[Barrin92]

>A couple of months ago, I was a train wreck that ate too many cinnamon rolls and watched Netflix while laying in sweats on the couch. Yesterday, I ran 3 miles, did 40 minutes of yoga, meditated, ate steel cut oats with berries for breakfast, then turned on my favorite business podcast while I showered, all before work started.

This reminds me of this guy with the bookshelf in his garage that went viral on youtube years ago. I honestly don't think gamifying your life and jumping on the hedonistic treatmill is a step up from eating cinnamon rolls at 3 am, just the flip side of the same coin. It Reminds me of Baudrillard in America

"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented. The body is cherished in the perverse certainty of its uselessness, in the total certainty of its non-resurrection. Now, pleasure is an effect of the resurrection of the body, by which it exceeds that hormonal, vascular and dietetic equilibrium in which we seek to imprison it, that exorcism by fitness and hygiene. So the body has to be made to forget pleasure as present grace, to forget its possible metamorphosis into other forms of appearance and become dedicated to the Utopian preservation of a youth that is, in any case, already lost. For the body which doubts its own existence is already half-dead, and the current semi-yogic, semi-ecstatic cult of the body is a morbid preoccupation. The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it will be made up in the funeral home, where it will be given a smile that is really ‘into’ death."

[papeda]

> This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern, in the obsessive fear of failure or substandard performance, a sign and an anticipation of death, that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but which everyone knows has at all times to be prevented.

It's a huge rhetorical jump to go from "people engaging in focused activity" to "ritualistic pre-enactment of inevitable death", and even after re-reading this quote several times, I'm confused by how that jump is supposed to make sense?

[Barrin92]

is it really such a jump with a reference like this in the original post?

"And it's almost effortless now. Like, wtf. Have I too become one of those insane Patrick Bateman-like beings that I thought all productive people were a few months ago? How did I finally pull it together? Here's the deal."

It may be a tongue in cheek reference but the comparison to Bateman is apt. He is actually the logical endpoint of this sort of life optimization, surface without anything beneath it and symbolic death. I'm not so sure how large the number of people is who unironically thing Bateman is a rolemodel rather than a parody and symbol of the sort of yuppie culture on display here.

[pradn]

He's a philosopher. He's looking at the metaphorical nuances of what he observes. It's meant to be a point of analysis, not a literal truth.

[JoeAltmaier]

Cute. But really, eating oneself into a miserable pain-ridden old age is not comparable to healthy eating and exercise in moderation? Sounds like sour grapes to me.

[pradn]

It's a difference in ethos. Is life for optimizing and perfection, a Taylorist treadmill turned to yourself, or is a joy, a breeze?

There's fun ways to have exercise and there's military regimentation. There's allowing imperfection and contingency in life, and there's hammering them away.

In a delicate irony, both attitudes are fully human.

[lizardking]

Maybe fun isn’t the best way to describe it, but Military regimentation can certainly be satisfying in its own way.

[rhinoceraptor]

Really if you follow this philosophy its logical conclusion, there’s no point in living at all since you’re just going to die. Which is true in some sense, but also completely vapid and useless.

[randallsquared]

The hedonistic treadmill is closer to the "before" state than the "after", here, no?