#539： Life Hacking, A Reexamination
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Summary
In an effort to get more done and be our best selves, many of us have turned to life hacks that we find in blogs, books, and podcasts. I ve personally experimented with several life hacks in the past decade, and we ve even written about some on AOM. But are there downsides to trying to hack your way through life? My guest took a look at both the positives and negatives of life hacking in his new book, Hacking Life: Systemized Living and Its Discontents.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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In an effort to get more done and be our best selves, many of us have turned to life hacks
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that we find in blogs, books, and podcasts. I've personally experimented with several
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life hacks in the past decade, and we've even written about some on AOM. But are there downsides
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to trying to hack your way through life? My guest took a look at both the positives and
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negatives of life hacking in his book, Hacking Life, Systemized Living, and Its Discontents.
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His name is Joseph Regal, and he's a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University.
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We begin our conversation with a history of the life hacking movement and how blogging in
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the early 2000s made this obscure cultural movement amongst computer programmers go mainstream.
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Joseph then discusses how he distinguishes between nominal life hacking and optimal life
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hacking, and between geeks and gurus. We then discuss some of the beneficial productivity
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and motivation hacks out there, and also how there are ways they can go astray, including
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only working for a certain class of people and becoming too much of a focus in life.
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We also discuss how the minimalism movement can sometimes lead to contradictory impulses,
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and we end our conversation talking about how using spiritual practices like meditation or
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stoicism as hacks can strip them of their deeper spiritual context. After the show's over,
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check out our show notes at aom.is slash hackinglife. Joseph joins me now via clearcast.io.
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So you just published a book, Hacking Life, Systemized Living and Its Discontents. And it's
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a look at the life hacking movement that started in the early 2000s and has had a big influence
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on internet culture. And it's something that I've experimented with over the years and done
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different life hacking things. Before we get into the specifics, for those who aren't familiar
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with the phrase life hacking, what is a life hack?
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At the simplest level, it's a quick or clever fix that's often systematic. Either you build up a
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system for taking advantage of something or you figure out a way to maybe bend the rules of an
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Gotcha. And where did the whole thing come out of? What's the history of life hacking?
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Well, since we spoke of the definition, it's actually interesting to think about
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the origins of the term itself. And back in the late 1950s, believe it or not, there was a model
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railroad club at MIT. And they were building this huge train platform. And there was various groups
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in the club. And the one was like the systems club subcommittee. And they had this mass of wires
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and relays. And they really loved this system. And they were fascinated about how all the interconnections
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work together. And they ended up developing a lot of jargon. And one of the terms they came up with
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in the 1950s was hack. And they called it a hack as a way to avoid the standard solution.
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So that was the birth of this geeky term way back in the late 1950s. And that term has continued on
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over the decades in the computer realm. And life hacking is really the emergence of that approach
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of avoiding the standard solution into all domains of life as a type of self-help.
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Right. So yeah, I remember hearing, even in the 90s, I heard the phrase hacker, referring to a
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computer guy who was able to subvert computer systems. But when did the people start putting
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life in front of hacking? When did that first start happening?
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That was thanks to Danny O'Brien in 2004. He's worked at the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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He's been an author for O'Reilly, the technical publisher. And there was a conference happening in
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the West Coast. And he noted that what he called alpha geeks, really good programmers, were very,
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very productive and efficient. And they could stay on top of the deluge that everyone else was
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overwhelmed with. And so he said, let's have a life hacking sort of session where we look at these
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alpha geeks, at these really good hackers, and ask them how they managed to do that. And to what
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extent that the people who are coming to this session have figured out little tips or tricks,
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we can share them amongst ourselves. So that's really where it came from. It was a gathering
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of writers and programmers trying to figure out how they could stay on top of the information
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And it was all about, I mean, it sounds like what it was about at first was like getting more done
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The people often turn to this idea of efficiency, that if you're feeling overwhelmed, if you have
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too much email, then problem is necessarily to somehow be able to process your emails quicker,
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more efficiently, and get down to inbox zero, which was one of Merlin Mann's ideas. He was an early
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life hacker too. And Merlin Mann actually promoted the idea. I think he's one of the first ones that
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really made a going practice of it on his blog. And Merlin Mann, Danny O'Brien, and then Gina
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Trappany, she created the site lifehacker.com. So I think that's when it really went mainstream.
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There was a website dedicated to the topic. People could go and read daily blog posts.
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And then Tim Ferriss came along. And I think with his four-hour work week, he took the idea mainstream.
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And he doesn't like to use the term life hacker. He prefers to call himself a guinea pig or a lifestyle
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designer. But you can still see the hacker ethos. It's very much present in Ferriss's work.
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And so this was around, I remember when this happened, this was like 2005, 2006, right? When
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Merlin Mann and Gina Trappany with the lifehacker, that's when that started getting going, right?
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Yeah. Because I remember when I first discovered lifehacker, I devoured the archives. I thought
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I discovered this just amazing well of useful knowledge and helped me get, because when I was in
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law school and I was really worried about getting a lot done, because I had a lot on my plate.
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And I remember Merlin Mann, uncovering him and learning about the hipster PDA. I even made a
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hipster PDA. And we'll talk about some of the specific tactics that they talked about. But
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before we get on staying broad, staying high level, how is lifehacking different from just general
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self-help and productivity advice that we've had in America and in the West for hundreds of years?
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Lifehacking is a type of self-help. I call it a type of self-help for the 21st century.
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And if you look at the history of self-help, there's a really nice history written by Stephen
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Starker. And he writes that self-help is a reflection of the fears and hopes of a people
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in their moment in time. And if you look back at that history, say you go back to the 1890s when
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self-help really first became a genre, you can see a lot of the self-help was predicated on the idea
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of being open to divine intervention. So the self-help was very kind of spiritually Christian
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inflected. And then in the 1930s, when we have the Rockefellers and the Carnegies,
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the self-help was kind of about how you could be like them. Why don't you follow their lead?
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And similarly, through the subsequent decades of the 20th century, and then into the 21st century,
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self-help is, well, let's look at the alpha geeks, see what they do, and then we'll follow their lead.
