A short statement often misinterpreted as apathy, or worse - giving up. However, upon closer reflection this quote actually outlines the importance of not becoming a different form of ourselves. Trying can be a form of avoidance. Avoidance of your true self and desires. Bukowski here was stressing that the purest form of living is one of authenticity.

“find what you love and let it kill you” - Bukowski

Bukowski reflects the soft underbelly of reality. That one day you will die and what you have produced on your short time here may not be appreciated or validated. With this, purpose must be one of an internal battle rather a search for validation.

The purest form of contentedness comes from finding something that you believe you were put on this earth to do and working tirelessly at it until you cannot no more. A pursuit of purpose is not a comfortable road, instead it is likely the most difficult thing you will ever face. At the same time it is a necessity for living in a world that on the face of it, has no meaning. The message here is that meaning must be derived from you and you only.

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It isn’t. Chronic low grade tiredness is one of the most common complaints people carry around, and it’s also one of the most solvable, because it’s rarely one problem. It’s usually four or five small leaks that combine into a system that never gets to run at full charge. Once you understand what’s actually draining the battery, the fix stops feeling mysterious and starts feeling mechanical.

Sugar Isn’t Giving You Energy, It’s Borrowing It

The most common trap is thinking sugar and refined carbohydrate are energy sources. In the short term they are, but the way your body handles a sudden glucose spike creates a debt that has to be repaid within a couple of hours. Blood sugar rises fast, insulin floods in to bring it back down, and it frequently overshoots, dropping you below where you started. That crash is what people call the afternoon slump, and it isn’t a coincidence that it tends to show up an hour or two after a carb heavy lunch.

There’s a second, slower mechanism working alongside this. Diets high in refined sugar and processed food promote low grade systemic inflammation, and inflammation is metabolically expensive. Your immune system runs a constant background process dealing with it, and that process competes for the same resources your body would otherwise be using to keep you feeling alert and capable. You don’t feel this as illness. You feel it as a kind of low, foggy heaviness that never really lifts, the sense of running your day through slightly thicker air than everyone else.

The fix isn’t extreme restriction. It’s stabilizing blood sugar by pairing carbohydrates with protein and fat, and reducing how often you spike and crash across the day. A stable line feels completely different from a jagged one, even if the total calories look similar on paper.

Exercise Is Not a Withdrawal, It’s a Deposit

Most tired people avoid exercise because it feels like the last thing they have energy for, and that logic feels sound in the moment. It’s also backwards. Movement, particularly consistent low to moderate intensity activity, increases the number and efficiency of the mitochondria in your cells, which are essentially the machinery responsible for producing usable energy. A body that moves regularly becomes better at generating energy on demand. A body that stays sedentary becomes worse at it, and the fatigue compounds.

There’s also a mood and alertness dimension here that’s easy to underestimate. Exercise raises circulating levels of several neurochemicals tied to focus and wellbeing, and the effect on how alert and capable you feel can outlast the workout itself by hours. This is why a short walk after lunch often does more for your afternoon than a nap would. It isn’t intuitive, but the tired feeling you’re trying to avoid by staying still is frequently the same feeling that a bit of movement would resolve.

Supplements Are Tools, Not Magic, and Most People Misuse the Main One

Caffeine deserves its own section because almost everyone uses it, and almost everyone uses it slightly wrong. Caffeine doesn’t create energy either. It blocks the receptors that would otherwise let a chemical called adenosine tell your brain that it’s tired. Adenosine keeps building in the background regardless. When the caffeine wears off, all of that accumulated tiredness hits you at once, which is why so many people experience a crash that feels worse than the tiredness they started with.

The other common mistake is timing. Caffeine has a long half life, often five to six hours, sometimes longer depending on the person, which means an afternoon coffee can still be affecting your ability to fall into deep sleep that night, even if you don’t feel wired when you go to bed. Poor sleep quality the following night sets up exactly the tiredness you’ll reach for more caffeine to fix. It becomes a loop that people rarely trace back to its origin.

Used well, caffeine is a genuinely useful tool, timed early in the day and not relied upon to mask a deeper sleep debt. Used carelessly, it becomes the thing actively perpetuating the problem it’s supposed to solve.

Hydration Is the Cheapest Fix Nobody Takes Seriously

Even mild dehydration, small enough that you wouldn’t necessarily feel thirsty, measurably reduces concentration and increases the subjective feeling of fatigue. Most people don’t think of water as something that affects energy because the effect is quiet rather than dramatic. There’s no crash, no obvious signal. You just function at a slightly reduced capacity all day and attribute it to something else entirely. Given how easy this one is to fix, it’s worth ruling out first before assuming the problem is more complicated than it is.

The Deficiency Nobody Checks For

A huge number of people walking around exhausted are simply low in something specific, and vitamin D is the most common culprit, particularly for anyone who spends most daylight hours indoors. Vitamin D functions closer to a hormone than a typical vitamin, and low levels are strongly associated with fatigue, low mood, and reduced physical performance. Iron and B12 deficiencies produce similar patterns, and both are common enough, especially in certain diets, that they’re worth ruling out with an actual blood test rather than guessing.

This is the piece people skip because it requires a bit of friction, an appointment, a blood draw, a wait for results. But if you’ve addressed sleep, diet, movement, and hydration and you’re still dragging, a basic panel is a more useful next step than another supplement bought on impulse.

