It’s Been a Bad Few Days for Joyless Optimization Freaks

· Vice

Believe it or not, it is now Wednesday. Are you still piecing your skull back together after a long weekend so lurid it’d make a WHOOP band blush?

If you’ve spent the last few days chasing down the mysterious, ineffable substance of life, the fizzing essence of existence that can’t be boiled down to any measurable productivity metric—or if you’ve simply had more than three glasses of wine—then chances are you are currently living through a hell even worse than that endured by the entrepreneur-podcaster Steven Bartlett a couple of years back.

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The Diary of a CEO host has spent his Lost Weekend whining about the three full days of his life that were “ruined” after he took his hot-wired body on a Baudelairean dopamine joyride with 375 satanic ml of vino tinto sloshing around in his bloodstream.

For those of you who aren’t able to face watching the clip, it turns out that just a few units of alcohol were enough to mess up Bartlett’s sleep pattern, disrupt his diet plan, throw off his workout routine, and mess with his podcasting game. What a lightweight.

“I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever—the cortisol system—was all messed up. I podcasted worse. I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad. I then slept worse, and I could track all of this on my WHOOP,” he explains morosely, before the camera cuts to fellow podcaster Chris Williamson, whose blue-light glasses ironically make him look like a 1970s acid casualty.

Before all the sober Cindies pipe up, I’m saying this as someone who no longer drinks. After 17 years spent adhering to William Blake’s proverb that “the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” passed down to me by some of the late 20th and early 21st century’s greatest wreckheads (Fassbinder, Basquiat, the little guy from Sum 41), like Bartlett I too promised myself I’d stop romanticizing drugs and alcohol. However, his desire to “optimize” life by turning it into a series of mathematical processes is enough to have me pining for my own late-nights at the front, fighting my own personal war against sobriety, dawn, and the passing of time. On the other hand, I guess treating your fleeting existence as a get-rich-quick scheme is a neat shortcut to “I podcasted worse” being the biggest of your problems. 

Though I am slightly less successful than the British YouTuber, who has 17 million subscribers, I also eased off drinking when I was 30. I didn’t need A/B testing to tell me that I get more done when I’m not smashing a bottle of whiskey on the reset button each week. Nonetheless, this obsession with measurable wellness and health just feels like a different brand of modern decadence, burying your head in numbers rather than booze and warm bodies. It’s interesting to see the kind of tribes Bartlett has united against him. Some of the replies to Bartlett’s video say things like, “Men used to go to war in the Ardennes in the dead of winter, and now they can’t handle drinking a couple of glasses of merlot.” Others are Dennis Rodman fans.

There’s something living out there in the night which resists being turned into statistics. How is a fitness tracker supposed to process a multi-day marathon of mixed drinks, unknown powders, random liaisons, and barely averted disaster? Sure, wearable tech will know if you went 72 hours without sleep. How can it quantify the effects of 72 hours free from care, responsibility, and inhibition?

Luckily enough, the forthcoming summer issue of VICE magazine will do just that. The Self-Destruction Issue is as-yet unannounced (shhhhhh) but we are so proud of the beautiful mess we have made. It’s our strongest issue since we relaunched last year and you can subscribe to get it first at VICE.com/membership.

Bartlett attracted public ridicule on what was a huge and hugely embarrassing weekend for the optimization crowd. I was actually excited about the Enhanced Games, the first athletics event of its kind to openly allow performance-enhancing drugs, eager for the outlandish spectacle of mutant athletes pushing their bodies toward previously unimaginable limits. I even looked to see if Polymarket had odds on how many of them would die in the process. But in the end, it was anticlimactic; even the one world record that was broken won’t be recognized by the official authorities. The whole thing ended up feeling kind of emblematic of the technological elite’s apparent contempt for the joys of the natural world—an apt metaphor for which might be the sight of celebrity longevity enthusiast Bryan Johnson sheltering beneath his little umbrella to keep the sun from aging his precious millionaire boy-skin. 

This is the true face of optimization: a tedious struggle against the small pleasures of life and nature itself, which is sure to be lost before it’s even begun.

OTHER NEWS

  • Someone who’s not afraid to taste a few drops of the blood of Christ is His Holiness Pope Leo XIV. He’s just used his First Encyclical Letter to warn that AI needs to be “disarmed.”
  • Given his broadside, I’m guessing the pontiff won’t be applying to be one of JoiAI’s new “masturbation consultants,” who the tech startup will apparently be paying $2,000-a-month to “masturbate for science.” 
  • The latest evidence for the “everyone is 12 now” theory comes courtesy of Ferrari, which has just unveiled its first fully electric car: a $640,000 piece of Playmobil that only a child would think looks good.

PREDICTION OF THE WEEK

To celebrate becoming the first artist to hold the top three spots on the Billboard 200 chart, Toronto’s biggest MJ stan Drake releases a new video featuring the Chinese “Billie Jean” robot. The humanoid contraption sadly slips and falls on a sheet of ice.

BRAND NEW SENTENCE

“Palantir embraces the neurodivergent. Join us.”

BONUS PREDICTION: STREAMS OF WHISKEY FOR STEVEN BARTLETT

After receiving word of his hell-raising ways, The Pogues reform with Steven Bartlett as the frontman. The newly retired podcaster immediately shows his admiration for the late Shane MacGowan by eating a WHOOP band, shattering his teeth in the process. 

Follow Adam on Instagram @yungtolstoi

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