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So lifehacking is a type of self-help. It's not different at all. It's just self-help for
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our current moment. And that current moment is coming, like a lot of the culture that we have
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in business is coming out of Silicon Valley. So what's going on there influences what lifehacking
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is. Right. Lifehacking is a response to a world in which other people are both, we're a bit alienated
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from them, but they're also just a button click away on our phones. And it's not even a button,
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it's a swipe more often. It's a world in which we don't have fixed schedules so much, but we still
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feel like we have this bleed over from our work lives into our personal lives. It's a world where
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we can outsource. It's a world where we're being outsourced and we experience, as some scholars
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refer to it, increasing precarity in terms of knowing who we are and how we can earn our living.
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It's also a moment in which we're overwhelmed with choices. We now have so many choices between
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how we proceed in our lives. And a short-sighted way of looking at modernity in the current moment
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is all of this stuff is good. All these choices, all these opportunities, all these things that we
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can or can't do, the flexibility we have, that should make us really, really happy. But it turns
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out we're still just animals. We're social animals and all that choice is overwhelming us. Lifehacking
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is a self-help for responding to that glut of information and choice and flexibility.
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Right. And it's responding to like, and it's, I think that's an interesting point,
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how self-help, the self-help genre changes based on the culture and the governing maybe business
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practice or whatever. So in the 30s and 40s, it was more, you know, like you said, the Rockefellers,
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maybe in the 50s and 60s is more managerial. I guess when Peter Drucker's stuff was really popular
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about managing yourself and now it's computer. So like we, the analogies we use for self-help is
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often very computer-based. Right. Both the stressors are coming from this information world
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and the analogies and the metaphors we use to approach and deal with those stresses is also
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by way of computers. And I think you can see this in the online dating world as well, particularly
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like maybe pickup artistry. Mystery said in his book, he came up with the algorithm for seducing
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women. And so again, they're using those metaphors as you just alluded to.
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Well, so you make some distinctions within life hacking. The first distinction you make,
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there's a difference between geeks and gurus. What's that difference and why is that important?
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Yeah, I think it's important to make distinctions, at least in the academic world, when people do
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something critical, like Matt Thomas wrote a really nice dissertation of life hacking,
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a critical history. And it's important to be critical, to point out the flaws and the short-sightedness,
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but then you just sort of damn the whole phenomenon. I wasn't interested in that. One,
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because I have a geeky hacker-ish kind of sensibility myself. And two, people are struggling.
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They're trying to figure out how the best path to pursue in life. And just to say, well, you know,
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anyone that makes use of self-help as a fool or a tool or something like that isn't very helpful at
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all. So the thing I am interested in is making distinctions. And so one of the first distinctions
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I make is between geeks and gurus. So I don't want to condemn anyone and everyone that's been
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interested in life hacking. That would include myself and a lot of people I know and care about.
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But nonetheless, there are people out there pushing some snake oil and it begs credulity.
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And so I want to make a distinction between the ordinary people who are trying to cope and who are
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trying to live good lives. That's not such a bad thing. We should all be aspiring to live a good life.
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And the people then who are then selling the snake oil, right? And guru also, I don't mean to be
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intentionally insulting. Gurus are people who offer you advice. And I could say there's good gurus and
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bad gurus. But then the questions that we should ask of the gurus is, is the advice that they're
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giving us solid, reasoned, and how much are they charging for it? So I would ask different questions
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of both of those constituencies, the geeks and the gurus.
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And also the gurus, one thing is like another question you asked, I've started to question
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is like, well, is this applicable to me? Like it might work for you, right? Because you're in a
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position where that works for you, but it might not work for average Joe who has a regular job,
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Yeah. And this is one of the inherent biases in self-help is very often the people who are
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offering their advice is very much predicated on their own life experiences. So one of the distinctions
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I make that I think is important about life hacking is it's really self-help for the creative
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class. And I think there's two constituencies in our contemporary economy. There are people that
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have a lot of flexibility who have the ability to control their calendar, the ability to pursue
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their path in life. And again, that can be a stressful thing, but that's very different from
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the person who is now working as a picker at an Amazon warehouse. They have a very regimented life.
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And to speak as someone, a member of the creative class and tell a picker at an Amazon warehouse,
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these very individualistic entrepreneurial approaches that I'm using are necessarily
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going to help you. And if you don't manage to help yourself through the advice that I'm giving you,
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Right. It's not helpful for sure. And then so another distinction you make also is different types
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of hacking. So you say there's nominal hacking and there's optimal hacking. What's the difference
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there? Yeah. The nominal is kind of an engineering word. So in a way it's fitting, but I have people
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who read the book said you shouldn't use the word nominal. It is too geeky. But the temptation is if
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I don't use the term nominal is to use the word normal, but that just tends to be overloaded. So
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life hacking is a type of self-enhancement as well as a self-help. You're improving yourself.
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And when you think about normal, like what is a normal nose in a world of rhinoplasty or in a world
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where a particular shape of nose is considered a better, more normal nose than other noses.
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Normal is interesting and has all its own sort of complexities and problems associated with it.
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But I just wanted to distinguish between the people who are trying to get back to a nominal state,
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a state where they're not having migraines, a state where they're able to maintain a relatively healthy
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body, and to distinguish between the people who are really pushing the leading edge,
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people who are trying to, you know, do extraordinary feats of athleticism and health.
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And again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but they're two different classes
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of people and approaches to life. And again, I think we can ask different questions of both of them.
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Yeah, the optimize. Maybe we can get specifics of optimization or optimizing hacking. So like
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one would be some of these folks who do like polyphagic sleep. I remember when that was a big thing
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where you only sleep like a few hours a day, you'd use these naps. You're able to work
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more. That would be an example of optimizing hacking, right?
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Yes. A nominal hack would be, can I get a decent seven, eight hours of sleep at night?
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And the optimal hack is, can I get through the day by taking, say, 10 minute naps every two hours?
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And when you sum that up, it's actually very few hours indeed, and you can be so much more efficient.
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And people have been experimenting with that for a period. Buckminster Fuller,
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that guy who did geodesic domes back in the 1960s and 50s, he supposedly lived his life like that.
