Just Be Normal About Things - by JA Westenberg - WESTENBERG
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Just Be Normal About Things<br>On sleepmaxxing, beef-only diets, political hysteria, and the lost art of being reasonable
JA Westenberg<br>Jun 09, 2026
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For all we’re obsessed with wellness, we’re not well, are we?<br>It’s not we care too much; caring is good, and conviction is good, and discipline is good etc etc etc. Wanting to improve your life, your body, your work, your politics, your relationships, your finances, your mornings, your sleep, your habits, your dinner, your sense of meaning, all of that is fine.<br>I’ll grant it.<br>The sickness that concerns me is that everything has become so very totalizing.<br>Nothing is allowed to be small anymore. Nothing is allowed to be moderate, partial, ordinary, seasonal, boring, or just good enough. Every preference must become an identity, every habit must become a protocol, every disagreement must become a moral emergency, every meal must become a philosophy, every viral post or breaking news item must become a referendum on civilization, every feeling must become a public performance, every hobby must become a monetized personal brand, and every single decision must be optimized, defended, aestheticized, and turned into something approximating Von Clausewitz’s total war.<br>You can’t just go to bed earlier - you have to sleepmaxx.<br>You can’t just eat a balanced diet - you have to eliminate seed oils, and track your glucose, fear vegetables and consume nothing but beef, drink raw milk, and talk about “ancestral living” and “blue zones” on your longevity TikTok.<br>And of course, you can’t just exercise. You have to train like a tactical athlete, buy recovery wearables, plunge yourself into ice, supplement like a racehorse, and describe walking as “zone two.”<br>And of course, you can’t just disagree with someone’s politics. You have to decide they’re either a fascist, a communist, a groomer, a traitor, a neoliberal shill, a terrorist sympathizer, or a brainwashed NPC.<br>You can’t just dislike a movie, a celebrity, a book, a brand, a podcast, a tweet, a hairstyle, a product launch, a parenting choice, or someone’s annoying opinion.<br>You have to turn it into a statement about the death of culture.<br>Everyone is bloody exhausted and bloody exhausting; and somehow, the solution offered everywhere is to become more extreme. More intense. More pure. More optimized. More committed. More certain. More aligned with the right tribe. More hostile to the wrong tribe. More suspicious of ordinary pleasure. More contemptuous of ordinary compromise.<br>Well, here’s my radical position:<br>Just be normal about things.
That’s it.<br>Be normal, and opt out of the deranged belief that the only way to take something seriously is to take it to the most extreme possible conclusion.<br>Normal is the condition that makes meaning possible. A normal diet works fine without a manifesto. A normal sleep schedule doesn’t need a name ending in “maxxing.” A normal political view allows for uncertainty, tradeoffs, and the possibility that your opponents might be wrong rather than the evil descendants of Satan and Satre themselves. A normal reaction to the news is to be concerned and to want more information - not to succumb to immediate emotional combustion. A normal life has habits and preferences and inconsistencies and repairs and occasional contradictions.<br>That’s what makes it all a life.<br>Part of the problem is that “taking it too far” is highly legible, in a way that moderation simply isn’t. Extremism photographs and posts well. It gives people a script, and it creates instant belonging. If you’re “all in” on something, anything, people know what to do with you. You’re carnivore. You’re anti-seed-oil. You’re doing hustle culture. You’re trad. You’re poly. You’re antiwork. You’re 995ing. You’re pro-AI. You’re anti-AI. You’re sober. You’re feral. You’re an accelerationist. You’re post-left. You’re in founder mode. You’re living a soft life. You’re a doomer. You’re based. You’re cringe. You’re whatever the algorithm currently finds most useful as a sorting mechanism.<br>But if you say, “I try to eat pretty well, but I try not to be weird about it,” there’s just nowhere for that to go, and nowhere for the world to put you. It doesn’t polarize, recruit or inflame. It doesn’t invite a pile-on, or signal total allegiance. It doesn’t make strangers feel either validated or threatened - the two things left that seem to make the world go round.<br>Platforms don’t reward “normal.” In pursuit of profit, they reward mania, purity, escalation, and novelty. They reward the person who says the thing with absolute certainty and maximum contempt, who can turn a minor observation into a civilizational diagnosis - the man who has no off-switch, no sense of proportion, and no respect for the idea that some things are not that deep.<br>And because we live inside these systems for hours a day, we keep confusing their idiotic, base incentives for reality.<br>But...