You Can't Pray To A Fitbit

How We Traded Meaning for Measurement in the Age of Data

When I finished the manuscript for The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, I was in an unlikely spot, at least for me: back in my hometown of Spokane. I’d spent a couple of years in Europe, but the time had come to plant myself somewhere and make real progress on the book. “Moving around” isn’t exactly the right way to describe travel, but it captures the problem: the project needed deep focus and few distractions.

I’d made some headway writing in places like Odesa, Ukraine; Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro; and during a month-long stint in Varna, Bulgaria. It sounds sweeping and exotic—and to be fair, it often was—but in all honesty, it’s easier to write in places where your surroundings fade into the background, where the environment itself isn’t the point.

Years ago, I read about a famous writer (a poet, I think) who literally checked herself into a mental health facility to quiet the monkey mind—and, I suppose, to banish the illusion that there’s anything in the world more interesting than finishing the draft. A bit extreme? Absolutely. But she’s the famous one, after all, and everyone knows her name (except me, at the moment).

So, having finished the manuscript and gotten it through the editorial gauntlet at Harvard University Press—and by the way, whatever is in the news, both my editors and the copy editor were first-rate and worthy of the “Harvard name”—I found myself splitting time between a rented room in town and the basement of my parents’ house. Cool? No.

As I’ve said before, the completion of that project felt like doctors had discovered a pill that zaps dopamine out of your brain. I had the extended-release version, effective 24 hours a day. Sure, I enjoyed catching up with family after vagabonding through Europe with my beautiful girlfriend from Ukraine (now a refugee in Canada because of the war). But I was there to write—and my schedule was to get up, drive to Starbucks, and write all day, sometimes 8, 9 hours or more.

Around this time I was also getting on in age, in my late forties. One morning I woke up a bit like the protagonist in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and realized that, in addition to the absence of any feel-good neurotransmitters, I was gaining weight and had no interest in working out. That, I would discover, was “low T,” or low testosterone, which to this day I quasi-rationally blame on my circumstances.

I’d flown in from Heathrow to LAX, then hopped a flight up to Spokane. Not long after that, all the external vitality in me was gone. What remained was all I needed: the internal focus to finish a project. But let’s be honest—we all like dopamine and testosterone, too.

I would eventually complete the manuscript and depart. As if God himself had arranged it, when I rolled into Central Texas in my Texas-ready GMC Denali (bought for a pittance from my brother-in-law—thanks, Shane, and Dad), apartment hunting and just starting a gig that was a throwback to my tech days—a research scientist at an AI and tech company in College Station—the local radio station was running an ad for legal testosterone “replacement” therapy. Dudes in the gym just call it “test.”

Turns out I was low—really low, as the lab tests revealed. And yes, the stuff works. Saying that adding testosterone to an otherwise healthy male in his late forties with sagging T levels “worked” feels a bit like Bill Murray’s line about Japanese whiskey in Lost in Translation: “The good news is, the stuff works.” Of course it works.

So, for that matter, does compounded semaglutide or GLP-1 agonists—the substance many know as Ozempic. If you don’t think the stuff doctors prescribe “works,” don’t go to the doctor, and ask the ghosts of Christian Science how abandoning that facet of modern life worked out for them.

From Data Points to Lost Souls

Something is odd here—off—and I’m tangled up in it, too. I know luminaries in Silicon Valley who take human growth hormone, which used to be the exclusive territory of bodybuilders. It also burns fat and slows aging, it turns out. Coders—if that’s still a job category—swear by taking microdoses of psilocybin, which many of us know as “magic mushrooms.” Magic. Science. Data.

Here’s the bad news. As America grows more obese, treating the body like a fixable machine—subject to endless measurement and improvement—gives us a simple model of control. But in today’s world, the idea that a person is a machine—best fixed (or broken) by inputs and outputs—fits all too neatly into our post-meaning world.

This post—originally a Harper’s draft—actually predates Ted Gioia’s excellent piece on our post-science and post-knowledge world, but reading that, I’m more convinced than ever that we’ve wandered out of the Enlightenment’s faith in science and objective knowledge, skipped any rediscovery of Renaissance humanism or religious faith, and at the end of the technological road, so to speak, settled for a totalistic belief in data. We’re as close to nihilism as I can remember in my own life—and in anything I’ve read, short of some fascist enthusiasms in early 20th-century Italy and Germany.

The young guys I see—the Gen Z dudes and some of the now-aging Millennial crowd—seem as cool and buff and smart as my generation in our twenties, maybe more so. But we were still kicking around ideas like truth, and the notion that the world had a hidden and revealed meaning to it, that it made sense, and that it was worth going to the Academy to figure out what it was all about. That’s gone. I really do feel for the younger folks today. We live in a phantasmagoria of technology, but we no longer have a unifying identity, and we don’t know what “core truths” we’d even pursue at a university anymore. We do have data. Facts. Lots of them.