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And I know that in the game, Neil Strauss's book about pickup artists, the character Herbal,
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who also goes, his real first name is Tynan. He's experimented with polyphasic sleeping.
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And the people who try it, again, it's very individualistic, very optimizing approach to
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life, but people don't stick with it very long because they find it's incompatible with the
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social world around them. Like the guy who wrote the WordPress blog did polyphasic sleeping for about
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a year, but then he got a girlfriend and she wouldn't, you know, she's like, this doesn't
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Right. Cosmo Kramer also did polyphasic sleep, I believe, in an episode of Seinfeld.
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Did he? I'm a big Seinfeld fan. I don't know if I remember that.
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I think it was, I think there was an episode where he did that. I'm going to have to find,
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I'm going to verify, but I'm pretty sure he did that. And it didn't work out. He just ended up
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And so, but I mean, I can see like the benefit of nominal hacking, just trying to like get things
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in order, get your life, you know, running efficiently. And so it's not craziness all
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the time, but one of the dangers of optimal hacking, it's sort of the Icarus effect. Like
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you might reach too far and like optimizing, like you spend a lot of money and time for
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very little gain. And it also might even make you more fragile in the end, because if you,
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if you mess up one thing, like the whole optimization just gets thrown off the track.
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Yeah. There's a lot of inherent dangers in optimization. One is that when people optimize,
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they tend to be naive about it. And I think I could see that in some of the people that
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were trying to hack dating and love, you know, one hacker went on like 250 dates in a couple
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of months and it's like, that can't be very good. Nick Winter is another life hacker. And
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he wrote a book about productivity hacking and he wanted to really maximize his productivity,
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work 120 hour weeks, and he used all these motivation hacks. But then he also had to create
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other things to track and optimize. So he like said, I want to go on 10 dates with my girlfriend
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and I need to have 12 social events with my friends. And so the danger there is sometimes
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maybe you optimize the wrong thing or you optimize one thing to the exclusion of everything else.
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So when people were first introduced to this, they love it. They're like, okay,
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I can solve my problems by optimizing my productivity. But then they realize productivity is just one piece
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of their life. And maybe they've distorted their lives by fixating on that one particular thing.
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Yeah. And the one thing I've seen in my own life, say like, you know, a big idea amongst life
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hackers is the idea of a morning routine or an evening routine, which can be helpful, right?
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It's have some things you do. So you set your life in order for the next day or whatever.
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But there comes a point where people try to optimize their routine and get it down perfectly.
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I found when I've done that, it's like, well, if one thing gets off, I feel like the whole day's
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ruined. It's like, well, my morning routine, my optimized morning routine is off the rails. So
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the rest of the day is... Psychologically, it does something to me.
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And that is, again, a lifestyle, a position where you control your morning. The kids haven't woken up
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screaming, right? The traffic isn't bad. So you have to rush out the door to get to the office.
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So it has problems both for the individual who's trying to do it. And again, it assumes a lot about
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the individual's position in life. Right. My morning routine became much more flexible once I had kids
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because you can't control them. If they're sick, they're throwing up, well, you can't meditate and
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drink your Yerba Mate that day. Right. Exactly.
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So let's talk about the different areas that life hackers have tried to optimize. And as we said
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earlier, a big area that early life hackers focused on was time, getting more done in less time,
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being efficient. And people have various reasons for wanting to get more done so they can have more
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time to do what they want, make more money, et cetera. So what are some of the different life
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hacks people have used and shared with one another to help individuals save more time?
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There's a couple, and I actually think they're quite useful. I use a couple of them myself.
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Pomodoro, on the cover of my book, actually, there's a tomato timer. And that's the guy who
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came up with the idea, said, instead of getting distracted or working in bouts that then he's
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exhausted at the end, why doesn't he break up his work into like 30 minute or maybe 50 minute segments
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minutes and then take a little five minute break and then return to a particular task?
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So I approach my day very much like this. I have a typing timer that tells me after 50 minutes,
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I should take a typing break. And that allows me to approach even big tasks by saying, okay,
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in the next 50 minutes, I just want to get a start on the big task. And then I'll take a break.
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And then, you know, maybe I'll have something else I want to do in the next task.
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And, but if I want to continue on with that big task, I have a good start. And that's often the
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hardest thing to approaching a big problem. It also allows you to say, okay, I want to spend,
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you know, three tasks on my big project today, and then I'll spend a 50 minute chunk of time doing
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email and a 50 minute chunk prepping for a class. And Stephen Covey, the author of The Seven Habits
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of Effective People, he said, don't prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities. And so this
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allows us to sit down and say, okay, what's the big thing that I really want to do today? And that's
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important because otherwise we're often overwhelmed and we're just dealing with the, you know, the fires
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that keep emerging instead of focusing on the things that are going to sustain us and lead to
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our growth. Besides those, any other useful ones that you found that are actually, hey, this actually
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does something. Something when I'm trying to write, I actually do keep account of how much time I spend
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on task and how many words I write a day. And again, it's not as if I'm going to be really hard on
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myself if I don't hit my target, but it makes me a little bit more accountable. And Nick Winter is the guy
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who wrote the book, The Productivity Hacker. And he has a, it's, there's a good book by Peter Steele
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called The Procrastination Equation. And the question is, why do people procrastinate so much? And he had an
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equation in there that said, your motivation is determined by the expectancy times the value. So what's the
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likelihood you're going to be able to achieve something by how much value it is to you, divided
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by the impulsiveness, the degree to which you're going to be distracted and the delay. How long are
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you going to wait until you see the actual result? And Nick Winter said about saying, I'm going to take
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this equation and I'm not, I'm going to use it not only to get rid of procrastination, but I'm going to
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use it to maximize my productivity. And his book, The Productivity Hacker is a wonderful engagement with
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all the various techniques that are out there, including maximizing that equation. So for example,
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when he was trying to write some software, he was spending a lot of time fixing bugs,
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but he realized he didn't have enough users yet. So if he worked on the features, then he would get
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the users and then he would want to fix the bugs because they would be more valuable to the people
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out there. Hence, it would be more valuable to him. Other people make use of Ulysses packs,
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which they're sometimes called, which is you commit yourself to a particular course.
