edging

planing

Editor’s Note: This is the longest piece we’ve published. It will approach 5,000 words. Take your time with it. There are no shortcuts as you’ll see.

Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash

You start your morning at 5am everyday. Sometimes before if you’re lucky. But luck has nothing to do with it. You planned this. You went to bed at 8pm Eastern Time, before the sun was completely down. It was a restful sleep. Or so you think.

Just to be sure, you check your WHOOP Recovery score. Green status, 70%, just barely in the optimal zone. You enter yesterday's activities and habits, providing data that allow you to test for correlation, though not quite causation. But then again, you aren't a statistician. Did you read before bed? Yes. Ditto spending time outside, journaling your thoughts, following an intermittent fasting diet, meditating, taking a cold shower. You did your breath-work - Wim Hof method, of course - and while you intended to follow a vegetarian diet, you had some salmon for lunch. Same with taking a magnesium supplement - you heard it works and your data seems to indicate it gives you a slight edge with a 3% higher recovery score when you swallow one. You figure you can take every edge you can get. After all, you're now officially in your mid-forties.

You listen to yet another episode of the Rich Roll podcast. But before getting to the guest, and at least once more during the two-and-a-half hour episode, you are once again beckoned to buy Athletic Greens. Mr. Roll swears by them. You order a free starter pack and a three month’s supply with the discount code RICHROLL. Next, you queue up an episode of Andrew Huberman’s podcast, bracing yourself for three-and-a-half hours of content serving as fodder for a supplement purchase. $370 a month seems appropriate for the edge they’re supposed to provide.

Shipments arrive and you begin mainlining AG1s with every drink of water you take to wash down the fifth supplement pill of the day. You miss a dose and worry about tomorrow's WHOOP Recovery score and whether that means you should push it during your workout or not. How you feel has nothing to do with it, it's all about metrics and HRV. Science.

Next day, you wake up at 4:45am in time for your 5:30am HIIT class. Again, you log your previous day's routines. You realize you forgot to add "supplements" as a tracker. You add it now while noting you only took 4 of the 5 doses. You're not sure if this was what caused your yellow-trending-towards-red Recovery score of 34%. You woke up to the sound of birds welcoming the early rise of the sun, feeling ready to tackle a workout but your score gives you pause. After searching frantically in the WHOOP app, you find and start one of Huberman's "Increase Alertness" breathing exercises, designed - scientifically, as they say - to give you a bit more energy despite last night’s poor sleep before you conclude you're going to take it easy. You drive to the gym as the sun starts rising, drinking your first dose of Athletic Greens.

You congratulate yourself on a workout done well, albeit at 70% effort. You feel great, like you had a lot more in you. You start to question why you held back so much today, that despite what the recovery score said, you were up for more strain.

You decide that your numbers indicate you could a boost, that you’re feeling rundown. You remember an advertisement on the Andrew Huberman podcast for a supplement kit. You head to his website and order a month's supply. As a test. You figure you know people who eat a very well-balanced - some would even say exemplary - diet yet take supplements, too, so it would be worth a try despite the cost.

While waiting for your first shipment to arrive, you pick up your copy of David Sinclair's book Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To sitting inertly beside you. For a man as old as he is, he sure does look young; you're younger than him, but you feel as if you look older. You start to read the book and think there's got to be a faster way to absorb this. You remember the free audiobook you had from the Independent Book Store Day and stop to download the audiobook instead. You press play. You notice that there’s a way to list at 1.5x, or even 2x, speed. You select 1.5x, but it’s not fast enough. You move the setting to 2x. You decide to go for a run while listening, thinking you may as well practice what he's preaching. You get to the part about metformin - a drug typically reserved for those with Type 2 Diabetes - and the study showing that it extended the lives of rats. On your return home, you go online and find a doctor who will prescribe it for you. It's a generic medication so it's worth a shot. Or rather a pill.

A month into taking your five supplements along with your daily dose of metformin and your WHOOP monthly report doesn't show much of a change from the prior. On closer inspection, you see that there is a change, but it's not an improvement. You think back on all you've done to get an edge - the supplements, the cold water plunges, the breathing techniques, the metformin, the tracking every of single activity and daily routine - and the results leave you at least starting to question the entire approach. You ask the WHOOP Coach, an AI tool designed to use your own data, and that of others, for insights into behavior modifications or workouts that will have an optimized impact. It reminds you that if you want to have Peak Performance tomorrow, you should have gone to bed three hours ago. Yet the bells at the church three blocks away have not yet signaled 9pm.

