Tyrant

Up front: I know I sound like an asshole.

I know I sound like a jerk, a tyrant, an oppressor of the people in my own house, a person who has gone too far on a few subjects and refuses to come back to the middle. I have read the manifesto on this site. I know how it reads to a stranger. I know how the carnivore essay reads to a person who likes pasta. I know how the six months or you are mentally weak line in Lifestyle reads to a person who has never tried six months of anything. I know.

I’m writing this to address the criticism head-on, not by softening but by explaining what the intensity is for. The intensity isn’t a personality flaw I’ve failed to manage. It’s the mechanism. Pulling it out would not improve the system. Pulling it out is the failure mode I’ve spent twenty years engineering around.

Why I am like this

I have tried being moderate. I have tried being reasonable. I have tried setting nice round goals like lose ten pounds, exercise three times a week, eat better. I have tried all of it. The result, every single time, was that I sat at the same weight, the same fitness level, and the same mood, year after year, while the world quietly took ground from me by inches. The polite version of self-improvement does not work for me. I suspect it does not work for many people. I cannot speak for them. I can speak for myself.

What works is setting a standard. Not a goal — a standard. I do not eat plants. I lift four times a week. I bike Sundays. I do not negotiate with my own body for permission to skip the work. The standard is the rule, and the rule is non-negotiable, because the moment the rule becomes negotiable the rule stops doing the work the rule existed to do. Negotiability is the failure mode. Negotiability is exactly what the modern environment is engineered to produce.

So I do not negotiate. I look like a tyrant because I am refusing to renegotiate a rule I set with myself when I was sober, careful, and looking at the actual data. The person at the dinner table who wants to renegotiate the rule is the one who has not done that work. I am not deferring to their renegotiation. I am holding the line I set when I was the person who knew best.

This sounds dramatic. It’s dramatic, and it’s literally true. I watched my body fall apart for twenty years on the standard American protocol. I watched MS get into my wife before we were married, and I married her anyway, knowing what the protocol was going to have to look like. I watched the depressive machinery take my mother. It almost took me. I have run the experiment of not enforcing the standard and I have the data. The data says I die early, miserable, and useless to anyone I love.

I am not willing to run the protocol that produced the previous generation’s outcomes and expect a different result. I am running a different protocol. The different protocol requires enforcement, because the default protocol — the one that produced the bodies my parents handed back to the grave — is everywhere, free, and seductive. The standard is the wall that keeps the default from leaking back in.

When I am at a restaurant and I do not eat the bread, I am not performing. I am holding a wall. The wall is what keeps the system the system. The moment the wall comes down, the system reverts. I have done the experiment. I am not redoing it.

Here’s the part that took me the longest to learn.

Set a standard high enough that, when you fail it, you are still better off than the people who succeeded at theirs.

Most goal-setting is wrong because the goal is set at a level where success produces a mediocre outcome and failure produces no outcome at all. Lose ten pounds sets you up to lose six pounds, miss the goal, feel like a failure, and quit. Exercise three times a week sets you up to exercise twice, drift to once, drift to none, and start over in January. The goal is a participation prize. The failure mode is collapse.

Set the standard high enough that the failure mode is still excellent. I do not eat plants — if I fail and eat a side of broccoli once a quarter, I have still been ninety-nine percent carnivore for the year, which is a metabolic state most people will never reach in their lifetime. I lift four times a week — if I miss one of the four, I still lifted three, which beats almost everyone I know. I bike Sundays — if I skip one Sunday a month, I still rode forty Sundays a year, which is more aerobic base than ninety-five percent of the adult population accumulates. The high standard protects you on your bad days, because your bad days are still better than other people’s good ones.

This is the engineering insight the moderate self-help books refuse to tell you. They tell you to set “achievable” goals because they are optimizing for adherence, not outcome. Adherence to a low bar produces a low outcome. Set the bar where the failure case is the outcome you would have been thrilled with five years ago. Now you cannot lose. Now the floor of your life is what used to be the ceiling.

You will look, to people on the outside, like a tyrant. You will look, from the inside, like a person whose life is improving every year, who has stopped riding the rollercoaster of new-year’s resolutions, who has finally gotten off the loop. The criticism is the price of the system working. It is not a sign the system is wrong.

The urgency the modern world demands

The other piece of this is urgency. Modern life is not a stable environment. It is a constant, low-grade attack on every system in your body and every habit you have set for yourself. The food is engineered to override your fullness signal. The feed is engineered to override your boredom signal. The schedule is engineered to override your sleep. The defaults are engineered to override your defaults. You are not coasting in a neutral landscape. You are pedaling uphill against a gravity that gets slightly stronger every year as the engineering improves.

To hold ground in that environment, you have to act in your own best interests every day, with urgency. Not when you feel like it. Not when the schedule clears. Not after the holidays. Today. The body you are inside right now is the body the next ten years happens inside. Every meal, every workout, every hour of sleep, every conversation is a deposit or a withdrawal, and the world is taking unsolicited withdrawals from you constantly, so the deposits have to be deliberate.

The tyrant in the house is the one making the deposits when the rest of the system would prefer to coast. The tyrant in the house is the one saying no, we are doing this today, we are doing this every day, we are not skipping because it is raining or the schedule is hard or your friend is in town. I am that tyrant inside my own house. I am also that tyrant inside my own head, which is more important. The internal tyrant is the one whose work no one else will ever see.

The third piece, which took me the longest to recognize for what it was, is that the intensity does work I didn’t consciously intend it to do.

The intensity narrows the battlefield. The people who cannot handle me leave. The people who can handle me arrive. The peer group is filtered. The conversations are filtered. The invitations are filtered. The opportunities, eventually, are filtered. I end up in fewer rooms, but the rooms I am in are full of people running their own version of the same operating system, and the compounding inside those rooms is enormous. The ring map tightens. The signal-to-noise of every hour I spend climbs.

I did not engineer this on purpose. I made myself unbearable to a certain kind of softness, and the softness drifted out of my life, and what was left was a much smaller and much higher-yield population of humans. This is, I now understand, exactly what the intensity is for. The intensity is the filter the rest of the world uses to decide whether they want to keep showing up. People who want a comfortable, mediocre evening stop coming over. People who want a hard conversation at 11pm about how to fix something stay. I get more of the second one. I get less of the first one. This is a trade I would make ten thousand times in a row.

If you read all of this and conclude I am an asshole, you are correct, and you have just self-selected out of my orbit, which is the system working as designed. The asshole filter is load-bearing. Most people who say they want to be around me actually want to be around a softer version of me that would not produce the results they say they want. The actual version is the only version available, and the actual version is non-negotiable.

I’m going to win at the games I’ve chosen to play. Body, marriage, mind, the technical projects I am still swinging at, the particular game of being a person whose foundation does not give way. I am going to win not because I am the most talented person in any room — I have already written about why that is not the claim — but because I have set a standard, I am enforcing it daily, and the standard is high enough that even my bad weeks produce better outcomes than most people’s good ones.

If you don’t like it, that is fine. The not-liking-it is part of the filter. Stay or go on the strength of what the system produces, not on the strength of how it feels in the moment. The system produces a marriage that is in the trench together at year fifteen with the disease pushed back. The system produces a hundred pounds off and metabolic markers in the elite range. The system produces a calendar I own and a life I am running on my own terms. The system produces the essays on this site, which exist because I held myself to the standard of writing them.

You’re welcome to copy any of it. You’re welcome to walk away from all of it. What you’re not welcome to do is renegotiate it with me, because the negotiation is the failure mode, and I’m not running that experiment again.

This is the standard. This is what we’re doing.