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I don't do this myself, but some people using apps like Stick and Beeminder, they actually,
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it's a web app service where you say, I want to do X, like say, I want to walk so many steps in a
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given day. And if you don't do it, you forfeit money. So they actually penalize you and say,
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you said you're going to spend $10, give us $10 if you fail to do this. And if people fail to do it,
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they spend the money. And the idea there is they can get you to the level that you want to be
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doing the thing that you're doing at a reasonable price and cost. And people are happy to pay that.
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Like if someone has to spend $100 to get up to that level necessary to really make them do the
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thing that they want to do, they seem to be happy to pay it.
00:21:57.520
Yeah, I've used a lot of those techniques. The Pomodoro technique I use, I've set up my computer
00:22:01.860
so that it blocks distracting websites for 45 minutes. And then I get as much work as I get done.
00:22:08.320
And then in 15 minutes, it opens them up and I can check, surf whatever I want.
00:22:13.520
Yeah, one of them is called Freedom. I think on the Mac you can get it and it's called Freedom.
00:22:17.580
Yeah. No, it's been helpful for me because again, it's a way to deal. It's a way to cope,
00:22:23.080
right? A lot of these life hacking stories are a way to cope with the current environment we find
00:22:27.320
ourselves in. And the current environment is like lots of digital distraction. We're going to take a
00:22:31.180
quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So another area we've talked
00:22:36.700
about a little bit sort of goes hand in hand with time management, this idea of motivation,
00:22:40.320
where you can hack your motivation. There's lots of blog articles, like 10 tips to supercharge your
00:22:46.120
motivation. There's books about it. So one of the things is the Ulysses pack that can be motivating,
00:22:50.780
knowing that you're going to be writing a check to you, don't believe the task, that can be
00:22:54.480
motivating. But there's also other tactics you can use. So what are some of those other tactics?
00:22:59.120
Charles Duhigg has written a couple of books on creating good habits, on hacking your motivation,
00:23:05.480
not procrastinating. And another idea in there that I actually think is useful is that when you
00:23:10.040
specify your goals, they should be SMART. And the SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable,
00:23:15.140
agreed upon, realistic, and time-bound. So the idea at least then is when you're looking at your life
00:23:20.060
and you're thinking about what you would like to achieve, don't rely upon nebulous goals. Make them
00:23:25.480
very specific. Have some sense of, well, how will I know when I've achieved that goal? Get the people
00:23:31.160
around you to buy in on it and try to be realistic and set a reasonable time boundary too. So there's
00:23:37.280
a lot of apps out there. For instance, there's exercise apps that take advantage of this. You set
00:23:41.300
a very specific goal that you want to achieve in a day. Maybe it's part of a larger goal. You can
00:23:46.560
measure it because you have the health sensor or your step counter or your smartphone that can keep
00:23:51.960
track of that. And then even the social aspect is interesting. There are exercise apps where you can
00:23:56.880
have people watching you online, kind of like an exercise buddy, or you can tell that your friends
00:24:02.780
and family that you're going to do this and they can check in with you to see if you're doing it.
00:24:06.500
So those are things that can be useful, right? To get motivated. But where do you think
00:24:11.180
motivation and productivity hacking can go awry?
00:24:14.580
Yeah. So there's a couple of angles there. For the actual individual, I think a lot of life
00:24:19.540
hackers have encountered some disappointment in their own efforts to be productive and to be
00:24:24.960
motivated. So even within a couple of years, Merlin Mann at his blog, 43 folders, he decided
00:24:32.100
he actually wasn't happy with what he was doing. So much of this is so alluring. You think this is
00:24:36.760
going to solve my problem. And then you experiment with for a while and you're like, this hasn't
00:24:40.180
really changed my life all that much. And so he called it productivity porn. And he noted that
00:24:45.140
life hackers are very prone to maybe fixating on if I only had the right pen or the right app or the
00:24:51.480
right notebook. I would be able to deal with all the stuff that I'm confronting, all the work that
00:24:56.400
I have to do. And that they spend a lot of time browsing blogs about life hacking, about motivation,
00:25:02.780
about productivity, and are not implementing it or they're using it to distract themselves. Heidi
00:25:08.160
Wooderhouse is another hacker and she did a really nice talk entitled Productivity Hacking for
00:25:14.760
the Rest of Us. And she caught all this process fondling. And she said something like,
00:25:19.500
if you spend more than half an hour a day working on your tools or reading about how to be more
00:25:24.800
productive and how motivated, you're losing. So for the sake of the individual, there's certain
00:25:31.100
excesses people can fall into. And then at the larger scale, again, I have questions about,
00:25:37.980
we seem to be living in a world where everyone expects us to be more productive, more productive.
00:25:43.440
And if we succeed and we're more productive, that just kind of raises the bar for everyone else.
00:25:48.700
And to what extent then do the companies start expecting this of us? So if the individual wants
00:25:54.300
to go out and they want to do their job better, that's great. But that Pavlok wrist zapper that
00:26:01.340
zaps you if you're not being productive, if you've gotten distracted, if you go on Facebook,
00:26:05.720
that's for the individual to purchase. But what happens when corporations start using tactics like
00:26:11.220
that? And Amazon actually has, it's not a zapper, but it vibrates to supposedly help pickers in their
00:26:19.780
warehouse. They've patented that technology. China is a bit scary because they're embracing a lot of
00:26:25.560
these technologies. And there are helmets that they have train conductors wear that can tell them when
00:26:33.520
they're being distracted. And again, that's kind of a good thing if it's going to keep safe
00:26:37.540
people being transported on trains. But they also have these gadgets that you can stick in classrooms
00:26:42.400
that recognize the students' faces and recognize when they're paying attention.
00:26:46.900
And there we're definitely encroaching upon scary, dystopic sort of vision of society.
00:26:53.080
Right. So this might not be a big one if you're just imposing it upon yourself. You decide,
00:26:57.960
I'm going to zap myself so I can be more productive. Okay. But like once a corporation
00:27:01.500
starts deciding, we're going to start using these tactics to get more out of you, then that's crossing
00:27:07.960
a line. Yeah. And the line, it's a slippery slope. It's definitely a gray area. So you choose to do
00:27:13.320
it for yourself. There's a lot of health programs at companies. And that's great if you want to be
00:27:17.880
healthy and the individual chooses to do that. And then the company says, we'll give you a little
00:27:21.680
bit of money back if you join this program in your health insurance that you pay every month.