So: We treat ourselves as bundles of data, subject to constant optimization, while the rest of life—politics, community, purpose—implodes around us. The planet is pandemic-prone, heating up from global warming, wracked by tariffs, protests, and war. Nuclear weapons still loom, and no one seems to get along. Welcome to Machineland.

When Optimization Replaces Purpose

Enter the influencer. Today’s male fitness influencers sell a vision of the world that’s controllable—like a machine—where reality consists of endless dials to be “tweaked” or “hacked.” The metaphor has spread far and wide: the brain is an “operating system” to be hacked, as public intellectuals like Sam Harris argue. TikTok biohackers like Bryan Johnson, Peter Attia, and Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman promote seductive ways to transform yourself from chunk to hunk. Meanwhile, Gen Z bodybuilders like YouTube’s Sam Sulek—his fantastically sculpted physique streamed live to millions—epitomize this modern ideal.

Underlying the popularity of these influencers isn’t just the age-old draw of sculpted bodies and perpetual health. It’s the belief that happiness and meaning can be engineered by tweaking the right dials. This is a reductive view of what it means to be human—and it raises deeper questions about meaning itself. Data and technoscience, tools once meant to serve us, have begun to act as ends in themselves. Some thinkers see this as a harbinger of a future where AI—growing ever smarter—will become an end in itself, perhaps even turning on us. But even before that happens, we’ve already flipped the script: we’ve turned technology into the end and ourselves into means, chasing data-driven optimization with no destination beyond the data. Facts—data—are what matter. Values are “squishy,” but numbers are “real.” We’re all hairless apes with increasing access and power to manipulate data—so why not tweak the dials to get the most out of the human organism? For that matter, maybe that’s the “Good Life”?

Transhumanist Dreams

Seeing self-optimization as part of a trend toward seeing categories instead of individuals is key. Race, sex, ethnicity, gender—we know this game already. But seeing self-optimization as instrumental is perhaps more important. It’s no coincidence that biohacking, for instance, is closely aligned with the broader philosophical vision of transhumanism—a dream where humans merge with machines to become stronger, healthier, maybe even immortal. The merging of man and machine represents the next evolutionary step, according to dyed-in-the-wool transhumanists like Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, and Kevin Warwick. These are the prophets of the self-optimizing crowd. A cyborg could happily bench press more than the strongest man in the world. Technology ups the ante. I think of Nietzsche’s question—“What will fill the void now that God is dead?”—and it still haunts me. Today, the answer seems to be: performance enhancers.

Self-optimization—the hacking of the body, brain, and everything else—has become a kind of secular religion. It’s not just about “more plates, more dates,” as one YouTube influencer puts it. It’s about seeing yourself as a machine, responsive to inputs and outputs. This reductionism goes hand in hand with elevating machines into something we aspire to be: we’re hairless apes with advanced tech that lets us tinker with our own hardware. That’s the best the culture can offer: a shallow sense of purpose in hacking the human machine. We’re convinced that an AI apocalypse is around the corner, with machines soon to surpass us. No wonder we’ve lost any Renaissance vision of the human person. We’ve made ourselves into machines that can be hacked.

Young men exemplify this crisis of meaning: they drop out, they overdose, they turn to influencers and optimization. But it’s not just them—it’s all of us. The crisis is bigger than testosterone injections and gym selfies.

When popular historian Yuval Harari declared in his 2016 bestseller Homo Deus that humanity had entered a new religious epoch—one in which data itself was god—he gave voice to a growing realization: that religion and philosophy, once the traditional explorations of meaning and truth, had quietly been replaced by a new metaphysics—this time one borrowed from digital technology and facile ideas about linear progress tracing back to the Enlightenment. Harari cut right to the point. He called our new religion “Dataism.”

In the early 2010s, “data is the new oil” was the rallying cry of the digital economy. But Harari’s Dataism marked something deeper: a full replacement of ends with means. The promise of knowledge, freedom, and insight gave way to the worship of data itself—and the assumption that “scientific” thinking meant endless measurement and tracking. Harari’s point was not metaphorical. He meant it literally: we no longer just use data; we worship it.

What might have been a throwaway joke in a philosophy class in the 1990s had, by the mid-2010s, hardened into a worldview: that the purpose of life is to generate data, consume data, and be measured by data. The soul became a stream. The ritual became the algorithm.

The only problem with this religion is the obvious one: it offers no real hope. You cannot pray to a Fitbit. You cannot suffer meaningfully under a calorie deficit. You can be strong, lean, disciplined—and lost.

Biohacking and other data-driven forms of self-optimization emerged partly from the Quantified Self movement of the 2000s—a loosely organized community of enthusiasts and technologists who believed that systematically tracking personal data (sleep, steps, calories, mood) could lead to insights, improvements, and even self-mastery. At the time, it seemed like a promising way to align technology with personal growth.