Putting the System Back Together

None of these factors work in isolation, which is exactly why fatigue feels so confusing to diagnose from the inside. Bad sleep makes you reach for more caffeine. More caffeine at the wrong time worsens your next night’s sleep. Poor sleep makes you crave sugar for a quick lift. The sugar spikes and crashes, leaving you too depleted to exercise. The lack of exercise reduces your baseline energy production, so the cycle repeats the next day with less capacity than before.

The way out isn’t a single dramatic intervention. It’s tightening several small leaks at once. Stabilize blood sugar. Move your body daily, even lightly. Use caffeine early and deliberately rather than constantly. Drink enough water that you’re never running on a hidden deficit. Get your levels checked instead of assuming everything internal is fine.

My friend with the sixty percent battery eventually ran a full blood panel almost as an afterthought and found his vitamin D was less than half of what it should have been. He fixed that, tightened his sleep and caffeine timing, and started walking after lunch instead of reaching for a third coffee. Within a couple of months he described it as feeling like his phone finally charged to a hundred for the first time in years. The fix was never complicated. It was just scattered across five ordinary habits nobody had ever asked him to look at together.

Not the watch. Not the car. Not the flat, the job title, the number in the account. When you’re gone, nobody at the table will raise a glass to your portfolio. They’ll tell the story about the night you dragged them to the place with no sign on the door and the food none of you could pronounce. They’ll remember where you took them, what you fed them, and how you made them feel while you did it.

One man understood this better than anyone who’s lived in your lifetime. He built an entire life on it, showed it to the world for twenty years, and left behind a blueprint hiding in plain sight inside what everyone assumed was just a travel show about food.

His name was Anthony Bourdain. And whatever you think this article is about, it isn’t. It’s about you, and the three things he did that you’re not doing.

• • •

He met the world halfway, every single time

Bourdain’s real gift was never cooking, and it certainly wasn’t television. It was curiosity — an appetite for the world so total that it pulled him into rooms, alleys, kitchens and countries that a more sensible man would have walked straight past.

He didn’t go to the good hotel. He went to the plastic-stool stall on the corner where an old woman had been making one dish for forty years. He sat down. He ate the thing he couldn’t name. He asked the questions, and then — this is the part almost nobody does — he actually listened to the answers, as though the man across the table were the most interesting person alive, because in that moment he had decided he was.

That was the whole trick. He treated the world as though it were worth being curious about, and the world, in return, opened itself to him. Fishermen, dictators, line cooks, grandmothers — they all told him things they’d never told a camera, because he wasn’t performing interest. He had it.

This is the man in the small square at dusk that we’re always going on about. The one who found the table two streets from where everyone else was queuing. Bourdain lived his entire life in that square. He met the world halfway, in its own language, badly, with his sleeves rolled up — and it gave him back a life so rich that people who never met him grieved him like a friend.

You can steal this tomorrow. Not the show. The posture. Be the man who sits down at the stall. Who asks the real question. Who’s interested in the actual human in front of him rather than scanning the room for someone better. Curiosity is free, it’s available on any Tuesday, and it’s the single most attractive thing a man can carry into a room.

• • •

He was actually there

Watch any hour of Bourdain and you’ll notice something you can’t quite name at first. He’s present. All the way in the room he’s standing in. Not filming his life for later. Not half-checking whether this is going to make good television. There, at that table, eating that bowl, listening to that man, as if there were nowhere else in the world worth being.

This is the rarest quality a man can have, and he had it in surplus. He didn’t perform having a good time — the curse of every lesser travel host, mugging for the camera, telling you how amazing it all is. He just quietly had one, and let you watch. When he laughed it was because something was funny. When he went silent over a bowl of noodles, he let the silence sit, and somehow that was the most eloquent thing on screen.

Presence was his whole medium. It’s why a programme that was, on paper, a man eating dinner became one of the most beloved things on television. People weren’t tuning in for the food. They were tuning in to watch a man be completely, unhurriedly awake to his own life — because almost none of us are, and we ache to see it done.

The lesson lands straight in your lap. You’ve sat at a hundred tables you don’t remember because you were somewhere else — the phone, the inbox, the thing you said wrong an hour ago. Bourdain remembered everything, because he was actually at every table he sat at. The richness of his life wasn’t the travel. It was the attention. He brought all of himself to wherever his feet were. That, and not the air miles, is what you’re actually envying when you watch him.

• • •

He treated everyone exactly the same

Here’s the thing people who loved Bourdain always mention, and it’s the one worth stealing most.

He gave the line cook the same attention he gave the president. The grandmother frying dumplings in a shack got the same genuine, undivided, curious respect as any famous chef or head of state he sat across from. He had no radar for status, or rather he’d switched it off on purpose, because he’d worked out young — in the brutal democracy of a restaurant kitchen — that the dishwasher and the owner are the same size when the pressure’s on.

This wasn’t a manner. It was the man. And it’s the exact quality we keep telling you a woman reads across a room in three seconds and that most men have no idea they’re broadcasting: how he treats the waiter. How he talks to the person who can do nothing for him. Bourdain treated everyone as though they could do everything for him, which is to say he treated them as fully human, which is the whole of kindness and most of charisma.