00:27:28.460
And that's another step. And then maybe this step becomes that it's required that you participate,
00:27:33.420
even if you're going to work here. And then we're definitely in the dystopic territory.
00:27:37.740
I mean, yeah, it is dystopic in China because they have that whole social credit system, which
00:27:42.040
Which is doing what you're talking about. It's like in order to, I don't know, just buy things or like,
00:27:46.920
you know, you have to have a good social credit score. And if you don't, you're going to get
00:27:51.180
turned away from businesses or loans or whatever.
00:27:53.880
Right. You can't rent a car. You can't travel. So yeah, very scary.
00:27:57.760
So that's where it could go. Yeah, that's where, yeah, that's where like hacking motivation
00:28:02.240
could get dystopic. Well, let's talk about another one. You talk about this in the book,
00:28:07.420
I think is interesting. There's lots of little different subcultures and niches within life
00:28:11.460
hacking. And one that popped up shortly after life hacking became mainstream was this idea of
00:28:17.040
minimalism. What's the draw of life hackers to minimalism?
00:28:21.240
Again, we live in a world in which we have so much choice. We have plenty of possessions. Most
00:28:27.780
people in America are not struggling because they don't have enough possessions or they don't have
00:28:33.360
enough food. Obesity is more of a problem in America than malnutrition. Malnutrition is still
00:28:38.840
a problem, but obesity has actually outpaced it. And we have plenty of reality TVs about hoarders.
00:28:44.440
And so we are really facing this conundrum of maybe a hundred years ago, we thought as the
00:28:50.180
middle class was growing, if people only had more food, maybe more meat to eat, if we only had more
00:28:56.200
positions, if everyone had a home and then they could fill that home with stuff, they would be
00:29:00.380
happy and content. Well, we've arrived at that moment and people aren't necessarily happy and
00:29:04.900
content. And so we asked the question, well, what now? And one of those knee-jerk reactions is to say,
00:29:10.980
well, what happens if I get rid of everything? And that makes sense. I think there's a reason that
00:29:15.920
Marie Kondo and her con Marie method is so popular and was popular in Japan and now even has a Netflix
00:29:22.040
show here in the United States. And I think minimalism had a lot of reasons. And it addressed
00:29:28.140
a number of problems of people working super long hours to buy houses, to fill them with stuff.
00:29:34.060
And we don't need all of that stuff to be happy. And I think that's one of the insights we can learn.
00:29:38.760
But again, people can go a bit too far and the minimalism itself can become fetishized.
00:29:46.100
No, yeah. And so what I thought was interesting about minimalism, so yeah, it's useful, right?
00:29:50.160
You don't need a lot of stuff to be happy. I think we can all agree on that. That's something that
00:29:53.780
people, human beings have been talking about for thousands of years. But yeah, there's a point where
00:29:58.480
the whole point of your life becomes minimalism. And then you, so you talk about all these blogs that
00:30:03.520
popped up where people would write like, Oh, I just have these 10 things. And they would just
00:30:08.500
under thing challenge. Yeah. The hundred thing challenge. Here's the hundred things I own.
00:30:12.160
And it allows you to, you know, be into location independent. But I think it's interesting to
00:30:17.360
sort of, so there, there's this, there's this paradox with minimalism, if you go too far with it,
00:30:23.300
where you, you, you say you reject stuff, but at the same time, the stuff you, you keep,
00:30:29.180
you hold on to like becomes super important. Like, so stuff becomes really important to you.
00:30:34.080
And like you sort of, like you said, fetishize it. Totally. And I think in response, again,
00:30:39.520
this was an interesting fad that happened about 10 years ago, people went super gung-ho and then
00:30:44.980
they realized, huh, this isn't making me completely happy. A life hacker that I spoke to used a pseudonym,
00:30:51.080
Rita Holt. She had been into minimalism a hundred percent. She got rid of all of her stuff. She quit her
00:30:56.980
job. She was traveling around writing blog posts and writing eBooks. And then I went back to look
00:31:03.600
at one of the sources as I was writing the book and all of her websites were gone.
00:31:07.660
And so then I said, what happened? And she said, she had just realized that it was this kind of
00:31:12.260
empty life and everyone was kind of competing to be who could be most minimalist. And it wasn't really
00:31:18.520
clear that anyone was living that much more of a satisfied life, or maybe these people were just
00:31:22.420
outliers. And she scrapped it all. So this was definitely a phenomenon of having this huge bloom
00:31:28.440
of hype and fad, and then it kind of dissipated, but it never goes away forever. So even after the
00:31:34.360
whole minimalism phase, Greg McEwen, who is a Silicon Valley kind of coach, he wrote a book called
00:31:40.780
Essentialism, The Discipline to Pursuit of Less. And he never mentions minimalism because I think it
00:31:45.800
had become sufficiently tarred for reasons that I mentioned and others. But then he just sort of
00:31:51.420
shifted the term he was using and said, let's focus on what is essential. So that was an
00:31:57.020
interesting turn. It's the same thing with Marie Kondo. She says, don't fixate on how much stuff
00:32:02.300
you have and getting rid of stuff instead of focus on what's really important. And so I think the move
00:32:07.060
from minimalism to essentialism was a similar sort of focus, but still it is very much preoccupied with
00:32:13.240
stuff, the both of them. And what intrigues me is, we might talk about this, but so much of life
00:32:19.400
hacking is inspired by the Zen aesthetic and various mindfulness practices. And Siddhartha's
00:32:25.320
own story was when he was born into extraordinarily wealth. His parents provided him a palace, dancing
00:32:31.920
girls, parties, food. He decided that was not for him. He went out, traveled the world, learned from
00:32:38.040
various masters, became very aesthetic, almost starved himself to death, and then decided, huh,
00:32:43.980
neither of those were good. I'm going to pursue the middle path, moderation. So though I've said that
00:32:50.020
self-help recurs, you know, has happened throughout human history, and it speaks to the fears and hopes
00:32:59.060
and wishes of the people of their moment, a lot of the insights persist decade after decade, century
00:33:05.180
after century, millennia after millennia. And I think we can see Siddhartha's story actually in the
00:33:11.200
movement from productivity hackers to minimalists to essentialists.
