note: this is a reskin of an essay i wrote a couple of years back where i polished it up and reposted it after bring this new site up, the original was written by hand this was vibes written
Going to the gym is a relic of an outdated human operating system—one designed for a world that no longer exists. We have all this technology, all this innovation, and yet millions of people still spend hours every week running in place like hamsters, all to counteract the basic fact that we have too much food. This is stupid. The future should be calorie-agnostic. Workouts should be for masochists and hobbyists—the rest of us should demand a better operating system.
We Are Malfunctioning Meat Computers
Nothing about modern life is natural. Our bodies? 200,000 years of software built for survival, not leisure. We were designed to panic about starvation, not count macros. Our metabolism is still operating in caveman mode, screaming: “Store the fat! Famine is coming!” Meanwhile, famine is not coming. If anything, the opposite—an infinite buffet of dopamine-laced sludge, precision-engineered to hijack our taste buds and make us balloon up like foie gras geese.
A quick aside: ever wonder why cancer is such a big deal now? Because for most of history, something else killed us first. Same with obesity, diabetes—diseases of abundance that our bodies were never built to handle.
Stop Blaming People, Blame the OS
The dumbest possible take on obesity is “People are lazy.” That’s like blaming a computer for running buggy software. We don’t need better willpower, we need better engineering.
We should be solving this with technology, not discipline. Imagine a world where you can eat anything, whenever you want, and remain perfectly healthy—not because you’ve “optimized your macros” like a psycho, but because science has already solved it for you.
Palmer Luckey has framed this problem correctly: we should not be trying to guilt or force people into dieting and exercising. That’s a brute-force approach to a problem that requires real technological intervention. If we can solve this at a fundamental level, why shouldn’t we?
The Gym Is Just a Commute for Your Body
Nobody actually likes commuting. It’s a tax on your time. Sure, some people love driving, but the majority? A colossal waste of man-hours. This is how we should think about the gym. Most people don’t actually enjoy lifting heavy things and putting them down—they do it because they have to.
Self-driving cars will eliminate commutes, and we should be using the same mindset for working out. The goal is not to “make fitness fun,” the goal is to make it irrelevant. You should be fit by default. The only people who should be going to the gym are the ones who genuinely love pain and suffering (which, to be fair, is a respectable hobby). The rest of us should have technology do the work.
The Future: Food Without Consequence
We’re thinking too small. “Healthy eating” is a brute-force solution. We need engineered food—food that tastes exactly like a double bacon cheeseburger but has zero impact on your body.
This isn’t impossible. We already bioengineer everything from corn to lab-grown meat. Why not take it further? Why are we still accepting caloric reality like peasants? We should be eating synthetic, calorie-perfect, zero-consequence food. Not fake food—real food, perfected.
We Have to Take the Blame—And Fix It
The fact that this problem is still unsolved is a failure of us, the builders. It’s easy to point fingers at the food industry, the fitness industry, or bad personal habits, but the truth is, if we were serious about fixing this, we would have by now.
Technologists, engineers, biohackers—we should own this failure. We created a world where calorie-rich food is abundant but calorie-burning is optional. We can’t just shrug and tell people to “try harder.” We need to be thinking bigger.
This is something that has been circulating in my brain for a while. It feels like a lingering piece of an idea maze—one I haven't fully mapped out yet, but I know is important. If you're working in this space, I would love to chat, to jam, to be helpful, to collaborate. Maybe this is something I’ll work on myself in the future. But someone needs to build this. This should exist.
The future isn’t about fitness—it’s about making fitness obsolete. Imagine telling someone from 2100 that we used to spend hours every week manually burning calories because we hadn’t figured out a better way yet. They’d think we were insane.
Final Note: If You Crack This, Don’t Go to Mars
If you get the biotech upgrade that lets you eat everything and stay shredded, do not move to Mars. That’s not going to be a post-scarcity society. If things go south, you’re going to want your original metabolism back.
But Earth? Here, in the land of abundance? We have no excuse for still doing things the old way. Fix this, or future generations will laugh at us.
The gym is a tax on human failure. It’s time to zero it out.