You decide to go to bed hoping you will be able to Get By tomorrow if you maximize your bedtime routine. You neglected to turn off any blue light devices two hours before bedtime - you were busy in the WHOOP App - but you managed to journal about your day and decided to meditate for a few minutes. Wim Hof breath-work at this time will only cause you to be more alert and then you remember that Huberman has a wind down breathing exercises in the WHOOP App. Another flash of blue light as you start to follow along with the breathing in, hold, two, three, four, breathing out, two, three, four. You repeat, and repeat four more times. You grab a book, The Count of Monte Cristo,¹ as another way to ease into bedtime - nonfiction before bed tends to keep you up - and head upstairs. You get upstairs only to remember you had not yet taken your magnesium supplement. Back down, into the kitchen for a half glass of water and one 400mg white magnesium pill, which you quickly swallow. Looking in the medicine cabinet which looks more like a Vitamin Shoppe shelf, you notice a Canadian muscle relaxer; the pinched nerve in your back still acting up, makes your decision easy.

You wake up the next morning to a different kind of blue light. The rising sun against the clouds give the world outside your window a bluish tinge, not like the golden hour of a setting sun or that of another morning's rising sun. You sit listening to the birds. You decide not to open the WHOOP app, decide not to document yesterday's journal, decide not to look at your recovery score. Setting out for a run, you think that maybe, just maybe, it's all bullshit.

You return from your run, a slow Zone 2 jaunt through town, the morning's fog a mist like the sea-spray off a wave crashing against the jetty with the coolness that hits when standing near a fountain which caught the breeze. You feel the stagnation and laziness of the past two weeks leave as say goodbye to the sour mood that came with it. Clear-hearted - from the increased blood flow - and full-eyed - from the perspective afforded by the run - you can't lose.² Your run was filled with thoughts, seemingly random but somehow connected to an approaching epiphany, about a world continually filled with shortcuts.

No need to read the book, listen to it at 2x speed instead; no need to listen to it at 2x speed, read a Cliff’s Notes or Blinkist summary instead; no need to read the summary, instead, just read - and like - someone's social media post about it without actually grasping the concept. No need to study, retain and review over the course of a school year, just get Cerebral or Done to send you ADHD medications in the mail so you can focus and cram the night before the test. No need to worry about tests at all, just have Gemini AI give you the answer.

No need to go out for groceries, any number of services can deliver them to your door, historically something one's neighbor's did for you when you were unable to venture out due to injury, illness or incapacitation. No need to create a thoughtful response to a business prospect, or something insightful to say on LinkedIn, Generative AI can now write something for you, the humanity removed - but not the humans whose copyrighted prose and personal creativity were sourced (though they were removed from any royalties or credit) - so you can increase your output while contributing nothing new to the world. Or you could just use your most special of days - the birth of your child or the moment when you propose to your wife and she says yes and what that teaches you about B2B sales.³

No need to eat better or exercise more to lose those remaining pesky 15 pounds, now there's a simple sho(rtcu)t to change your brain chemistry to not feel as hungry, but still allows you to eat ultra-processed edible substances. No need to even take a break from your day to make a lunch consisting of real food, you've got your glass of Soylent with its “science-backed nutrition” to keep you sustained, completely in on the joke that it's named after a movie, Soylent Green, where Charlton Heston finds out it was people, but would also continue drinking it if you found that out to be true of your meal-replacement beverage.

No need to face reality with added empty calories, we've got alcohol-infused seltzers and THC-gummies to get us through the days and nights. No need to worry about getting it right, just break the news first to get that little bit of extra coverage. Even better: just make everything breaking news to keep viewers glued to the screen to increase advertising spend. You always have to be first, like calling "shotgun" the second you see a car as a teen. It's all about brevity and speed - soundbites and headlines, time to publication and stimulants to keep you alert and focused - over accuracy and originality.

Somehow, even the ultimate life hack author of the 4-Hour Workweek and 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferris, would agree with you:

If I find myself rushing to do something that I feel is original, I have to remind myself I'm rushing because it's not that original.⁴

You realize it's always been about gaining an edge. Like those struggling with addiction, the more you attempt to get an edge, the less effective each edge is. Sure, you can find the next thing to give you a temporary boost - you can switch from melatonin to magnesium just as one moves from THC (now with added probiotics) and alcohol (now with added phytochemicals) to harder stuff - to hone your capabilities but eventually, you end up like a knife’s edge: dulled from overuse.

