Recently I came across James Hillman, a psychologist who, with the writer Michael Ventura, wrote a book in 1992 called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. His argument: early in the history of modern psychology, we decided the soul lives inside our skin. Our feelings are ours. Our childhood is ours. Our wounds belong to us privately, inwardly, and the work is always to go in and find them.

The nervous system runs on novelty. Whatever becomes permanent becomes invisible. The mansion, the view, the retirement — the brain catalogues them, files them, stops registering them. You worked thirty years for a sunset you no longer see.

All this self-optimisation is making us more self-obsessed. We chase power, property, prestige. We track our metrics. We refine our protocols. And the happiness we’re actually looking for stays exactly where it’s always been — not inside the data, not inside the ring, but in how we feel and who we’re with.

My fear isn’t about AI, or peptides, or people chiselling their cheekbones into an algorithm’s ideal.

Every time I bend down to launch the six-kilogram wall ball, I feel my heart racing. The ball is hitting the frame and not being marked. I throw it again. Not marked. Again. The rep counter barely moves. Several minutes pass, and we cross the one-forty mark with only seventeen reps on the board.

Friday nights are gone too, in their old form. No dinners out, no late evenings. I learned that lesson from a single ruined Saturday and never needed to learn it again. When an invitation comes in on a Friday now, I decline. Not with resentment — with something closer to relief. Knowing what you’re protecting has a quietness to it.

HYROX is a global fitness race that has taken the athletic world by storm in recent years. The format is deceptively simple: run one kilometre, complete a functional workout station, repeat — eight times over. The stations include the ski erg, sled push and pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, sandbag lunges, and wall balls. It sounds manageable until you’re on station five with legs that stopped cooperating two stations ago.

Sassy. Scottish Fold, indoor cat, queen of everything she surveys. She has spotted Pirate through the glass and is doing that thing cats do — back arched, nose wrinkled, a slow hiss that says you do not belong here. On the other side: Pirate. One eye, scarred leg, perpetual hunger. She is not hissing back. She is just looking at Sassy — quietly, almost hopefully — as if some small gesture of approval from this pampered stranger might mean something.

But the crazy part is that this wasn’t just a thirteen-year-old thing. It carried through into my adulthood — and when it did, it mutated. The silence didn’t stay silence. What started as a boy who couldn’t speak up became a man who sometimes goes too far the other way. Either I walk away entirely, or I push until I get what I want.

Joseph Nguyen, in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, draws this line clearly. Thinking, he argues, is the source of our suffering — not the thoughts themselves, but what we do with them. The spiral. The second-guessing. The relentless inner commentary that turns a moment of clarity into a week of anxiety. He echoes a truth that philosophers and mystics have long understood: we cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. Tactics are temporary. An expansion of consciousness is permanent.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the world we’ve built the Achievement Society — a civilisation that replaced external discipline with internal compulsion. Nobody forces you to hustle.

You do it to yourself, freely, because you’ve been shaped to believe that relentless production and consumption are the same thing as being alive. We are no longer obedience-subjects, Han writes, but achievement-subjects — entrepreneurs of ourselves, forever optimising, performing, acquiring.

The deepest growth left might not be another metric. It might be learning how to expand without self-punishment. To pursue progress without panic. To work without worshipping work. To breathe — taped or untaped — without believing that my value depends on the results.

A few weeks ago, I binged several episodes of Billions. Both rivals—Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades—live such full lives they barely sleep. They’re on the go 24/7, making moves, closing deals, destroying enemies. At the end of one episode, my heart was beating so fast I couldn’t sleep.

I’ve been reading Epictetus, the 2nd-century Stoic philosopher. His words have unsettled me: we control almost nothing. He says, “Some things are up to us, and some are not. Up to us are judgment, inclination, desire, aversion—in short, whatever is our own doing. Not up to us are our bodies, possessions, reputations, public offices—in short, whatever is not our own doing.”

I’ve heard countless predictions about AI and automation. Most wash over me like background noise. But this one landed differently. Maybe because surgery feels so fundamentally human—hands, judgment, years of training, life and death. Or maybe because at 57, I’m old enough to remember when computers couldn’t beat humans at chess, and young enough that I’ll likely live to see machines do everything I once thought made us irreplaceable.

Demis Hassabis was a chess prodigy at the age of four. By his early teens, he competed at the highest levels and could have pursued a comfortable, prestigious life in that narrow domain. But at thirteen, he did something unusual: he walked away.

The guide tells me to ignore the shrieks of the baboons that populate the reserve. They are not close at all. I relax and, within an hour, ascend to the summit of a small hill, arriving at several large granite boulders. I follow the guide’s path, pull myself up, and sprawl on the highest flat spot available.

Years ago, when Tesla was struggling to meet its production targets, Elon Musk did something extreme even by his own standards: he moved his desk onto the factory floor.

We no longer needed God to explain the laws of the universe; we had physics and philosophy. Governments no longer required divine right; rational consent was enough. For the first time in history, humanity stood on its own feet — and found the ground strangely hollow beneath them.

Comfort, I’ve realised, is the great sedative. It kills growth, courage, and creativity. Self-mastery is the antidote. Saying no to sugar, or to a screen, or to that second drink, is the same act that says yes to meaning, to work, to love. It’s all one movement — toward coherence.