Genuine, unperformed warmth toward people who can’t advance your position is the most quietly magnetic thing a man possesses. It can’t be faked — the fake version reads instantly as the transaction it is. Bourdain never had to fake it. He was simply more interested in people than in what people could do for him, and that made half the planet want to be near him.

You don’t need a camera crew to run this. You need to talk to the barman like he’s a person. Let the old man go ahead of you. Ask the cab driver the real question and listen to the answer. It costs nothing, nobody’s watching, and it will change how every room receives you — because the man who’s kind when there’s no audience is the one everyone can feel is the real thing.

• • •

The part we’re not going to skip

Because to hold Bourdain up as a flawless guru would be a lie, and he’d have hated it more than anyone.

In 2018, at the height of it all — loved by millions, the richest life imaginable on paper, the man who seemed most awake to the world of anyone alive — Anthony Bourdain took his own life. And any honest word written about him has to sit with that rather than write around it.

It’s tempting to treat that as a contradiction, as though a man in that much pain can’t also have been the man who taught the rest of us how to be alive. But it isn’t a contradiction. It’s the most human thing about him. The same depth that let him feel a place, a person, a bowl of soup so completely is not separate from the depth that could turn on him in the dark. He was not a superhero who had it solved. He was a person, in real pain, who also showed millions of us what it looks like to meet the world with your whole heart open.

Both things are true. And the second one doesn’t stop being a gift because of the first. If anything it makes the gift more honest — the lesson isn’t “be like this flawless man and you’ll be happy.” The lesson is that being curious, present and kind is worth doing for its own sake, in a life that stays hard even when you’re doing it right. He’d want you to have the blueprint. He’d want you to know it doesn’t come with a guarantee. Both of those are him.

And if you’re a man reading this and something in it landed a little too close — if you’re carrying more than you let on — the most Bourdain thing you could possibly do is talk to someone. Meet your world halfway. The people who love you would rather have the conversation than the story.

• • •

What to actually take

Three things, and not one of them requires a passport.

Be curious — sit at the stall, ask the real question, be interested in the human in front of you. Be present — bring all of yourself to the table you’re already at, and remember the evening because you were in it. Be kind to the people who can do nothing for you — because that, more than anything you’ll ever own, is what people feel and what they keep.

Bourdain didn’t have a richer life than you because he had a television show. He had a richer life than you because he was more curious, more present, and more decent to strangers than you’re currently being — and every one of those is available to you this week, at the caff on the corner, with the people already in your life.

You won’t be remembered for a single thing you own. You’ll be remembered for the tables you sat at and how awake you were while you sat there.

So go and sit at one. Properly. Tonight.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since. Because attraction isn’t actually unexplainable. It just isn’t explainable in the language most people reach for, which is a language of checklists. Height, income, jawline, symmetry. Those things matter, and I’m not going to pretend they don’t. But they’re the surface of something deeper, and if you want to understand why people are drawn to each other, you have to go beneath the checklist and look at what the mind is actually doing when it decides someone is worth wanting.

Attraction Is a Prediction, Not a Reaction

The mistake most people make is treating attraction as something that happens to you, a spontaneous jolt with no logic behind it. In reality attraction functions more like a prediction engine. Your nervous system is constantly running a background calculation about what this person would mean for your life if you let them in. Would they raise your status or lower it. Would they protect you or drain you. Would being around them expand what’s possible for you or shrink it.

This is why so many people find confidence attractive even when they can’t articulate why. Confidence isn’t really about swagger. It’s a signal that this person has a stable internal read on their own value, which your nervous system interprets as evidence that the world has already tested them and found them worthy. You’re not attracted to the confidence itself. You’re attracted to what the confidence implies about the bet you’d be making.

The same logic explains why competence in a specific domain, whether it’s someone who can cook an incredible meal from nothing or someone who can defuse a tense room with one sentence, tends to land harder than generic good looks. Competence is proof. Looks are a claim.

The Trap of Scarcity Signaling

One of the more uncomfortable truths about attraction is that it responds to scarcity far more than it responds to effort. People who are visibly available, who chase, who over explain themselves, who make their interest the center of every interaction, tend to trigger less desire, not more. This isn’t because scarcity is some manipulative tactic you need to perform. It’s because scarcity is a proxy for value in a world where value is otherwise hard to measure quickly.

Think about it from an evolutionary lens for a second. If a potential partner is surrounded by other people who want them, that social proof is doing verification work your brain doesn’t have to do itself. It’s outsourcing the judgment. Conversely, someone who is desperately available with no other options creates a quiet, often subconscious doubt. Why is nobody else interested in this.

I made this mistake badly in my early twenties. I thought devotion was the currency of attraction, that if I just showed enough interest and enough consistency, the feeling would eventually be reciprocated. It rarely was, and when it was, it usually came from a place of pity or convenience rather than genuine pull. What actually changed things for me wasn’t becoming colder. It was building a life substantial enough that my attention became something with real weight behind it, rather than something given away freely because I had nothing else occupying my mind.

Novelty, Familiarity, and the Tension Between Them

There’s a paradox at the center of long term attraction that almost nobody talks about honestly. We’re drawn to novelty because novelty signals growth, possibility, an expanded future. But we’re also drawn to familiarity because familiarity signals safety, predictability, a nervous system that can finally relax. The couples who sustain desire over years are usually the ones who figure out how to keep injecting novelty into a relationship that has already secured familiarity, rather than letting the relationship calcify into pure routine.