I'm against edging; I'm for planing.

Let me explain. I've realized over time that for all my tracking, for all my trending, for all my attempts to gain what little favor an item ingested or a shortcut taken may have given me in the moment, or perceived within me in the weeks and months that followed its continual use to provide some sort of gain, that it was all from the faulty pretense that the quest for an edge was misguided at best, hubristic at second best and downright delusional at worst.

Tracking is one dimension, and while it allows you to mark progress and compare action versus inaction it ends like a bubble gum pop song, a monotony of an ear worm stuck in your head despite all efforts to the contrary, a slave to the constant tracking. If tracking is one dimension, edging is two dimensions. You compare each tracked item to another, testing against perceived placebos and dense data brought forth by evidence. You start to rely on things that show promise, putting effort behind their continuation while failing to understand what is really causing the change and improvement in the first place.

Andrew Huberman loves a good edging. He is prone to (ab)using his neuroscientist credentials to recommend some extract based on one published study that has been shown to improve some health factor in some non-human life form - and will gladly put it in a pill (it's always a pill) and charge you the aforementioned $370 for it - as a shortcut to getting that edge you seek while he edges closer himself. But as Alex Hutchinson in his incredible - and incredibly brief - take-down of Dr. Huberman⁵ in Outside Magazine, something New York magazine failed to do in their blatant - and blathering⁶ - hit-piece about him being a not-so-great-man, it's worse than that:

Consider the cost of that pursuit, however. You have limited time, energy, and resources, and dedicating these to performance hacks can distract you from foundation stuff like training, recovery, eating, and sleeping well.

He continues:

But it's not just the opportunity cost: paradoxically, taking what seems like a shortcut to better performance can nudge you toward doing a worse job on the basics.

He goes on to cite a study - with actual humans - which demonstrated those who thought they were taking a multivitamin ended up walking less when testing a pedometer than those who were told they took a placebo - both were placebos - and they also ate in a more unhealthy way. He shares that this is what is known as licensing: that we trade-off a little progress in one area for one in another. I'll call it what it is: cheating. The reality is we end up just cheating ourselves in the process by forgoing the real work.

David Sinclair is another man who loves slinging snakeoil though for him, it would more likely be rat oil as he too loves to peddle things - like taking metformin prophilactically - to improve health measures with evidence so scant the rats wouldn't even take it.⁷ This is a man with a doctorate - though not of medicine but of philosophy - with enough filler and injections to give the appearance of a life not yet lived. His aforementioned (co-authored) book, is the only book I've ever burned: and it burned well, what with all the shit in it. He's been accused - though to be fair, never convicted - of scientific fraud related to Resveratrol, a compound reputed to slow aging that Sinclair used to develop a drug that he later sold to GSK for $720 million. The studies used to validate Resveratrol's effect were done by another man, Dipak Das, whose work was discredited by the UCONN Health Center. When trying to distance himself from Das saying he never knew the man and "had to look up who he is", Sinclair was later confronted by the simple fact that he not only knew him, but served on a scientific committee on Resveratrol itself upon which he said, "I apologize. I did not expect my off-the-cuff comments to be printed. I will be more careful." It would have been too perfect had he blamed it on old age. Oh, and that $720m spent? Written off because GSK was never able to bring a drug to market using Resveratol. But my fellow edgers, you’re in luck: you can instead, buy Resveratrol from Sinclair directly. A quick look at Wikipedia would find at least five other controversies, but we'll spare him any further scrutiny, but what can you expect from a man from Australia?⁸

This (finally) brings us to the third dimension: planing. Unlike buddhism with its four levels of enlightenment, we can also reach enlightenment when we start to plane. It allows you to exist across multiple disciplines, to be a true renaissance man in the sense of being able to run a fast mile, do multiple sets of pushups, prioritize the time to read a book (or books (or many, many books)), or to write one's thoughts down (and to realize as a writer that you just switched between two subjects - you and one - in the same sentence causing potential confusion for the reader but deciding not to use AI to catch it and to instead notice it, decide you can change it and correct it, but decide against it, and to use it as a silly aside to make people know for sure that this was written by a human, for humans, typos and all, despite being someone who enjoys catching typos in others' writings and pointing out grammar mistakes but realizing mid-aside in an already meandering sentence that I, the writer, have the ability to choose, that I'm not beholden to a process in two dimensions but in three and can work across a plane).