00:33:16.940
I mean, did you notice that when you talked to a lot of these life hackers, like they were all in
00:33:21.280
at the very beginning and just like became fanatics about it, and then eventually they just took a more
00:33:27.620
Most of them have. Like no one, few people are fixating on a hundred things anymore, particularly
00:33:32.860
when they get kids. Rita Holt scratched it all and lives a much more moderated life. So it was a fad.
00:33:39.820
And again, it's not that it's not helpful to think critically about, am I beholden to the objects?
00:33:44.540
And am I worried about getting more stuff to fill my house with? But as you said in your own blog
00:33:49.560
post many years ago about this, it can become yet another preoccupation with stuff. And the whole
00:33:57.240
Right. Yeah. I mean, that's what I know. I've talked about like my grandfather,
00:34:00.980
part of the greatest generation, and he tended to hoard stuff. And that was probably because like,
00:34:05.840
he grew up in the Great, you know, the Great Depressions where it's like stuff was like
00:34:09.080
something you could use. Right. But what I thought was interesting about him, he was never really
00:34:13.440
overly preoccupied with stuff. Like he didn't think too much about it, but like, you know,
00:34:18.300
you have sort of like these MacBook minimalists that you call in the book, I thought was a good
00:34:21.840
phrase, just super like, this is my pen. This is the greatest pen in the world. Here's why it's the
00:34:26.460
greatest pen. And I use my Moleskine notebook and it's so wonderful and it feels so good. And it's
00:34:30.360
like, man, you really love stuff for a person who says they don't need stuff.
00:34:34.860
Right. So we need to get beyond stuff. And then there's chapters on relationships and even
00:34:41.660
Well, we'll talk about in the bit. I mean, one thing I want to get into, there's so many things
00:34:44.860
we can talk about, but one I want to talk about is this quantified self movement that has popped
00:34:49.620
up amongst life hackers where they track their health or not even just their physical health,
00:34:55.780
maybe their psychological health. And they do that with the purpose of hopefully finding
00:35:00.240
insights to optimize their life. When did that whole quantified self movement start?
00:35:06.680
This was in the late aughts, the late 2000s. And a couple of people were behind it, but I think one
00:35:12.060
of the most notable people was Kevin Kelly. He used to be editor in chief at Wired magazine. He worked
00:35:18.880
on some of the whole earth catalogs in the decades before. And he's really been behind a lot of this.
00:35:24.740
He helped with the well, which was our early digerati bulletin board system pre-internet. He
00:35:30.540
worked with Stuart Brand, putting together one of the early hacker conferences. He now runs the blog
00:35:36.820
cool tools, which is kind of a reincarnation of the whole earth catalog. And the whole idea with the
00:35:42.660
quantified self, their little motto is self-knowledge through numbers. And in some of his early pieces,
00:35:49.520
he said that if we can quantify our lives, like how many steps we take, how many hours we sleep,
00:35:56.160
all kinds of things, not only will we be able to figure out how to sleep better or how to be more
00:36:01.160
productive, but what is human? Is human nature fixed, sacred, and infinitely expandable? And I'm
00:36:06.880
quoting him there. So he can be quite utopic or farsighted in terms of what he thinks this might bring
00:36:13.340
about. And now we're also moving into people who believe that one day computer artificial
00:36:20.720
intelligences are going to be sufficiently advanced that we might be able to become cyborgs or maybe
00:36:25.680
upload our own minds into computers. And things get a little bit kooky there, but this is one of those
00:36:31.580
places where I think it's useful to distinguish between the geeks and the gurus. Because I met lots
00:36:37.960
of people who, for instance, suffer from migraines, really bad migraines. And they do keep very careful
00:36:43.320
track of the potential triggers, like were they exposed much late during the day or did they eat
00:36:48.760
a particular food? And so I can totally appreciate that. I have various health trivial concerns that I
00:36:54.360
would like to see improved, and I try to approach them in that way. But when people start quantifying
00:37:00.340
everything without any particular cause, and then they accumulate so much data that they then start
00:37:06.560
seeing ghosts in that data. They're just looking for something to find. And so I think that speaks
00:37:10.800
to some of the dangers that when we just start experimenting with everything, trying to optimize
00:37:15.660
various things in a very individualistic way, there are excesses and possible dangers.
00:37:22.080
And health is one where life hacking can get dangerous because people often go beyond just
00:37:28.160
nominal hacking, where you're just like, okay, I'm getting enough sleep, I'm exercising enough,
00:37:33.320
I'm eating a balanced diet, where this is where you start taking supplements, or you start doing
00:37:39.720
crazy things that there's really not a lot of research about, or it might even put your health
00:37:46.760
in peril. Yeah. Serge Fugo is someone who was just in the news a month or two ago. And he has a post,
00:37:54.420
and he got a lot of coverage saying that he spent $250,000 on his biohacking. And his blog posts
00:38:00.260
are extraordinary. They're really long, they have all these figures and his lipid levels and all
00:38:04.340
these weird memes. And he's taken hundreds of supplements. And just from a common sense point
00:38:09.180
of view, you'd have to wonder, if you think these supplements are actually efficacious,
00:38:13.100
what about their interactions? Like how can you take a hundred supplements and then figure out
00:38:18.920
how you're improving, why you're improving, if you have a side effect, what is the side effect being
00:38:23.440
caused by? So I guess you could say in some sense, these people are maybe doing us a favor. They're
00:38:30.200
acting as guinea pigs for the rest of society. But I, but I like, for instance, I don't know how
00:38:36.260
much Fugo's findings are going to be useful to science. And he's certainly spending a lot of money
00:38:43.100
doing all this. And he hasn't suffered yet, but there was a fellow named Aaron Trawick, who was
00:38:47.820
really into biohacking and he was injecting himself at conferences with gene therapy concoctions.
