An Incoherent Rant on Grind Culture and Testicle Ladles

Taking Excessive Care of Yourself is Not Grinding, also Voting Polls

I wake up at 3am.

One thing that I immediately choose not to do every morning is set up a camera to capture a video of myself getting out of bed next to a clock that says 3am.

Why?

Because I’m forty years old and I’m too busy.

I then do one of two things:

1. If I’m up to date on work, I write for my substack.

2. If I’m behind on my work, which has been the case lately, I answer emails.

This usually lasts a few hours. I eat breakfast at 5am. Eggs, spinach, and turkey sausage. I make it in a rice cooker in a single giant patty. While it cooks, I empty the dishwasher from the night before so it will be empty when my wife gets up with the kids. I clean up anything I forgot to clean up the night before because there is always something. I eat breakfast before 5:30 am and then I pray for the well-being of my friends and enemies.

Sometimes my eldest son wakes up during this time and we spend a few minutes together before work starts.

I splash some water on my face and comb my hair.

From 5:30am to 6:00am, I stare with a total emptiness at a wall or something in a perfect meditative state that rich people pay tens of thousands of dollars to even approach at expensive meditation retreats. My brain feels like how I think a computer must feel when it is defragging its hard drive. On the days I don’t get to do this, I am much less effective at everything.

From 6:00am to 3:00pm I am in meetings. On a given day, I usually have about eighteen or twenty-five meeting requests. I can only make it to something like ten or twelve. Believe it or not, my presence is usually required on these meetings in order for work to move forward and the subjects are too complicated to care for by email. I farm out the other ten or so meetings to my direct reports, who all also have their own full calendars and responsibilities. I try to stay on top of my inbox but I inevitably I fall behind while trying to pay attention and contribute to calls. I track something like fifty Instant Message requests and quietly wish the technology for this was never invented. Instant Message was pitched as “you can reach anyone you want at anytime!” but considering it the other way around it’s also, “let me have a perfect ability to interrupt your train of thought!” which is a terrible concept.

During the day if I’m not actively speaking on a call, I will help change diapers or wrangle children who might need hugs, or to be brought down the stairs from their bedrooms when they wake up. Last week, my eldest son, who is potty training, peed all over the back of my legs and before I had time to clean it up I was on a zoom call giving a presentation. It was a couple hours before I had a meeting end early, which is when I shower. If I have eleven or more minutes, I can look very presentable.

At 3:00pm, whether I am done clearing my inbox or not, my wife will drop one of our children in my lap and tag me in as primary parent. She’s been up all night with a teething baby so this is fair. Then she makes dinner or does laundry or whatever. I usually make dinner for the eldest boy. Sometimes we all bundle into the minivan and go grocery shopping. The weather is finally changing again where we can take them outside without everyone getting filthy. At something like 5:00pm or 6:00pm my eldest son bathes for 30 minutes which is his happiest time of day. The youngest has started to eat baby food so he makes a big mess and then he needs a bath as well.

My wife will take the baby up to sleep at 7:00pm unless she’s behind, in which case he will be extremely mad at me for an hour until she grabs him at 8:00pm.

I will stay up with the oldest until 8:00pm.

Then, the dreaded question. Did he take a nap that day or not?

If he did not take a nap he will fall asleep after one to three iterations of the phonetic alphabet song.

If he took a nap, then sometimes I’m looking at an hour and a half of reading the Chronicles of Narnia out loud. Which he presently cannot understand or enjoy but seems like the sort of thing I should be doing so that when he can understand the story his memory will be that we’ve always done this.

At either 8:15pm or 9:30pm I go downstairs and do the dishes and clean up the play area. I’ve got this down to something I can get done in about thirty minutes.

If my son didn’t take a nap, I can do writing for substack.

If he did take a nap, yeah, that ain’t happening.

While the baby is still night feeding, I’ve been sleeping on the couch so I can sleep in one continuous stretch. Generally, I sleep for five hours but sometimes it’s as little as four or as long as six. I can really feel the difference either way. Four is way too little and at six I feel perfectly rested.

No matter what, I’ve been waking up at 3am so it doesn’t really matter if I fall asleep at 9pm or 10pm.

On the weekends, I’m the primary parent from the moment the children wake up to the moment they go to sleep. My wife will do house chores. I do a lot of my writing on those weekend mornings and it really throws off my writing schedule if my oldest boy wakes up too early. On Sundays I take two hours to write, but over the last several weekends there have been a series of obligations requiring me to surrender this time back.

On Wednesdays, for an hour, I will have a meeting about the Trust Assembly.

I used to have a two hour block of time when I took my eldest to a weekly appointment and I would write in a cafe, but that’s gone now. I used to listen to podcasts in the mornings, on drives to the grocery store or other appointments, or Friday afternoons, but now I don’t. My kids are annoyed by them so I just put them away. I’ll get them back in a few weeks when I start mowing the lawn now that good weather has started.

That’s the whole of my life schedule right now and I anticipate this being the case for several years.

I don’t get a chance to workout unless it’s using the treadmill under my desk, which I try to do but can’t do when I have to do spreadsheet work. I have a home gym but going into it makes too much noise so if I tried to do it in the morning it would wake everyone up. So it’s usually just the desk treadmill. I can type and talk and walk without problem but I can’t be a spreadsheet bro and walk at the same time. So the weeks I spreadsheet bro are the weeks I feel the most blegh. I will also sometimes lift free weights while I walk on the treadmill and talk but mostly don’t because it makes me feel like a douchebag.