Edging is all about making things easier; planing is all about making things better. The technology steward, Albert Borgmann, in his book, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, makes the case that as technology use and ubiquity increases - and thereby making things easier - happiness decreases. And while we can debate whether life is about being happy, let's replace happier with fuller, as in fulfillment, as being satiated or content; fulfillment as in accomplishment, useful; fulfillment as in to make real. I've written a lot in this newsletter about the need to just simply do the work, yet I still look for shortcuts.

And it's easy to see why shortcuts exist everywhere.

Instead of reading the book written thousands of years ago by a Stoic which has remained relevant, if not increasingly more important, all these years, have someone read it to you via audiobook while working out. Better yet, don't read it at all: have Generative AI summarize the complete works of all stoicism into a song written as if by Taylor Swift. Better yet still, have that song put through an AI filter to sound like one of her songs, in the sound of her album 1989.

Instead of putting money aside each month for retirement, just put a sizable chunk in Crytpo or juice GameStop or whatever stock is being hocked as a sure thing on Reddit. Better yet, bet on sports 24/7/52 from the comfort of your own home from the device in your pocket that already you were already using 12 hours a day, adding another hour checking scores and making in-game prop bets. Better yet again, you could have put that money into the California-based startup, Ambrosia,⁹ who for $8,000 would inject you with the blood of a 16 to 25-year old in an effort to reverse aging, the ultimate hack to seeing returns on your investments. Better yet once again, be super rich, don't pay taxes using loopholes written into the tax code; or just move to Florida, the ultimate edge.

Instead of heading to the store - or better yet, sending your pre-teen to the store to build some agency - to buy some groceries, have UberEats pick it up for you. Instead of making dinner, order from DoorDash to save a bit of time between episodes on Netflix. Instead of working out and eating right, get a prescription from Ro for Wegovy to eliminate your appetite. Instead of sending a thoughtful note to a business contact filled with meaning and the occaisional¹⁰ typo, have SalesForce come up with it using Generative AI (again). Instead of posting some shitty LinkedIn post using the proposal to your fiancé as a way to talk about SaaS selling like that guy above did, have LinkedIn generate its thoughts on it, but claim them as your own.

I write all of this not without sin or guilt but fully with it. While I wrote the first paragraphs in the second person, the reader could easily replace you with I and with it the appropriate grammar adjustments and have most of my days - heck, even today - pretty well summed up. It’s sadly less a fiction and more a reality than you probably think.

The origin of the word hypocrite, comes from hypokrites, a Greek compound word that translates to an interpreter from underneath. It referred to actors, who wore masks to distinguish the character being played on stage. I've worn the mask of edging for the better part of a decade now. So, yes, I'm a hypocrite. I write these words as a way to convince myself a change is needed. But I need to first, do no harm. I need to be a Hippocrate.

Hippocrates is known as the Father of Medicine from which the Hippocratic Oath is derived. Within his oath, he puts forth the following:

I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.

Even before doing no harm, he focuses on diet which is where I will continue.

Planing, doesn't sell drugs, edging does. Planing doesn't sell supplements, edging does. Planing doesn't sell books, edging does. That is, with one exception. Michael Pollan's Food Rules is a book that could be read between the first and second course at a farm-to-table restaurant but at its core could be just the opening lines to the book: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Seven - two less than Reagan's most feared - words¹¹ could replace all the diet fads, eliminate the need for all the supplements we take, cut out a supermarket's worth of processed and ultra-processed food and strike its own fear into the Manses of Mondelez and Nests of Nestle, the House of Kraft, General Mills and Clan Campbells.

Soylent is not food, it's nutrients in liquid form. Athletic Greens is not food, it's more nutrients in liquid supplement form. Fake meat is not food, it's nutrients in solid form made to taste like meat. And while I understand the need to cut down on meat consumption, especially for environmental reasons - I too made that decision years ago, and partook in a fake meat bonanza as a result - fake meat has its own consequences, not least of which is the flavors they inject it with made in factories in New Jersey. And who wants that?

Theseus' Paradox asks one to consider whether a boat, where over the course of a hundred years every piece is eventually replaced when it starts to decay, is still the same boat despite not having any original components. While I may agree that a boat or other objects like a car or a house could be considered the same after a complete rebuild, I've become convinced that in the case of food, this is not the case.