This is part of why shared adventure, trying new things together, building new skills side by side, keeps a spark alive far longer than shared comfort alone. Comfort without novelty slowly turns a partner into furniture. You stop seeing them as a live, unpredictable person and start seeing them as a fixture of your environment.

Status, Not the Way You Think

Status gets treated like a dirty word, as though caring about it makes you shallow. But status, properly understood, isn’t about money or followers. It’s about your position within a social hierarchy that matters to the people around you. What raises status in one social context might do nothing in another. A man who is deeply respected among a small circle of serious craftsmen has more real romantic capital in that world than a man with more money but no standing among people whose opinion actually matters to him.

The real lifemaxxing insight here is that you don’t need generic status. You need earned respect within contexts that are actually visible to the people you want to attract. Chasing broad, undifferentiated status, more money, more generic approval, is often less efficient than becoming genuinely excellent and respected within a smaller, more specific world.

What This Actually Means for You

None of this is about tricks. It’s about understanding what your nervous system, and other people’s nervous systems, are actually optimizing for. Attraction is a downstream signal of a much older question, is this person’s presence in my life going to make things better or worse. Every trait we call attractive, confidence, competence, scarcity, novelty, status, is just a different way of answering that question convincingly.

If you want to become more attractive, the honest path isn’t performing these signals superficially. It’s actually becoming the kind of person whose presence genuinely does make things better. Build competence in something real. Build a life full enough that your attention is scarce because it’s genuinely occupied, not because you’re withholding it strategically. Keep growing so you remain a source of novelty even to the people who already know you well. Earn respect in a world that matters to you.

The woman at that dinner party wasn’t choosing men randomly. She was reading signals her conscious mind couldn’t fully articulate, running the same ancient calculation we all run. Understanding that calculation doesn’t make attraction less mysterious. If anything it makes the mystery more precise, and precision is the first step toward actually doing something about it.

You know the persona. The cars, the columns, the farm, the bloke who’s built a second career out of enormous, unapologetic enthusiasm for things. He’s one of the most beloved men in Britain, and rightly so. But the love tends to stop at he’s a laugh — the funny car man, the telly national treasure — and that’s where nearly everyone misses the point.

Because underneath the entertainment is one of the most quietly instructive lives in British public life. Look past the persona for four minutes and what you find is a masterclass — a man in his sixties living with more appetite, more nerve and more genuine joy than almost anyone half his age.

Including, if we’re honest, you.

Here is a man of sixty-five who, in the last decade, got publicly sacked from the biggest show on earth, built an even bigger one, became a farmer he had no business becoming, accidentally made the most-watched depiction of the countryside in a generation, bought a pub, and is — by every visible measure — having a more enormous time than men a third of his age.

He isn’t a national treasure by accident. He’s earned it, and there are at least three things he does, out in the open, that most careful, sensible men will never do once.

Let’s take them.

• • •

He never once stopped betting on himself

In 2015, at fifty-five, Clarkson lost everything that mattered professionally, and he lost it entirely through his own fault. Top Gear wasn’t just a show. It was the most-watched factual programme on the planet, beamed into three hundred and fifty million homes, the single biggest thing the BBC had. And he threw a punch at a producer over a cold dinner and it was gone. Sacked. The empire, gone overnight, nobody to blame but himself.

Here is what a sensible man does next. He apologises. He rehabilitates. He does a contrite interview, waits out the storm, and lives comfortably off the reruns and the pension of a man who was once very famous. He protects what’s left. He coasts.

Here is what Clarkson did.

He went to Amazon and built The Grand Tour — reportedly one of the most expensive television shows ever commissioned, a car programme with a bigger budget and a bigger reach than the thing he’d just been thrown out of. He took the two men who were sacked alongside him and he rebuilt the whole cathedral somewhere new, bigger than before, and in doing so proved something most men never get to prove: that the empire was never the BBC’s. It was his. He was the empire. He just walked it across the road.

That alone would be the reinvention story of most men’s lives. A comeback for the ages, done and dusted, lesson learned.

But that’s not the bit that should stop you.

The bit that should stop you is what he did next — when he had absolutely nothing left to prove, all the money he could ever need, and every reason on earth to relax. He bought a thousand acres in Oxfordshire and decided to farm it himself. A man in his sixties who knew nothing — genuinely nothing — about farming, choosing to become a rank, fumbling, useless beginner again, on camera, in front of millions. Failing at lambing. Failing at hedges. Getting shouted at by a twenty-something farmhand who knew more than he did about everything that mattered on that land.

Sit with the sequencing, because it’s the whole lesson. Sacked. Rebuilds bigger. Then, from the top of that second mountain, chooses to be terrible at something new in public.

Most men switch off the appetite somewhere around forty. They stop applying for the job they’re only half-qualified for. They stop learning the thing they’d be embarrassed to be bad at. They start protecting the reputation instead of spending it. The whole downhill slide of a man’s life is just the appetite quietly going out, one avoided risk at a time.

Clarkson’s never went out. At sixty-five it’s still roaring. He is, in the truest sense the word ever had, a man who keeps saying worth a punt — long, long after the age most men stopped.

