Do we know how to do anything?
Lifestyle orthorexia is here to stay
The other day, on my way to work, I noticed that a few other people headed the same direction easily passed me by. I never thought of myself as a particularly slow walker, yet there I was — taken over by rival pedestrians.
Walking has been turned into a competition by step counters, corporate challenges and organised walks, and in that moment I felt that there’s something off with my walking game. Maybe it was my worn-out Viking flat tops or the fact that I was not, in fact, in a hurry. Or maybe there was a flaw in my technique that I could somehow correct and add a whole km/h to my speed.
So I stood there on the stairs leading to Old Town, typing “how to walk faster” into the YouTube search bar. Immediately, I had a selection of walking coaches to choose from. Randomly clicking on one of the thumbnails, I was exposed to a mini-lecture from a guy who, in his words, had invented something he called the “forefoot walk”. Yes, the guy literally invented walking. You can thank him the next time you go out and do some “forward ambulation” (which is what the king of nerds Andrew Huberman calls walking).
I felt like a complete idiot. Then I remembered that just a few weeks ago I had listened to a few talks by a guy whose whole shtick was “how to breathe properly”. Apparently, 99.99% of the population (if you can’t tell, I’m exaggerating) breathes incorrectly and thus there is merit in reading his New York Times bestseller, subscribing to some course and finding a breathing specialist in your area. For if you do so, you stand a chance to cure your sleep apnea, improve your mood, and become a more productive member of your community. What a load of baloney.
If you have ever listened to any of the popular bro podcasts, like Diary of a CEO, Modern Wisdom or Huberman Lab, you know that the modern man (probably woman, too) doesn’t know how to do squat. Reading? There’s a lost art of speed-reading and this guy can show you how to devour a book in one sitting. Eating? You don’t even know how to chew properly, and you need to do this set of exercises for your jaw if you want to keep your teeth from falling out. Walking? Same thing, the Big Shoe cursed you with flat-footedness and now you have to re-embrace the way our ancestors walked in the savannah.
And while I am taking the piss a little bit, it does seem that there’s a push in the broader podcast bro sphere to make us re-think and re-evaluate everything we do. To feel insecure on every step. It’s like orthorexia but extended to every other facet of life. Nutrition, of course, remains the largest minefield, but with the constant need to churn advice on a weekly basis, no area of lifestyle is safe. And if you’re not too careful of what and who you let live rent-free in your mind, you too will find yourself googling “how to walk faster”. Peace.
"... there’s a push in the broader podcast bro sphere to make us re-think and re-evaluate everything we do. To feel insecure on every step." - exactly!
There are in fact tiny nuggets of wisdom here and there in the sea of «lifestyle advice» but the problem with new media is that they're striving for volume. All that can be known about picking your nose properly can be said in perhaps two minutes, which is totally insufficient for a podcast episode, much less for a book. So the rest is filler.