00:38:54.140
And he did eventually die. It doesn't appear he died because of his gene therapy injections,
00:38:59.940
but he died in a total immersion tank. It was probably on some drugs and maybe he drowned himself.
00:39:05.880
But that still was like the idea that you have to take MDM and go into an immersion tank and float
00:39:11.780
there and maybe drown. I think that is scary. And again, I don't think from a self-help point
00:39:18.300
of view, we should be listening to those people as gurus. That's dangerous stuff. And if they want
00:39:23.040
to do it, that's fine. But I don't think people should look to them as that's the path I should
00:39:26.520
be pursuing. And what's interesting too, you note throughout the book with, I mean, a lot of these
00:39:31.200
life hacker types, they're typically computer, they're like computer programmers. They're very
00:39:35.780
analytical. But with a lot of them, there's also this strain of magical thinking. Like you talk about
00:39:41.240
the people who want to live forever and upload their brain to a computer. There's that Ray,
00:39:46.580
how do you say his last name? Kurtzweil. Right. He works for Google. He's a futurist. He's the guy
00:39:52.160
that coined the term singularity when the computers will take over. But he's like taking hundreds of
00:39:57.520
supplements a day in the hopes that he can live long enough to have his brain uploaded to a computer.
00:40:04.180
But like that's kind of, that's sort of magical to think that that's possible, right?
00:40:08.920
It is. And this is a difficult thing to reconcile. I haven't gotten my head fully around it. But in
00:40:14.980
some ways, these people are very, very rational the way they approach things. But they're also not
00:40:19.440
immune to magical thinking, as you put it. An interesting side about Kurtzweil, I don't think
00:40:24.400
he's taken a hundred supplements. I think he's honed it down a little bit. But at some point,
00:40:28.660
he was taking so many supplements that he actually hired an assistant to keep track of his supplements.
00:40:33.960
And again, we get back into that thing of like, these are very wealthy people that can afford to do
00:40:40.420
this sort of thing. Serge Foucault is a very wealthy person to be able to spend $250,000 on
00:40:44.700
biohacking. And I can't help but wonder like, boy, if you had spent some of that money, maybe getting
00:40:51.280
vitamin A supplements for people in India or something like that, you could have saved hundreds of lives.
00:40:56.880
But like you said, like you talked to a lot of these guys, particularly with the health thing,
00:40:59.760
with the quantified self stuff. And they'd say, well, I just do this thing and it just works. I don't know
00:41:03.760
why, but like it works. And like, well, you know, you could always say, well, it could be placebo,
00:41:08.000
right? Like that could be the thing why, like you think it works, so it works.
00:41:11.480
Yeah. I was reading recently that there's a couple of psychologists that are pushing this idea of RQ
00:41:18.180
as a complement to IQ. And the research does show that intelligence does not necessarily correlate
00:41:24.620
with rationality. And they have a particular test where they test against magical thinking.
00:41:30.680
But in a more common sense, when we talk about life hackers and their rationality,
00:41:34.540
that's more of a cognitive style. They tend to be more analytical, but it doesn't mean that they
00:41:39.360
necessarily have the understanding of the sort of cognitive mistakes and biases we can make,
00:41:48.800
Well, I think I've read studies about that similar, where it's typically like really intelligent people
00:41:56.440
Because they're able to think their way, like, oh, this makes sense. They're able to be more
00:42:00.360
analytical about like why it's a good idea to join the cult. And they're able to, when people say,
00:42:05.520
you're in a cult, they're like, well, no, I'm not. Here are the reasons why and blah, blah, blah,
00:42:09.120
blah. I can see something similar going on possibly with life hackers. Like, well, it works for this,
00:42:15.020
this reason, because I'm seeing the data and I see a pattern there. And they're like, well,
00:42:18.080
no, that could be placebo. Like, no, really, here's the data. And it's like, well,
00:42:23.160
Yeah. People can be very good at rationalizing it, justifying what they do. And the more
00:42:27.320
intelligent they are, the better at it they seem to be.
00:42:30.600
So you mentioned this earlier. There's also this strain within life hacking about hacking meaning,
00:42:35.320
right? And life hackers tend to be drawn to Asian philosophy. And that's where the whole
00:42:41.280
minimalism thing came out of, but also stoicism. What do you think is the appeal there for life
00:42:48.040
hackers to stoicism and Buddhism and other Asian philosophies besides Buddhism?
00:42:53.860
Well, interestingly, they're the two ones that I'm most interested in. I've been a practicing
00:42:58.080
Buddhist for over a decade, and I've been reading Seneca and other authors in stoicism for many,
00:43:05.560
many years across different translations. And what is nice is that they don't invoke a lot of
00:43:12.780
magical thinking. There's no gods that you're necessarily calling upon to help you change your
00:43:17.680
life. They are very suitable for the individual because it's like, this is your life. Things
00:43:22.820
are going to happen in your life that you don't necessarily like, and somehow you need to cope.
00:43:27.400
And there they give recommendations for coping. They recommend a moderate approach to life.
00:43:33.500
The Stoics, for example, have all these interesting practices where you try to
00:43:37.760
be grateful for whatever it is that you have, to practice a living heart so that you won't fear when
00:43:45.480
difficult things appear in your life. You'll be like, well, I've been through this or worse,
00:43:49.340
so I can deal with it. So I think there's a lot of wisdom there that I try to take advantage of,
00:43:54.700
and that's available for other people. But again, given that this is life hacker and given that people
00:44:00.940
can get a bit excessive and optimize the wrong things, there are dangers.