• • •

The friendship is real, and it’s the rarest thing on television

Watch Clarkson, Hammond and May together for ten minutes and you are watching something almost extinct: three grown men who properly love each other and would rather die than say so.

They take the piss without mercy. They mock each other’s height, driving, faces, choices, entire personalities. May is a pedantic old woman. Hammond is a needy hamster. Clarkson is a lumbering oaf who breaks everything he touches. It never stops, across two decades and two shows and hundreds of hours, and underneath every single insult is the deepest affection you’ll see between men anywhere in the culture.

That’s the thing the sneerers miss entirely. British men built an entire language — the piss-take — specifically so they’d never have to say the sincere thing out loud. And usually it’s a cage. Usually banter is the wall men hide behind so they never actually meet. But watch these three and you see the piss-take used the other way — as the proof of love rather than the substitute for it. You only get to call a man a useless old fool for twenty years if you’d walk through fire for him and both of you know it.

Now look at your own friendships and ask the honest question. Are they still like that? Or have they quietly become logistics — the occasional pint, the birthday text, the “we should really sort something” that never gets sorted?

Because here’s what actually keeps three men laughing together at sixty: they kept doing things. Idiotic, elaborate, pointless things. Driving cruddy cars across Botswana. Building amphibious vehicles that sink. Racing to the North Pole. The friendship stayed molten because they never stopped generating shared stupid adventures to laugh about. That’s the fuel. That’s the only fuel. Friendships don’t die from conflict — they die from admin, from the slow settling into “we should get something in the diary.” These three never let it settle, because there was always another daft trip to plan.

The lesson isn’t have famous friends with an Amazon budget. The lesson is: the stupid adventure isn’t a distraction from the friendship. It is the friendship. Keep doing them, or watch the whole thing cool into mortgage-rate small talk by fifty.

• • •

He stopped auditioning decades ago

Here is the quality that sits underneath all of it, and it’s the one worth stealing most.

Jeremy Clarkson does not care whether you approve of him.

Not in a try-hard, look-how-much-I-don’t-care way — that’s just auditioning in a different costume. In the real way. The settled way. He long ago worked out which people were always going to dislike him and simply stopped spending a single second trying to win them over. There’s no rebrand. No sanitised comeback version. No focus-grouped, algorithm-chasing Jeremy 2.0 who says the acceptable thing now. He does the columns because they amuse him. He does the farm because it delights him — and it loses money, and he does it anyway, which is the most on-brand fact about the entire enterprise. He bought a pub because he wanted a pub.

He is doing, at every turn, the thing that interests him — and letting the chips fall.

This is the exact quality this whole account keeps circling. The settled man versus the waiting man. The man who’s already someone versus the man forever becoming someone, forever adjusting himself to the room, forever checking the temperature before he speaks. Clarkson is, whatever else you think of him, unmistakably already someone. He walks into every situation at the same pace. He’s not managing his image because he stopped believing his image was the point.

And this is why he ages the way he does — not physically, God knows, but in aliveness. The men who spend their lives auditioning get more anxious as they get older, because the reviews never stop mattering and the body that has to perform keeps declining. The men who stopped auditioning get freer. Every year, less to prove. Every year, more happy to just do the thing.

That’s the trade on offer, and most men are on the wrong side of it. They think the freedom comes after the approval — once I’m liked enough, successful enough, established enough, then I’ll relax. It never comes, because the approval is a moving target and chasing it is the cage. Clarkson worked out the shortcut. Stop chasing it now. Do the thing that amuses you. Let them wince.

• • •

The thing to actually take

You’re not going to become Jeremy Clarkson, and you wouldn’t want to. That’s not the exercise.

The exercise is to notice that a sixty-five-year-old man is out-living you. Not out-earning you — out-living you. Still betting on himself when he’s got nothing left to prove. Still deep in real friendships built on shared stupid adventures. Still doing exactly what he wants and letting the disapproval wash straight off him.

Three things. The appetite that never switched off. The friendships kept molten by doing daft things together. The total refusal to audition for anyone’s approval.

None of them require a farm, a fortune, or a television show. They require the thing he’s actually got, the thing that has nothing to do with any of the trappings: he decided, a long time ago, to be fully alive and slightly ridiculous rather than careful and admired.

Pick one of the three this week. Bet on yourself on something you’d normally call yourself too old or too settled for. Text the mates with an actual daft plan, not a “we should.” Or just do the one thing this week that amuses you and let somebody wince.

The old man’s still having the best time in the room. The least you can do is find out why.

“Clarkson, you infantile Pillock.”- James May

— Lifemaxxers

Six men. Decent restaurant. Food’s good, company’s good, everyone made the effort to be there. And at any given moment, two of them are lit from below in blue. One’s “just checking something.” One’s holding the phone under the table like that makes it invisible. The conversation runs at about sixty percent capacity all night, because at no point are all six men actually in the room.

Nobody comments on it. That’s the etiquette now. We’ve all agreed, silently, not to notice that nobody’s really anywhere anymore. People are starting to forget what the word ‘presence’ even means now.

Here’s the question you don’t want to ask about last night’s dinner: what do you actually remember of it?

Not the photos. Not the receipt. The dinner. What was said. The joke that landed. What your mate’s face did when he told you the thing he’d clearly been building up to telling you.

If the answer’s foggy, I know where you were. You were at the table. You just weren’t at the table.

