How American Fitness Became a Cult of Self-Enhancement

Derek Thompson

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The Cult of the Enhanced Self<br>Americans have never been healthier, or more alone. Might these things be related?

Derek Thompson<br>Jun 18, 2026

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Photo by Simone Pellegrini on Unsplash<br>I. The Ring

In December 2024, I received an Oura ring for the holidays. I thought I would hate it.<br>I’d had a messy relationship with other “wearable” technology designed to monitor my physical activity, or lack thereof. Years earlier, during a period of elevated stress and miserable sleep quality, I’d owned a different fitness device that wouldn’t stop sending me panicked notifications about my insomnia. Sleep was hard enough without the harsh judgment of one’s jewelry, I thought. I threw the thing in the trash.<br>But the ring I liked. One of the first things I learned was how alcohol affected my sleep. When I had a glass of wine after 8 p.m., my resting heart rate shot up, and my heart rate variability plummeted. This would lower my “Readiness” score, which is prominently featured on the smartphone app. But when I had the same glass while cooking dinner around 5:30 p.m., the wine had no effect on my Readiness number. Like so many elderly Millennials, I am the sort of person who cannot see a prominently labeled scoreboard without devoting myself to climbing it. So, without ever figuring out what heart-rate variability actually meant, I ditched the late-night drinks. (Mostly.)<br>The demise of the nightcap wasn’t the only way the ring changed my life. More profoundly, it altered my relationship to activity. Before a walk, after a workout, or even after a nap, I would check in with the app to see my Readiness, Activity, and Sleep scores. Each day was now compared with—even set in competition against—the previous day or the previous week. The ring pulled me into a feedback loop with a biometric technology that turned my body into a game board through which I could win or lose points.<br>The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who writes about the philosophy of games and metrics, has said that the modern world’s blizzard of numbers can obscure our wise yet murky questions about life and replace them with easy and legible goals. For example, someone might become a journalist to uncover important truths but then devote each week’s labor to maximizing page views; or she might get into philosophy to think about the deepest life questions but devote her life to maximizing her h-index. “Metrics are useful because they compress information,” Nguyen told me. “They are dangerous, because they compress information.”<br>At its best, the ring makes me fitter, happier, and, sure, even more productive. I walk more, lift more, sleep more, and drink less. You will be hard-pressed to find a physician who thinks there’s anything amiss in the previous sentence.<br>But the same doctor might not see how the obsession with winning the measurable games of health can encroach on the less measurable games of life. The best way to sleep more is to see fewer friends in the evening. The best way to lift more during the week is to eliminate social lunches to protect my midday gym time. To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating my less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness.<br>The ring improved my life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls me away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

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II. The Enhanced Self

Clearly, I am not the only American who is reconsidering his relationship with alcohol. The share of people who drink hit an all-time low last year, according to Gallup, whose data go back to 1939. Total beer consumption recently reached a 21st-century low, and wine vineyards are reportedly “in crisis.” While many social changes happen slowly, the attitude shift against alcohol has been quite sudden. The share of Americans who say moderate drinking (defined as one or two drinks a day) is “bad for health” doubled in just the last 10 years. Two-thirds of Americans under 35 now tell Gallup that alcohol is harmful in any quantity.

The decline of drinking is one part of a larger cultural phenomenon, a hydra-headed megatrend whose tentacles reach out to touch everything from science and medicine to technology and entertainment, reshaping the way that Americans think about themselves, their time, their friendships, and their future. It is the rise of the Enhanced Self.<br>The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides (injectables that affect inflammation and gut health and are also the “P” in GLP), and the continued growth of supplements. More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what...