00:44:07.700
It is a very individualistic sort of approach. So one of the folks I talk about in the book,
00:44:14.860
he decided that he was completely dissatisfied with the life hacking world. So he had gone through
00:44:20.020
this whole progression of being really productive, and then that didn't work, and then being a
00:44:23.760
minimalist, and that didn't work. And then, so he said, I'm going to do an ancient wisdom
00:44:29.220
experiment. I'm going to do these experiments where I follow the practices and teachings of these
00:44:34.480
various traditions that have been around for at least 500 years. And he dabbled with a good dozen
00:44:41.040
spiritual and philosophical traditions. And for instance, when it came to Buddhism,
00:44:46.840
he just would sit quietly and meditate. And that is a big, important practice of some aspects of
00:44:52.500
Buddhism, especially say Zen and mindfulness, but he did it alone. And I think the thing that he failed
00:44:58.240
to recognize, and also when people do this in Stoicism, is that these were very much community and
00:45:03.820
mentorship-type practices and cultures, right? We had Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. In Buddhism,
00:45:12.360
and particularly in Zen, there's a tradition, a lineage, that goes back 1,500 years of transmission,
00:45:19.760
and there's the Sangha that supports you. So I think one of the dangers with the, sometimes what
00:45:24.860
is called McMindfulness, is that, again, it's very individualistic. It's very rational. You think
00:45:30.640
you can figure it out. You think that you are rational, hence you might not see some of your
00:45:34.360
biases and limitations. And then again, there's the social angle. So one of the criticisms of
00:45:42.160
McMindfulness is that maybe the reason that this has been picked up at Google under the banner of
00:45:47.340
Wisdom 2.0 is that because it's good for business. So Ming Tan, he's the guy that set up the search
00:45:53.620
inside yourself. And his book is very good, but he was a Googler that started offering meditation classes,
00:45:58.140
and they really took off. And then they started having this Wisdom 2.0 conference out on the West
00:46:02.540
Coast. And he actually said that, and this isn't the only thing he has said, but still, I think it's
00:46:08.500
somewhat representative. He said, Wisdom 2.0 is going to allow your employees to increase their
00:46:15.260
emotional intelligence. And employees with higher EI are going to make you shitloads of money.
00:46:21.120
So again, we've gone far from some genuine insights of wisdom to something that's been
00:46:29.480
picked up by corporations to somehow make more money. I don't think Buddha would be down with
00:46:33.900
that. No, I don't think he would. No. Well, I mean, so what's your takeaway after
00:46:38.360
doing this book? I mean, it sounds like you're ambivalent about life hacking. Would that be a fair
00:46:44.700
judgment? Yeah. And I think it teaches us. So these distinctions we're making between geek and
00:46:50.880
guru and nominal and optimal and some ethical sort of distinctions we might think about, like,
00:46:55.920
is a particular hack, is it universal? Does it work if everyone does it or only if you do it?
00:47:01.240
And I think there are some hacks out there that are like, I have a hack for cutting in line. And we
00:47:05.480
said, well, if everyone tried to cut in line like that, that wouldn't be a better world. So we can ask,
00:47:09.500
is it universal? Is it beneficial? And then, interestingly enough, one of the important
00:47:14.700
distinctions I pull from all of this is a Buddhist philosophical notion called near enemies.
00:47:20.280
And the idea is that virtues often have an apparent enemy or opposite. So compassion and animosity,
00:47:28.440
those are obvious near enemies. But there's also near enemies, they appear to be virtues, but they're not.
00:47:34.580
So it's very easy for people maybe to confuse pity with compassion.
00:47:38.240
So compassion, yes, that's a virtue. We want to be compassionate. But when we go out in our real
00:47:43.500
lives and we start interacting with people and we're pitying them, it's not quite the same thing
00:47:47.840
as compassion. So one of the insights I take away is I really think life hacking exemplifies this notion
00:47:53.420
of near enemies. When we look at efficiency, our first impulse when we're overwhelmed with work is
00:48:00.000
to try to be more efficient, but that's not the same thing as being effective. When we think about
00:48:04.860
our relationships with other people, we think we could be connected or we could go on 100 dates or
00:48:09.480
we could have sex with dozens of women in a particular month or year, but that isn't actually
00:48:14.660
giving us connection. And similarly, wisdom 2.0 isn't necessarily actual real wisdom.
00:48:22.080
So life hack, but do so thoughtfully maybe would be.
00:48:26.900
And the metaphor I ended up choosing was kind of like horse blinkers or blinders. And so we live in
00:48:32.760
this world of distractions and choices, and it makes sense for us to want to put on the ear-canceling
00:48:38.420
headphones and maybe get a cubicle for our head and have these blinkers on. And that helps us look
00:48:44.100
out into that distant vision of those goals that we want to achieve with our life. But in wearing these
00:48:49.300
blinkers, we are blocking out a lot of stuff on the periphery. We're blocking out other people
00:48:54.400
that we shouldn't be ignoring. Maybe we're trampling some people underfoot. And I actually
00:48:59.340
toyed with the idea of calling this book Blinkered, but I thought that was too negative. But as I was
00:49:03.520
writing the conclusion, I was still making use of this metaphor. At last year's South by Southwest,
00:49:08.980
Panasonic actually demoed, they call it wear space, a literal set of blinkers with noise-suppressing
00:49:15.660
headphones that you stick on your head. And I really recommend people Google it and have a look
00:49:20.560
at the pictures. It's really remarkable. And Panasonic, it was just a demo, but there was a
00:49:25.520
crowdsourcing in Japan, and supposedly they're manufacturing them now. Supposedly, this really
00:49:30.760
is the solution to the 21st century, that you put this weird thing that blocks your periphery and
00:49:35.840
cancels out and drowns out all the sound around you. And that concerns me. Yes, it is going to give
00:49:42.480
you some benefits, but at least you have to take that off some of the time and look at the people
00:49:46.620
around you. Well, Joseph, is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and
00:49:50.560
your work? They can just Google me, Joseph Regal. I have a website that I update sometimes. I am on
00:49:55.780
Twitter, though I don't pay a lot of attention, J.M. Regal, to social media. It's one of my own life
00:50:01.400
hacks is not to get too caught up in social media. And my email is on my webpage, so people can email me
00:50:07.300
as well. All right, Joseph Regal, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
00:50:10.820
My guest today was Joseph Regal. He's the author of the book, Hacking Life,
00:50:14.660
Systemized Living and Its Discontents. It's available on amazon.com. You can find out more
00:50:18.340
information about his work at his website, regal.org. Also check out our show notes at
00:50:22.460
aom.is slash hacking life, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper
00:50:26.940
into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website
00:50:38.000
at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:50:42.140
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00:51:14.040
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00:51:33.260
a friend of 2018, it helps out a lot. And when we built up and we wanted to share it all