The thing it’s actually stealing

Everyone tells you the phone is stealing your time. Screen-time reports, digital detox retreats, the annual January article about dopamine. You’ve heard it. It bounced off. It bounces off everyone but it never really seems to imprint in our minds.

Because time isn’t the real theft. The real theft is worse and nobody’s named it for you.

The phone is stealing your witness.

There’s a version of you whose only job is to be present at your own life. To watch it happen. To store it. Every good dinner, every long drive, every 2am conversation, every sunset you happened to be stood in front of — someone in your head is supposed to be recording all of it, because that recording is what you’ll live off later. It’s the back catalogue. It’s the stories. It’s the entire raw material of the man you become.

And that witness is being sent out of the room forty, fifty, eighty times a day.

You were on the beach, but you were also in your emails. You were at the gig, but through a screen, filming a video you’ll never watch. You were at your mate’s wedding and you missed the exact second his face went when she walked in, because a man you’ve never met posted a carousel about morning routines. Go back 20 years and the wedding video was hilarious because everybody was so present and genuinely having a great time whereas now everyone’s first thought is how good will this look on Instagram?

You didn’t lose the time. The time happened. You lost the having been there. And that doesn’t come back with better habits next week. That specific dinner, that specific light, that specific version of your mates around that specific table — that’s gone into the archive with half the frames missing.

A life is just accumulated presence. Miss enough moments and you’ve missed the life, even though you technically attended it.

The maths nobody wants to do

You know I’m going to make you count it. That’s what we do here.

The average UK adult is on his phone around four hours a day. Four. And most men reading this are above average, because the men reading this are the men whose phones told them to.

Run it forward. Four hours a day is 28 hours a week. Call it 1,460 hours a year — that’s 61 full days. Two entire months, every year, face-down in the glass.

Now stretch it across the runway you’ve got left. If you’re 30 and you make it to 70, that’s forty years at two months a year. Eighty months. Six and a half years of your remaining waking life, spent on the one activity you will never once tell a story about.

Or count it the way this account counts things: you’ve got about forty summers left. At current usage, you’re going to spend thirteen of them on your phone.

Thirteen summers. Handed over. For what — do you even remember what you looked at yesterday? Name three things. You can’t. Nobody can. That’s the tell. Six and a half years of your life is going into a hole that doesn’t even leave memories behind.

No purchase, no habit, no vice on earth is taking more from you. The pints aren’t. The takeaways aren’t. It’s this, it’s in your pocket right now, and it buzzed while you were reading that paragraph.

The two men at the bar

Walk into any bar this Friday and you’ll see the whole thing laid out like a diagram.

Man one is on his phone. Waiting for his mate, so obviously he’s on his phone — what else would he do, stand there? He scrolls, he half-smiles at something, he looks up to check the door, back down. Perfectly normal. Completely invisible. There are eleven of him in the room and the room has registered none of them. He is furniture that breathes.

Man two is just… stood there. Drink in hand. Watching the room the way you’d watch weather — interested, unhurried, nowhere else to be. Not performing anything. Just present.

Now here’s the part that’s changed in the last ten years, and almost no man has clocked it: man two is now conspicuous. Being off your phone in public has quietly become the rarest thing in the room. The still man used to be the default; now he’s an event. Women notice him first — not because he’s better looking, but because he’s the only man broadcasting on a frequency anyone can receive. The barman serves him first. Strangers stand near him. He looks like the only person in the building whose evening is happening here.

Presence used to be free and universal. Now it’s scarce. And you know what happens to the value of scarce things.

Your grandfather had to be taller, richer or braver than the other men to stand out in a bar. You’ve been handed the softest deal in history: you can outrank most of the room by doing nothing, visibly. Standing still with your head up is now a status display. That’s how far the bar has fallen.

Ninety percent of men can’t do it. Watch them. The phone comes out within ninety seconds of being alone, every time, like a reflex. Because it is one.

What the phone is actually for

Let’s be honest about what’s happening in that reflex, because it isn’t boredom.

The phone comes out when you’re alone at the bar because being visibly alone feels exposed, and the phone is a shield. It comes out in the lift because eye contact with a stranger costs something. It comes out at dinner in the lull, because a silence is a small test and the phone is the answer sheet.

Every time you reach for it, you’re not seeking something. You’re escaping something — a silence, a stranger, a feeling, a room. The phone is where men go to not be where they are.

Which means the scroll isn’t the habit. The flinch is the habit. And a man who flinches away from every unstructured moment is training himself, hundreds of reps a day, in the exact opposite of the one trait we’ve established women, employers, strangers and children read first: the ability to stay in the room.

You’re not wasting time. You’re rehearsing absence. Four hours a day. It would be strange if you were good at presence. You’ve been practising the other thing since 2009.

The protocol

You know how this account works by now. No detoxes. No greyscale screens. No app that plants a digital tree. That’s the optimiser’s answer, and the optimiser always loses to the man who just changes what he does.

One move: the phone doesn’t come to dinner.

Not on silent. Not face-down — face-down is still at the table, and everyone knows it’s loaded. In the pocket, in the coat, in the car. One full dinner this week — mates, family, date, doesn’t matter — where the phone is simply not a guest.