Pedometers and wearable devices gave users new ways to tune into their habits, sleep rhythms, and activity levels. Tim Ferriss, one of the movement’s early evangelists, turned personal tracking into an empire. His book The 4-Hour Workweek became a how-to manual for hacking not just productivity but identity. I was working as a research scientist in Austin when it came out, and I devoured it—only to return to my cubicle researching AI for the Department of Defense, wondering how I could leverage my PhD into a supplement startup like Ferriss’s BRAINQuicken. I didn’t. But I admired the ethos: test, tweak, improve. Ice baths, magnesium l-threonate, omega-3s, quantified cognition.

Ferriss was selling performance—but always in service of something larger: freedom, creativity, escape. He was suggesting a way of life that required you to step into the world—to travel, to experiment, to live fully—rather than just scrolling through the metaverse. Today’s version of the quantified self has no such commitment to the world. It has no overarching reason to do it at all, no purpose, no telos. It’s all instrumentality, no destination. The metrics have become the meaning. Reading The Brothers Karamazov? How many pages per hour? How many calories burned? Everything reduced to inputs and outputs.

Of course, some of this is pure grift. Brian Johnson, aka The Liver King—a cartoonishly bulked influencer recently exposed for spending $11,000 a month on steroids while claiming his physique came from raw organ meat and ancestral living—isn’t a spiritual crisis. He’s a con man. But the real story isn’t the scammers. It’s the millions of young men for whom that performance reads not as farce but aspiration. The Liver King may be ridiculous, but he’s not alone. He’s just louder.

Biohackers—the self-optimizers who constantly tweak the “dials” on their brains and bodies with supplements, smart drugs, cold plunges, and the rest—are a practical embodiment of transhumanist ideas. Transhumanism holds that human beings are ever-evolving, and that as technology outpaces us, we’ll merge with machines. What results is a cyborg—or, in more radical visions, a consciousness uploaded into computers. Along the way, we enhance and “optimize” with implants, nootropics, and performance drugs.

Of course, implants, prosthetics, and other technologies genuinely improve the lives of injured veterans and amputees. At a folksy book festival in South Dakota, I met a famous science fiction writer who, in a quiet aside, revealed that he was dying of cancer. He plucked out his hearing aid and told me he could hear better than most people at its highest setting. He was self-optimizing—though I doubt he’d call it that. And there’s nothing wrong with using medical science to improve our lot. But I’m troubled that so few people believe their lives have any kind of destiny anymore, that hacking the body and brain has become the best we can come up with to get out of bed in the morning. I miss the old stories, the myths, the gritty tales of warriors on real journeys to faraway lands.

Data Isn’t the New Good Life

Life is full of contradictions. Mean people suck, and so does negativity, but perpetually warring on social media is considered progress. Do that well, and you might even become an influencer.

Jesus famously taught us to love our enemies, but in this world, you’d do better to find some. Having an enemy is key. The AI engines organizing our social media feeds have handily supplied everyone with an endless supply of enemies—defined simply as people who don’t see political issues the way you do.

It used to be that “mean people suck.” Now, we’ve reached a weird bifurcation. On one hand, everything distinctively human has come to resemble what psychologists and economists have long insisted we are: faulty creatures prone to bad judgment, bias, and emotional subjectivity. The distinctively human has been under siege from the intelligentsia for decades, and now no one seems to have the spunk left to push back. It’s easier to be what “they” said we were: angry, biased a-holes. That’s a fair gloss of what I see online.

On the other hand, the non-human stuff of our new world—computers, networks, and data—keeps getting elevated. Data isn’t just economically powerful like oil; it’s the foundation of a new worldview. The route into this new world isn’t a prayer book but a mastery of what the data says—how to acquire it, record it, and use it to pursue unspoken ends that are, in reality, the extension of means into the role of ends, reality be damned.

It’s the perfect storm. We’re faulty data-objects. No worries, because the nihilism of that statement can be ignored—at least for a while—by embracing the rapidly approaching future where everything that counts can be counted, and everything that can’t be counted doesn’t count.

It follows, then, that those who embrace Dataism, the Quantified Self, or biohacking are “doing what counts.” Great. We’re in a quest for something meaningful, though—and that’s the rub. I’m increasingly convinced that the whole techno-futurist fantasy of computers becoming “smarter” and us merging with them is a thinly disguised way of saying that the modern world is engulfing us and choking the humanity out of us.

The problem is that when you explicitly reject this worldview—call it hopelessly reductive, radically incomplete, and instrumental rather than purposive—you fall back into the black hole of modernity. There’s nothing much left in our philosophical itinerary that can survive contact with Dataism and our Quantified Selves.

At least, here, we’re in step. Even if the world has gone completely insane, if we align ourselves with the madness, we can salvage a bit of coherence.

It’s a bad gambit. And I feel so bad we did this to the younger generations—and left them so little to live for.

Erik J. Larson