Back in the fall of 2004, a British technology journalist named Danny O’Brien gave a talk entitled Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks, and single-handedly launched the life hacking movement.
Life hacking was initially about the programming world – about using things like clever shell scripts and command line utilities to make coding easier – but the concept quickly expanded to the non-programming (though generally tech-savvy) internet at large. Soon, the term ‘life hack’ came to mean any clever, non-obvious way to solve an everyday problem. Like, for example, leaving an item you need to take to work tomorrow in front of the door the night before – you won’t miss it, because you’d otherwise have to step over it on the way out. Or, at a higher level, something like David Allen’s Getting Things Done time management system, which retrofits your humble to-do list to encompass tracking all the open commitments in your entire life.
Sites like Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com and Gawker Media’s Lifehacker.com sprung up to further / cash in on the life hack trend, as did dozens of books, conferences, and podcasts. But the apotheosis of life hacking was surely Tim Ferriss’ bestselling The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, which brought together basic productivity ideas (like time-boxing and the Pareto principle) with a step-by-step plan for small-scale internet entrepreneurship, to the ostensible end of making every reader an independently wealthy, uber-efficient, world-traveling iconoclast.
The book may have fallen short of that goal, but the hype never did, largely due to Tim himself. The man, whatever else people may think of him, is a marketing genius. So I’m not surprised that his next book, the shortly upcoming The 4 Hour Body is on trend with its new body hacking angle.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, it’s 2004 and 2005, the life hacking world is cranking ahead, and geeks and tech-dorks of all stripes are more productive (or, as was joked, at least more theoretically productive) than ever. They have a sense of boundless power – figure out the tricks, and you’re made! And, at the same time, per usual, they’re not getting laid.
Enter Neil Strauss (and with him, Mystery), via The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. And lo! It’s their own story! A dorky guy who’s terrible with women, who learns the hacks, the tricks, the secret moves, and suddenly he’s up to his neck (and perhaps other parts) in ladies.
It’s life hacking all over again. Think of it as sex hacking.
Of course, like life hacking, it had its own problems.
Life hacking was ostensibly a way to allow people to do ‘thought work’ more creatively, by keeping them from getting swamped by the mundane detail of their lives. Yet constantly tweaking and hacking the hacks becomes an awfully effective form of procrastination, and a particularly good way to never quite make it to the creative thought work after all. For too many people, it was less Getting Things Done, and more Getting Things Overly Organized in a Interconnected Array of Complex Lists.
Similarly, while the young pick-up artists (or PUAs) devoted to Strauss and The Game quickly developed a ruthless, video-game efficiency at ‘scoring’ with the ladies, most still had no idea what to do next. They couldn’t quite swing the dynamics of a real relationship, and were as lonely and unhappy as before, albeit now with wildly more exciting STDs.
Still, victory! Or as close as could be hacked. Yet things seemed to be falling apart at a most fundamental level. Our life hacking sex hackers pushed into their 30’s, 40’s, or 50’s. They had back pain and knee pain and shoulder pain. Their mid-section bulges continued to expand. Their parents looked even worse. Their mortality, in the form of an ever-increasing stream of alarming news coverage (like the New England Journal of Medicine‘s “this generation could be the first in the history of the United States to live less healthful and shorter lives than their parents”), smacked them in the face.
Couldn’t that hacking savvy, that shortcut-focused, outside-the-box, cleverer-than-the-mainstream thinking, apply to our bodies, too?
Indeed. Enter Ferriss, on point as always, with the upcoming 4-Hour Body. In it, he assures us, you’ll learn:
* How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends)
* How to increase fat-loss 300% with a few bags of ice
* How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time
* How to reverse “permanent” injuries
* How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months
Etc., etc., etc. Whole new vistas of hackery, yet still firmly rooted in the life hacking (note that the four-hour gimmick remains) and sex hacking (with chapters like ‘How to produce 15-minute female orgasms’ and ‘How to triple testosterone and double sperm count’) worlds.
The difference is, in this case, many of the hacks might actually live up to their billing.
In the creative thought-work realm that life hacking addresses, there isn’t an array of powerful secrets, there’s just a single unfortunate truth: making interesting things is hard and painful and it sucks and none of us wants to do it (and god knows I can find cleverer ways to avoid it than most), but eventually work gets done by actually doing it, and sooner or later you’ve got to suck it the fuck up and get down to that work.
And, in the love realm that sex hacking ostensibly addresses, there isn’t a simple secret either. Women don’t just appear strange and mystifying, they are strange and mystifying. They’re full of more thoughts and concerns and desires and neuroses than our simple guy brains can usually even comprehend, much less boil down to ‘up up down down left right left right B A select start’ secret codes.
But in the realm of health, the problem actually is extraordinarily simple, and easy to address: we’re meant to be wild animals; instead, we’ve entirely domesticated ourselves. We’re zoo animals, and we have all the same problems that other zoo animals have as compared to their counterparts in the wild.
We’ve avoided this insight for a very long time, in a slew of different ways. For a while, we thought technology would save us. Advances in modern medicine would cure cancer before the cigarettes killed us. The nanobots would repair us at a cellular level, extending our lives indefinitely. We’d reach Kurzweil’s Singularity, transcending biology entirely. But, like jet-packs, flying cars, and intelligent robots, those miracles seemed to always be just a bit further than expected down the line.
So we thought small and concrete, and we listened to what the health experts told us. We cut our fat intake (30% less as a country than we ate 30 years ago) and we ate more fiber. We took statins and we took the stairs. And in the end, we’re fatter than we’ve ever been. We have more Type II Diabetes, more heart attacks, more Metabolic Syndrome.
So, it turns out, the experts suck. There’s vast room for improvement. And there are endless interpretations of the simple ‘be a wild animal not a zoo animal’ solution that we’ve so long ignored, especially when that idea is put through the empirical wringer of even “n=1” self-experimentation.
Which, basically, is Ferriss’ new book in a nutshell. And, as a result, I suspect it will do very well. As will, for example, John Durant‘s upcoming book, a slightly different lifestyle / fitness book to be published by the same Random House / Crown imprint. And, in their wake, I think we’ll see a fast-increasing tide of body hacking content, of mainstream interest in finding smarter, more efficient, more effective ways to be and feel healthy.
Which is to say, body hacking: it’s the next big thing. You heard it here first.