First twenty minutes, you’ll feel the flinch. Your hand will move on its own three or four times. Let it. That twitch is ten years of training announcing itself, and it’s the most useful discomfort you’ll feel all week — every rep you don’t reach is a rep the other way.

Then, somewhere around the second drink, something you’d forgotten happens. The dinner gets deep. The conversation goes somewhere because nobody bailed out of the lull. You notice things — the room, the food, your mate’s face doing the thing before he says the real thing. The witness comes back in and sits down.

And here’s what they’ll notice, though nobody will say it: you were the man who was there all night. In a world of half-present men, the fully present one is unforgettable, and he didn’t do anything. He just left a rectangle in his coat.

Thirteen summers are on the table. Start by winning back one dinner.

Book the table. Leave the phone.

Tiredness has become so normal in modern life that most men have stopped even registering it as a problem. It’s just the water they swim in. Wake up groggy, drag through the morning on coffee, hit a wall around three in the afternoon, come home with nothing left to give the people who actually deserve your best energy, and repeat that whole cycle until the weekend, when you sleep in and somehow still feel exhausted. Most men assume that’s just what being an adult feels like. It isn’t. It’s what being an adult feels like when almost none of the actual levers that produce energy are being pulled properly, and honestly most men have never even been shown where those levers are.

This isn’t a biohacking listicle full of vague wellness nonsense. It’s closer to an engineering problem. Your body is a machine that produces energy through very specific inputs, and if you’re not deliberately managing those inputs, you’re basically running that machine on whatever fuel happens to fall into it that day. Here’s the actual blueprint, in full, with the nuance most versions of this conversation skip entirely.

1. Train hard, not just often

There’s a difference between moving your body and actually training it, and most gym goers never cross that line. A gentle twenty minutes on the treadmill while scrolling Instagram is better than nothing, technically, but it’s not doing the thing that actually rebuilds your energy system from the inside out. Your body only bothers upgrading itself when it’s given a genuine reason to. Lift something heavy enough that the last few reps are actually hard. Push your heart rate up somewhere it doesn’t usually go, at least once or twice a week. Give your body an actual signal that more capacity is required, and it will, slowly and without asking your permission, start building that capacity.

What people miss is that this works almost backwards from how it feels in the moment. Training hard feels like it should drain you, and in the short term it does. But the medium term effect is the opposite. More mitochondria doing the actual work of producing cellular energy. Better oxygen delivery through a stronger heart and better blood vessels. A resting nervous system that isn’t constantly on the edge of panic because it knows the body underneath it can actually handle physical demand when it shows up. Men who train properly report more energy for the rest of their day, not less, and it’s not motivation talking, it’s genuine physiology.

There’s also a slightly irreverent point worth making here. A huge number of men chasing more energy through supplements and morning routines have never once in their adult life done a proper heavy squat or sprinted until their lungs burned. You cannot supplement your way past a body that has never been asked to do anything hard. No stack fixes that. Go train first.

2. Get your hormones checked instead of guessing

This is the part almost nobody actually does, because it requires admitting you might have a real, fixable medical issue rather than just a willpower problem. Testosterone and thyroid function sit underneath almost every conversation about energy, and most men walking around exhausted have simply never had either properly tested. They assume they’re just lazy or unmotivated when the actual issue is a number on a bloodwork panel they’ve never seen.

Get it checked. Not guessed at through some online quiz, actual bloodwork through a doctor. Low testosterone in particular is far more common in younger men now than it used to be, and a huge chunk of that has environmental causes we’ll get into shortly. Thyroid issues get missed constantly too because the symptoms, fatigue, low mood, weight changes, get written off as normal stress rather than investigated properly.

Beyond the medical side, there are lifestyle factors that support healthy hormone production without needing a prescription for anything. Heavy compound lifting genuinely raises testosterone over time. Sufficient sleep matters enormously here, more than most men realise, because a huge amount of your testosterone production happens specifically during deep sleep, which means cutting sleep short isn’t just making you groggy, it’s quietly cutting your own hormone production off at the source. Sunlight on your skin, particularly in the morning, plays a role too. None of this is exotic biohacking. It’s just basic maintenance that almost nobody actually does.

3. Eat to fuel the whole day, not just the next hour

Modern eating has been quietly engineered around convenience and immediate pleasure rather than sustained function, and the entire food industry benefits from you not really noticing that trade off. Sugar and refined carbohydrates spike your blood sugar fast, which feels great for about forty minutes, and then it crashes hard, taking your mood and focus down with it. That crash isn’t bad luck or a coincidence. It’s the direct, predictable, physiological consequence of what you just ate, and it happens to basically everyone the same way.

Build your regular meals around protein, healthy fats, and slower digesting carbohydrates like vegetables, oats, and whole grains. These keep blood sugar steady across hours rather than sending it on a rollercoaster that leaves you reaching for more sugar an hour later just to get back to baseline. Save the faster digesting, higher glycemic carbs specifically for around your training sessions, when your body actually has somewhere useful to put that quick fuel rather than just storing the crash that follows.

There’s a slightly contrarian point worth adding here too, particularly for men chasing leanness. A lot of guys trying to stay lean end up quietly starving their own performance without realising it, running on a deficit large enough to tank their energy, their hormones, and their training output, all in the name of a slightly flatter stomach. Eating enough, genuinely enough, matters just as much as eating the right things. Undereating wrecks energy just as thoroughly as eating badly does, it just gets far less attention because it looks disciplined from the outside.

