Biohacking is Dumb....and here is why
Biohacking is dumb, and here is why
Somewhere along the line, “eat a balanced diet, exercise and get plenty of sleep” stopped being trendy enough. Now we have biohacking, a grab bag of ice baths, wearable trackers, expensive supplements, coffee enemas, and podcast bros insisting they’ve “optimized” basic human functions like blinking and digestion. The pitch is always the same, your body is a flawed machine and with enough money, discipline, and Bluetooth-enabled devices, you can finally fix it.
This is dumb. Let’s talk about why.
1. It Treats Normal Human Life Like a Software Bug
Biohacking starts from the flawed assumption that being tired, distracted, stressed, or unmotivated is a malfunction rather than a predictable response to modern life.
Did you sleep six hours, stare at a screen all day, skip movement, and live in a constant low-grade state of anxiety? Congrats, you’re human. You don’t need red-light therapy—you need rest, social connection, and exercise.
Instead of addressing obvious root causes, biohacking reframes the problem as “my magnesium levels aren’t dialed in” or “I need to stack these four nootropics before noon.” It’s like putting racing stripes on a car with no motor oil.
2. It Confuses Measurement with Improvement
Biohackers love data. Heart rate variability. Blood glucose spikes. Sleep scores. Oxygen saturation. If it can be graphed, it will be worshipped. But measuring something doesn’t automatically make it meaningful, and it doesn’t mean you know what to do with it.
Most people tracking this stuff:
Don’t understand the science behind it
Don’t have a baseline that actually matters
Are reacting to normal biological noise
So they “optimize” by chasing numbers that fluctuate naturally, turning their own body into a Tamagotchi they’re constantly worried about killing. If your wellness practice makes you more anxious and obsessive, that’s not optimization, its just neurosis with better branding.
3. It’s Mostly Vibes, with the support of scientific Evidence
A lot of biohacking lives in the valley between science and fan fiction.
There is legitimate research on sleep, nutrition, exercise, and stress. Then there’s the biohacker version, which is that research filtered through podcasts, Twitter threads and guys who say “ancestral” a lot. Suddenly, we’re confident that cold plunges at exactly 39°F will unlock mental clarity, despite mixed evidence and the small detail that humans survived for thousands of years without ice baths in their backyard. If something worked that well, it wouldn’t need a personal brand and a discount code.
4. It’s Privileged Self-Absorption Disguised as Health
Biohacking is expensive, time-consuming, and deeply individualistic. It assumes that you have disposable income, flexible time, consistent control over your schedule, and the mental bandwidth to obsess over marginal gains. For most people, health improvements come from boring, fundamental structural things like safer neighborhoods, childcare, better food access, stable housing, good healthcare. Biohacking ignores all of that and says, “Have you tried buying this supplement and waking up at 4:30 a.m. for your cold plunge?” It’s wellness culture’s version of victim-blaming.
5. It Misses the Point of Being Alive
Here’s the quiet part no one wants to say: optimizing everything makes life worse.
When every meal is a macro calculation, every night of sleep is scored, and every bad day is treated as a failure of discipline, you stop living and start managing yourself like a startup that’s perpetually underperforming. Human bodies are not meant to be maximally efficient.
They’re meant to:
Wander
Waste energy
Feel pleasure
Recover slowly
Occasionally do nothing
A life spent constantly tweaking inputs to squeeze out a 3% productivity gain is not a well-lived life. It’s just capitalism applied directly to your nervous system.
So What Should You Do Instead?
Here’s the unsexy alternative:
Sleep more
Move your body in ways you enjoy
Eat mostly real food
Spend time socializing with people
Go outside
Reduce stress where you can
Accept that you’re not a machine
No spreadsheets required. No wearables. No identity built around optimization. If that sounds boring, good. Boring works. Biohacking isn’t dumb because curiosity is dumb or because self-improvement is bad. It’s dumb because it overcomplicates what we already know, commodifies anxiety, and turns being human into a performance metric. You don’t need to hack your biology. You need to live in it.