Measured

Optimization is a quiet think tank and peer community of two hundred members across eighteen countries, all age ranges, several strata of economic backgrounds, and varied ethnicities, who treat health as a research problem rather than a personality. We publish what we find.

The briefs and countless converdsations in Optimization have worked through VO2 max, visceral fat, sleep architecture, nasal breathing, and the biological-age studies the supplement industry would rather you not read closely, and we keep our own numbers in the open as the cost of admission. That is the context for what follows. The essay below responds to Scott Galloway's argument that optimization is a trap. It is written by people who do this every morning and have reached the opposite conclusion, with receipts to show for it.

Scott Galloway just published 1,200 words arguing that measurement makes you miserable. The b-school professor, who instructs a course on quantified digital marketing at the vaunted Stern School of Business (5% acceptance rate), built the case on a 121-study meta-analysis, a survey of 1.5 million people, a Harvard happiness model that tested multiple variables, BMI-reduction data, and national death-rate statistics. The essay against metrics is sourced entirely to metrics, which isn’t a gotcha so much as the tell.

Galloway trusts data completely, right up until the moment it asks something of him. When flexible dieters turn out to be less moody, he cites the study; when moderate drinkers report higher life satisfaction, he cites the 1.5 million; but when the subject turns to his own VO2 max or sleep score, the numbers suddenly speak too loudly and threaten to drown out what matters. He isn’t against measurement, he is against the measurements that would require him to change, and while every one of us carries that bias, most of us don’t dress it up as a philosophy.

What He Gets Right

Start with the 80 percent of this he gets right, because it is a lot. Value capture is real, and C. Thi Nguyen is one of the sharpest people working on the problem: a rich value gets flattened into a number, and the number takes over. Perfectionism is a clinical disease, and the meta-analysis he cites describes it accurately. The metric is not the meaning, and anyone who has watched a friend ruin a vacation because their ring wouldn’t close knows the disease is real.

Had Galloway simply written that bad optimization is a trap, every serious person in this space would have nodded and moved on, because we say it constantly and it is the entire reason the good version exists. But that essay doesn’t trend, and it doesn’t close on a photo with Hillary Clinton, so he wrote a different one in which the worst case became the only case.

The Man in The Hyperbaric Chamber

The worst case has a name, and Galloway leans on it: Bryan Johnson, who spends two million dollars a year tracking hundreds of biomarkers, takes no rest days, and treats every calorie as something that must fight for its life. Johnson is the strawman the whole essay depends on, precisely because he is absurd and almost nobody is him. The move is a motte-and-bailey, in which the defensible claim is that obsessive, joyless, seven-figure measurement is bad for you, while the claim he needs to make is that tracking your sleep is perfectionism in disguise. He proves the first, asserts the second, and trusts that the reader won’t notice the substitution. The person who runs three miles before work and then checks whether they slept is not Bryan Johnson, and is in fact a great deal closer to Galloway than he would like to admit.

The Optimizer Who Is Embarrassed About It

Read his own routine again, because it gives him away. He (1) eats to hit his calorie and macro targets, he (2) protects his sleep, he (3) trains regularly, and then, in his own words, he (4) works out harder so he can drink more, staying health-conscious 80 percent of the time so he can devour the other 20. That is not a rejection of the philosophy of optimization but optimization itself, and it is the exact strategy every reasonable practitioner runs, because the discipline is what makes the indulgence survivable in the first place. The In-N-Out, the edibles, the Peronis, and the chocolate almonds lifted from the Faena minibar are all available to him because the base underneath them is solid, and if you take away the 80 percent, the 20 percent stops being a great night and becomes a health event. Galloway did not escape the optimized life; he is living it, and living it well. He has simply learned to code the discipline as wallpaper and the dessert as identity, which is how the most optimized sentence in the piece ends up disguised as a case against optimization.

The Pursuit of Youth

There is a deeper tell beneath the whole performance. A man who has truly made peace with age does not, at 61, tour the country on a punishing schedule, train on a clock, count his macros, and build a second act of his career on energy and relevance, and he certainly does not write this vigorously about why none of it matters. Galloway is on his second marriage, to a woman roughly eighteen years his junior, a gap he discusses freely, and that is entirely his own prerogative (there is nothing wrong with it). But it does point to his own perceived vitality and vigor. A man this invested in staying vital and staying in the arena is poorly positioned to tell the rest of us that the pursuit of youth is a trap. He is pursuing it as hard as anyone. He has simply decided that his version counts as wisdom and everyone else’s as neurosis.

What Gets Measured

He opens with the Caulkin line, that what gets measured gets managed even when it is pointless to measure it, and he is right, except the line is a warning to measure the correct things rather than a case against measuring at all. But let’s take it a step further and review a key para from 1954’s Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements

The skill has always been in choosing the metric, never in going blind. So choose well: VO2 max is not a vanity number but one of the most durable predictors of all-cause mortality we have, and resting heart rate, recovery, training load, and time in zone two are not a GPA chased for its own sake. They are the dashboard that tells a 55-year-old man whether his heart will be there for the parts of life that never appear on any dashboard. The instrument does not replace the judgment, any more than a pilot’s instruments fly the plane for him, and the mature version of this practice is not the man who cannot stop reading the numbers but the one disciplined enough to read them and then close the laptop, because the recovery score told him to go to dinner.

Enjoy Every Sandwich

Then there are the sandwiches. Warren Zevon, months from death, joked that avoiding doctors for two decades was a phobia that didn’t pay off, and Galloway quotes the line for its sentiment without sitting with its content, which is that ignoring your body is a bet that eventually comes due. Zevon’s joke is an argument for the checkup, delivered by a man who had run out of time to take it. This is the thing the essay cannot hold in its head at once: the metric and the sandwich are not opponents, because the metric is how you earn more sandwiches. You do not track your heart so your sons will admire your heart rate, you track it so you are still at the dinner table in 30 years, so you can walk your daughter down the aisle, so the father who shows up imperfectly at the games gets to keep showing up. Longevity work is not the enemy of enjoying every minute, it is the down payment on more of them.

Bronnie Ware’s dying patients did not wish they had optimized, but they did not wish they had tracked less either; they wished for more health, more energy, more time, and more truth. Read the regrets again and you will find that half of them describe capacity the patients no longer had, and protecting that capacity before it is gone is precisely the work Galloway is dunking on.

The Point Was The Years

What is essential is invisible to the eye, which is beautiful and also true, but the boys do not get the invisible, essential father if the visible, measurable one checks out early. The sleep score was never the point, and neither was the sandwich; the point was the years, and the energy to be fully present inside them, and the dashboard is simply one of the tools we use to keep them. So enjoy every sandwich, because I sure do, and then check the glucose, lace up, and run, because we intend to be here for a great many more of them.

Measured,