4. Cut the stuff quietly disrupting your hormones without you noticing

This is the part of the conversation people find slightly uncomfortable because it sounds paranoid, but the evidence behind it isn’t fringe anymore. Plastic containers leaching compounds into your food, particularly when heated. Certain heavily processed seed oils showing up constantly in fast food and packaged snacks. Regular heavy drinking most weekends, which does measurable damage to testosterone and sleep quality even if you’re functioning fine the next day. Constant blue light exposure late into the night confusing your body’s natural signal that it’s time to wind down and produce the hormones associated with rest and recovery.

None of these single handedly ruins a man’s health on their own. It’s the stacking effect over years that matters. Small swaps genuinely help here without requiring you to become paranoid about every single thing you touch. Glass or stainless steel over plastic where it’s easy to switch. Whole, minimally processed food as your default rather than your exception. Fewer heavy drinking nights, not necessarily zero, just fewer. Winding down screens earlier than feels natural at first. None of this is dramatic. It’s just removing quiet friction that your hormonal system has been fighting against in the background for years without you ever clocking it as the cause of anything.

5. Sleep is the foundation everything else sits on top of

You cannot train your way, eat your way, or supplement your way around consistently bad sleep. It’s genuinely the base layer that everything above it depends on, and it’s the one most men treat as negotiable the moment life gets busy. Poor sleep tanks testosterone directly. It wrecks insulin sensitivity, which makes you crave sugar the next day specifically because your body is trying to compensate for the energy it didn’t properly recover overnight. It makes every workout feel harder than it should and every minor stress feel like a genuine crisis.

Aim for a consistent sleep and wake time, including on weekends, because a wildly inconsistent schedule confuses your body’s internal clock almost as much as not sleeping enough does. Get morning sunlight early, genuinely, actual daylight on your actual eyes, because that single habit does more to regulate your circadian rhythm than almost any supplement on the market. Keep the room properly dark and cool at night. Put the phone down earlier than feels necessary, because the version of you scrolling in bed at midnight is trading tomorrow’s entire energy budget for twenty more minutes of mindless content tonight, and that’s a genuinely terrible trade when you actually look at it plainly.

Recovery isn’t only sleep either. Rest days from training matter here too. Training hard without proper recovery doesn’t build more capacity, it just burns you out faster while convincing you that you’re being disciplined.

6. Your mental attitude is not separate from your physiology, it’s part of it

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Look at yourself for a second.

You track your sleep. You wear the ring. You log your steps, your macros, your resting heart rate, your recovery score. You take the magnesium, the creatine, the vitamin D. Cold plunge in the morning. Zone 2 in the evening. You’ve read every protocol, listened to every podcast, optimised every input you can find.

And on paper, you’re winning. Your bloodwork is clean. Your resting heart rate is low. You’ll probably live a long time.

But here’s the question nobody in this space wants to ask you:

What are you actually saving all that time for?

Because if you’re honest — really honest — you can’t remember the last time you did something that wasn’t optimised. The last time you stayed out late and didn’t care what it cost you. The last spontaneous trip you said yes to without checking how it’d wreck your routine. The last night with your mates that didn’t get cut short because you had to protect your sleep score.

You’ve turned your one life into a spreadsheet. And you’re so busy managing the inputs that you’ve forgotten to live the output.

This is the longevity trap. And it’s quietly stealing the exact thing it claims to protect.

You’ve met this man. You might be becoming him.

You know the guy.

He brings his own food to the dinner. He leaves the party at nine because he’s “protecting his cortisol.” He won’t have the drink, won’t take the trip, won’t do anything that isn’t scheduled, measured, and accounted for. He’ll tell you his resting heart rate unprompted. He has never, not once, been swept up in a moment, because a moment you didn’t plan can’t be optimised.

And here’s the thing. He’s healthy. Genuinely. His numbers are immaculate.

He’s also one of the most boring men you’ve ever met, and quietly, underneath all that discipline, he is not happy. He’s just controlled. He’s mistaken the absence of chaos for the presence of a life.

Now be honest about how close you are to becoming him. Because it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens one declined invitation at a time, one “I can’t, I’ve got training” at a time, until one day you look up and realise you’ve spent five years perfecting a life you never actually lived.

Optimisation is just anxiety wearing a lab coat

Let’s be real about what’s going on here.

For a lot of guys, the obsession with optimising isn’t really about health. It’s about control. The world feels chaotic and your future feels uncertain, so you grab the few variables you can control — your diet, your sleep, your training — and you squeeze them until they scream. Every metric you move feels like proof you’re not falling behind.

But that grip has a cost. The constant monitoring, the guilt when you slip, the low-level dread that you’re never doing quite enough — that is stress. Chronic, daily, self-inflicted stress.

I’ve written before about cortisol, the stress hormone that wrecks your body, your face, and your mind when it stays elevated. Here’s the irony almost nobody catches: the man obsessively chasing the perfect low-cortisol life is often drowning in cortisol because of the obsession itself. You cannot supplement your way out of a life lived in a permanent state of quiet panic about whether you’re optimised enough.

The pursuit of the perfect life is making your life worse. And you can’t see it, because it’s dressed up as discipline.

Somebody sold you this

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