I admit I feel something like visceral bewilderment when I hear Andrew Huberman or Bryan Johnson talk about hours long self-care routines. That’s not a funny enough statement, so I’ll say it another way. It’s something like the same emotion I would have toward a woman performing in a donkey show in Tijuana. What? What do you mean there are people who are entertained by this? Oh my God, you poor woman! Come with me right now, I’m going to rescue you from this! How did this happen? You were kidnapped and forced into this, right? Then just overwhelming confusion that anyone anywhere could ever find this kind of situation appropriate let alone entertaining.

I’m mostly ranting about this video in which a man gives his schedule for his “grind” but it involves really stupid things like submerging his face in a bowl of fruit. I know this was made to trigger me and I apologize that it was extremely successful. I felt like I was watching an eleven year old boy describe what he thinks an ideal day should look like but it was a grown man with no children trying to Pied Piper other men into oblivion. I also noticed that at no point in his day did he account for the time he spends telling everyone about his day.

People say all this wild stuff about energy management but what are you saving up all of this “energy” to do, exactly? What do you need this much health for? Why do you want to be sexy at sixty? That’s really weird! I hear you saying “uh, health, no one wants cancer, longevity blah blah blah” and I’m here to reply that you owe it to your grandchildren that none of their friends should be sexually attracted to you. You should not even want to be a hot old man. There have to be limits to all of this. Go to the gym by all means, but lay off some of these skin care treatments. What’s wrong with having crow’s feet? I’m going to have one or two more children and then I’ll be an old man who looks like the dad from Teen Wolf and you know how that makes me feel? Relieved! One less thing to worry about. I am really looking forward to being someone’s surprisingly strong but totally unsexy dad! And I basically already am! And that’s good!

This lifestyle just seems endless and socially uneconomic. I struggle to even understand this mindset where you look at the people in your life who need your time and say, “I’m going to treat every single thing that comes up like it’s an emergency situation so that I can operate under those airplane rules where I put the oxygen mask on myself first.” What do you mean you’re spending almost a full working day on grooming and self-care routines? Why haven’t you lived in such a way that people can come to you to work on their problems? If you have so much extra time why haven’t you found something more socially productive to do? Do any of your kids or grandkids need you to come help them out with their life? Your nieces or nephews? Your local church?

Again, this isn’t a funny enough image, so the first time I ever saw another man’s testicles I was in eighth grade and we were watching a documentary on elephantiasis. This is a disease where your body can no longer appropriately drain its own fluids for those of you not in the know. One of the side effects is that your testicles can balloon up to something like forty or fifty pounds. There was a man living in a shack somewhere far away from the modern world, basically chained in place by his own giant testicles. He had a barrel of water and a ladle and when his testicles got too hot, he would dip the ladle and drip water over his own giant testicles. He was very proud of these giant testicles. This is how I feel about most “maxing” culture. If you were only measuring having giant testicles, this guy clearly won. If you narrow your focus down to the attainment of giant testicles, he clearly needs to do something when his testicles get too warm. That’s why he has a testicle ladle and a barrel of water right there! This is all just correct, sensible, and practical. But if you step back, he needs some kind of medical treatment and he was pretty definitely measuring the wrong thing. This analogy, of course, breaks down because the guy with the testicle ladle didn’t have a choice.

This is what I see when Andrew Huberman or Bryan Johnson talk about very extensive self-care routines. You could argue their job is to sit in the village square and be the guys who have very large elephantiasis testicles and remind people on the importance of thinking about keeping your testicles cooled down and they make their living by selling testicle ladles. And that’s fine. Someone probably needs to do that. But I can also tell you if either of them were my children I would be super concerned and trying to intervene to get them to do something else. So what am I even trying to say here?

You have to have productive balance. You need something external you’re doing all of these difficult things to accomplish. When you’re resting, you should be resting on your way toward something. The last few weeks I’ve been pushing it too far. I need those handful of hours each week to focus on things for myself. But life isn’t meant to be a smooth curve. I haven’t had those hours for a little while now. Sometimes you have to scrap the bottom of your testicle barrel just like sometimes you have to top it off.

So, this is me scraping the bottom of the testicle barrel to write this piece for you. I promise to have something

Free Voting Poll

I have stuff I want to write for the next few pieces so no free voting poll this go around. There will be a piece about AI-HoHoHo (this was the most memetic version of the thing I think is most dangerous about AI) and I want to write something about the AI 2027 project since I feel we should all be giving our best thinking and predictions on that stuff. It may all end up being one giant piece that is too long to email.

Paid Subscriber Voting Poll

Paid subscription costs have been lowered to $5/mos. Please consider an upgrade if you can afford it (but no worries if not). If you want to lower your existing subscription I think you have to go in and try it again. I will not be offended or anything if you do this.

Dutch — A story about the guy I named my eldest son after, whose mother was a nun and whose father was a blind piano tuner.

Men of the Mill — something similar to the Deep South of the Pacific Northwest, but about weird guys at the mill like Nick at Night who once attempted to hang himself with a noose that wasn’t tied to anything at the other end (the rest of the stuff is crazier and would be too much to write down without explaining the whole thing)

Middle Middle Class — a sort of sequel piece to the Salt of the Earth about how I finally got a decent job, but it would also be about how it’s important to have some ambition for yourself.