In recent times, we seem to be intoxicated by the heady spirits of progress and modernity. A climate of optimism saturates the air as we continuously blaze untrodden paths in science, technology, and all the rest of it. So dramatic are these headways being made that there is a deep sense in which we are part of ‘modernity’, in a reified sense of the word: a totalising project of perfecting ourselves by harnessing new knowledge to shed traditional, defunct ways of doing things.
The global AI race, for example, is more than just a competition to develop the most advanced form of artificial intelligence in the shortest timespan. It represents a battle for the license to assert the occupation of an advanced stage in the wider project of modernity — and to smirk at the other competitors lagging behind in a stale condition. Much of the rest of geopolitics nowadays is conducted in a similar vein. It can be detected, for example, in the haughty nature of Trump’s diplomatic discourse, as he refers, for instance, to several African nations as “shithole countries” and deplores the “decaying” condition of much of Europe. He is constantly speaking in relational terms, emphasising how the rest of the world has been left to eat America’s dust in the campaign for modernity.
The danger of this is that it leads us to see the trees more clearly than the forest. The perversion of the desire for worldly betterment into a fetish for the project of modernity can make us subconsciously neglect, and even entirely dismiss, the genuine agents of progress and the guardians of our wellbeing. Some of our most cherished values and practices are now under serious threat. This is the sabotage of modernity.
One of its most devastated victims — the one which I am going to focus on here — is the credo of hyper-successful people transmitted to us in the language of personal development and goal-getting. More specifically, it is a particular part of the wider genre typically known as ‘self-help’ or ‘self-improvement’, the part that targets those with a fiery ambition to reach the heights of ultra-success, to not only climb further than most people but to set foot on the summit of their chosen mountain.
Pioneered in the main by athletes such as David Goggins, Kobe Bryant, and Michael Jordan, it counsels obsession and sacrifice while championing delusion and isolation. It promotes living in a mechanical monotony of habit and routine that is nonetheless electrified by a fanatical devotion to doing whatever it takes to succeed, a kind of monomaniacal mindset. Containing quasi-Stoic elements, it emphasises the value of fortifying the citadel of the mind through a spirited embrace of the vicissitudes of life.
But this philosophy makes an awkward bedfellow for a certain strand of modern science and culture. With the explosion of new research in neuroscience and nutritional science, we are more attentive to mental and physical wellness than ever before. Indeed, so powerful is this surging tide of health consciousness that the entrepreneur-turned-biohacker Bryan Johnson has become genuinely convinced that “we might be the first generation that doesn’t die”. Although an obvious hyperbole, it is hard to doubt the sincerity of the force behind Johnson’s statement, given that he is ponying up a hefty $2 million annually to fund an anti-ageing project, which involves a team of experts utilising cutting-edge science to devise a comprehensive health protocol aimed at reducing Johnson’s biological age.
Johnson’s case represents the most extreme manifestation of the new wellness ethos of our day. But the very fact that the parameters of our thinking have been stretched to permit a space for immortality (in a purely secular sense) indicates the force that this culture of health consciousness bears in the present world.
And it is this force which the maximalist principles of the Gogginses and Bryants of the world seem to fly directly in the face of. Whereas Bryant’s scheme entails spending no more than 3–4 hours sleeping every night to maximise the amount of time in the day to work towards goals, Johnson condemns getting less than eight hours of sleep as an “act of violence”. Moreover, Jordan’s notorious alienation of friends and teammates as a ruthless leader of the Chicago Bulls is entirely at odds with the modern emphasis placed by experts on a proactive sociability as a necessary means to maintain stable mental health. And Goggins’s urge to “callous your mind” by plunging into the quicksands of pain certainly has an odd ring in the ear of much of the population today, who have grown sensitive to the psychological and physical consequences of ‘burnout’ and ‘toxic resilience’.
How should we address this tension between the paradigm for human excellence and the precepts for human wellness? Our current answer, it appears, is to sacrifice the former in favour of the latter. We have become so animated by the innovations of our age that we have drawn them into a panorama depicting the forward march of humanity. And anything that appears to blemish this, we seem to think, must be shunned.
But this is only a speciously valuable trade-off. For what we will eventually be left with is a world entirely impoverished of any imaginative and unconventional way of doing things; it will be a world so obsessed with modernity that it ends up looking anything but modern. But Goggins and Johnson can coexist. By recognising this, the innovations of the present can be made not to swim against the currents of the unfamiliar, but rather with them. This is far more productive — and far less dangerous — than hacking through the dense underbrush of the present world in order to weed out anything that does not seem congenial to the project of modernity.