"Food, not nutrients, is the fundamental unit of nutrition." So says Nutrition Review, referenced within the pages of Chris Van Tulleken's exacting book Ultra Processed People, about the misguided premise that we can strip food down to its component parts, remove items that cause issues like spoilage and rot leading to higher costs of transport and shelf life, only to add them back in so the math equation of calories and fats and carbohydrates and proteins - your macros - plus the necessary vitamins and minerals that have been removed in the process. To those last two items, Van Tulleken elucidates for the reader:

In short, there aren't any supplements that work for healthy people. Beneficial nutrients only seem to help us when we consume them in context. Fish oil doesn't benefit us, but oily fish do. It seems unbelievable, I know. There's no supplement, vitamin or antioxidant that decreases risk of death, or even of disease of any kind in healthy people. Almost all the large-scale independent studies of multivitamin and antioxidant supplements have shown that, if anything, they increase the risk of death.¹²

But for all that the book made clear, and for as much as I recommend the book, it can really be summed up in four words: five ingredients or fewer. Whatever you buy in a package at the store, keep it to five ingredients or fewer, and you'll likely be in good shape to avoid eating edible substances. Pollan would likely agree, as another one of his food rules is that you can eat anything you make. But four words does not a book make.

I continue to write this piece - and in pieces of time over the past few months - as a way to remind myself of what James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem sang about in Losing my Edge. For him, he was losing it to the kids when it came to music, name-checking acts from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s; for me, it’s the name-checking above, all those acts of edging that I thought were doing me some good. But unlike Murphy, who yearns for relevance and treats this loss of an edge as some sort of age-old, old-age milestone, pleading for the last days of waning hipness - or perhaps better to think of it more as a millstone, wearing down the man that once was what he never will be again - the loss of an edge should be celebrated, not mourned.

Murphy ends by concluding the song, by repeating fifteen times the refrain "you don't know what you really want". Despite what with be nearly 5,000 words on the topic being spilled, much of them written in the second person as a way to self- or other-motivate me to see the errors in my way, I check last night's recovery score and think this is more or less where I've ended up: you don’t know what you really want, Jeremy.

Which makes sense as an edge is all about appeasing one's ego. It's about always pushing the limits, seeking whatever additional gain someone can get. It's about that little bit extra achieved not through effort, hard work, healthy habits, willpower, grace and forgiveness, not by allowing the work to take the time it requires but with attempts to advance like a Monopoly token - always the car - taken directly to Go through shortcuts, cheating and hacks.¹³ But over time, constantly seeking an edge becomes a prison, confining one's actual abilities to a limited space within which to live and thrive. Movement along an edge is like a runner who doesn’t move laterally or backwards, only moving forward, creating imbalances that show up first as niggles before turning into favoring your right leg before becoming an achilles injury causing you to miss a month of marathon training. And while it's not about an edge, it's not about balance either: it's about simple things done often with respect for the ritual, with patience for the process.

There's an aphorism related to trees that I’ll use to conclude, one which may be familiar to the reader. In some tellings it's an old Chinese proverb; in others it's attributed to a specific person. A wise man is asked when the best time to plant a tree is. The wise man responds, twenty - or in some retellings, he answers thirty - years ago. And this is true. If you want a tree to provide shade, bear fruit, take root, attach nitrogen to the soil, provide oxygen to breathe, then yes, you need to plant it twenty years ago.

The second question asked of the wise man is when the second best time to plant a tree is to which he responds: now. Unlike a leaf which has an edge, a tree lives and grows and thrives across a plane. Today, I'm planting a tree.

Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash

1. As an affiliate of Bookshop.org (read: they are not Amazon), project kathekon will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. You’ll also help a local independent bookstore in your community.

2. Yes, you acknowledge that this isn't the correct Friday Night Lights' phrasing, but keep it for effect. Besides, it's Thursday morning as I write this.

3. Yes, this exists, but I’ll spare you the link.

4. When Brandon told me this, I responded with, "It's so good. Despite the author," a response he was waiting for.

5. He is a doctor, so respect due. But not all doctors are to be trusted. See: Kevorkian, Lechter, Jeckl, Mengele.

6. Like some might say, this piece.

7. All apologies due to Dr. Seuss and his Grinch who Stole Christmas.

8. This is a penal joke.

9. The FDA shut them down in 2019, so despite what the band by the same name sang, you'll still be holdin' on to yesterday.

10. Did you catch this typo, Dawid?

11. “I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”

12. Emphasis mine.

13. While writing this piece, I checked to see if it was going to rain this weekend. I went to the website for Weather Channel where ads celebrating a life hack for putting a toilet paper roll under your toilet seat at night to do "this" was presented. Summoning all willpower, I avoided clicking the bait.