examples of this), in most of life, there’s genuinely a sweet spot where you get all you need out of it without wasting a lot of time, effort and money.
For example, with money, you don’t want to be poor, but at a certain point, the benefits you get from spending all that dough are going to get increasingly small. Is your third mansion going to make you happier than your second one? Is staying in the nicest suite in Vegas going to really be that much better than a regular room in a 5-star hotel? Are thousand-dollar dresses going to get you that much more attention than a well-fitting, nice-looking $100 dress anywhere outside of the Oscars?
Speaking of “stuff,” is the highest-end freezer, dishwasher, TV, shoes, car, or suit really all that much better than the high-medium or lower end of an excellent product? Not really. If you’re single, do you need to break the bank for a 2,500 square foot house? Probably not.
How many people are working jobs that they hate with a passion because it pays a little more than some job they’d find much more tolerable? Is making $5,000 more per year worth waking up every day and hating the idea of going to work? People make that trade-off all the time, and it’s probably not worth it for most of them.
You can fall into the same trap with trying to be parent-of-the-year. There is a lot of range between being a lousy parent and an obsessive parent who drives themselves a little crazy because so much of their life revolves around their kid. Nobody is going to say to you, “Well, maybe you don’t need to go into debt to send little Jimmy to Basketball Camp this summer and get him a $200 pair of sneakers he won’t appreciate anyway,” but some people absolutely should consider what’s “good enough.”
Because of online dating, a LOT of people have fallen into this trap with their relationships. For example, this recent Tweet stood out:
It’s a woman putting a sign on her dorm room that says, “No man under 6 ft. should be able to walk in.” Come to think of it, it’s a little like those signs at amusement parks:
While everybody has preferences and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, this kind of thinking has mostly been created by online dating, where you set your preferences to arbitrary levels and exclude everyone else. Once you get beyond “taller than you,” most women’s height preferences often turn out not to be that strongly held. Same goes for income earned. There’s a world of difference between having some basic standards and turning down 99% of the male population because they don’t meet some ideal you came up with on the fly one day after reading a dumb article in Vogue.
Meanwhile, there are some men could be dating, but aren’t, that sound like that famous Crumb cartoon every time they see a woman who doesn’t match up to the hot girl they saw watching p*rn last night:
We live in a society full of people who are dating less, having less sex, and checking out of marriages faster because they have trouble finding that sweet spot between “I’m going to be alone” and “This needs to be nearly perfect for it to be worth it for me.”
The number of different things this applies to are practically endless.
Yes, you need to pay SOME attention to your safety. Don’t do cartwheels through traffic on the freeway or walk through the bad part of town at 3 AM carrying a wad of cash. But if you go too far in the other direction, you’re going to shrink your life down and miss so many opportunities to travel, meet people, go on dates, and try new things.
Are you going to check out of your fairly successful 7 year old marriage because you feel like you need a change or “want to see what else is out there.” That’s like going to Atlantic City and betting your house on a game craps. Chances are, it just ends with you losing the place that could have been your home for the rest of your life.
Statistics consistently show that people with college degrees outearn those without, but does that mean you should spend eight years at an expensive private college earning a degree in social services that you may still be paying for 20 years from now? Probably not.
The unfortunate truth is that unless you can clone yourself, you’re either going to have to neglect an awful lot of important things in your life or find that sweet spot where you can maximize your benefits in most areas. That goes double for high achievers or people pouring a lot of time into one area or another. There’s nothing with being unbalanced for a while in your life, but that means finding the sweet spots in other areas will become even more important. Nobody has time to be “the best” at more than one or two things. Everywhere else, you have to except some trade-offs.
So, don’t be a perfectionist and don’t spend your life pouring your heart and soul into things that won’t make that much difference anyway. For most things in life? That “sweet spot” is where you want to be.
I feel like you need to tell us what the 8 supplements you kept were...
Well said, John. And so true.