We’re Treating Our Bodies Like Machines and Calling It Wellness.

Eda Dolunay
8 hours ago
4 min read

What if wellness isn’t making us well? Somewhere between ice baths, glucose monitors, and longevity hacks, we stopped living and started performing health.

The day Bryan Johnson got sick, I realized wellness had stopped being about health. Somewhere along the way, it had become performance art. Until recently, I had no idea who Bryan Johnson was. Today, it's almost impossible to avoid him if your algorithm has even a passing interest in longevity, wellness, or biohacking. If you don't know him, he is the face of extreme biohacking, a man who spends millions to slow, or even reverse, the aging process. Every meal is measured, every biomarker tracked, every hour of sleep optimized. His body no longer feels like just a body. It has become a laboratory. He has dedicated his life to rejuvenation alongside his partner, Kate Tolo. When I watched them publicly analyzing their microbiome after intimacy, I wasn't shocked by the science. I was struck by what it represented. Even intimacy had become another dataset. Wellness, even sex, was supposed to make us "well," but instead, it turned us into test subjects.

Bryan recently got sick, and something strange happened: people didn't feel sorry for him. On the contrary, they were intrigued that his system had failed. Much of the online conversation wasn't, "I hope he's okay." It was: "So the protocol doesn't work after all?" It was as if health was no longer a way of living, but a game to be won. Shortly after, I saw an ad for a dating app that suggested: "Find your next date or your founder in an ice bath or sauna." Forget dating apps; meet someone while sweating in the same sauna. Forget networking events; chat after a cold plunge. Am I the only one who finds the idea of flirting with someone next to me (not in bed) while we’re both sweating a bit odd? Unless you have a sauna fetish, I’m excluding you. Wellness isn't bringing us together; it’s turning us into a collective of "optimized" bodies jumping into the same ice bucket. I couldn't stop thinking: when did shared vulnerability become another networking strategy? Are we building relationships, or just matching optimized lifestyles?

As my algorithm filled with biohackers, I noticed something unsettling. Every video promised another metric to optimize. Better sleep. Lower glucose. Higher HRV. More protein. Longer life. We keep saying artificial intelligence will turn us into robots. What if we got there first?

I realized we were so busy monitoring our data that I wasn't even sure we knew how we actually felt, or if we were just manipulating ourselves based on our scores. Wellness stopped saying, "How do you feel?" and started asking, "What’s your score?"

As someone who has spent the last three years living with a chronic illness, I understand better than most why data matters. Sometimes it can save your life. So can not drinking alcohol and being mindful of sleep and nutrition. But if I were given my healthy body back tomorrow, I don’t think I’d spend every waking hour optimizing it. I’d probably drink another glass of wine. Stay out too late. Miss a few hours of sleep. Forget my smartwatch at home. Live. Because true health isn't about hitting that perfect sleep score; it’s about not missing out on life while chasing it. Sometimes data can save your life. But data was never meant to become your life.

When wellness becomes just another project to be constantly "improved," we leave our real health, our joie de vivre, by the wayside.

Why did people say "the system doesn't work" instead of "get well soon" when Bryan Johnson fell ill? This isn't really a piece about Bryan Johnson. It's about our concept of wellness. We no longer see him as a human, but as an experiment. It’s as if he’s not allowed to make mistakes. If he gets sick, we feel as though the system has collapsed. Is wellness teaching us to be more human, or less?

We are optimizing our lives: sleep scores, blood glucose, red light, avoiding the sun, saunas, supplements, temperature-controlled beds, electrolytes, and protein powders without calories. We’ve stopped living and started managing our lives. There’s protein popcorn. Protein gummies. Every ordinary product now seems to come with the promise of optimization. I have a feeling we’ll see wine with melatonin or protein-infused vodka soon. If we had given even a fraction of the importance we give to protein or self-optimization to nature, social inequality, or, heaven forbid, our own emotional intelligence, everything would be different. If we had just put a substance that increases emotional intelligence into protein shakes for men, I think the world would be in a much better place.

To be clear, I don't think wellness is the problem. I think our obsession with optimization is.

Somewhere along the way, wellness stopped asking, "How do you feel?" and started asking, "What does your data say?"

Maybe the healthiest person in the room isn't the one with the highest HRV, the lowest resting heart rate, or the perfect supplement stack. Maybe it's the one who can forget about all of it for a while.

Biohacking started with a simple idea: knowing your body better to feel better. But somewhere along the way, "feeling better" was replaced by "performing better." Today, optimization is a lifestyle; for some, it’s even an identity. Ice baths, continuous glucose monitors, red light therapy, supplements, sleep scores, longevity protocols... Health is no longer something we experience; it’s something we measure. Health became another metric. Another competition. Another identity.

We were so afraid that AI would turn us into robots that we forgot to notice we were already treating ourselves like machines. And perhaps the real question isn't how long we can live.

It's whether we're still living while trying so hard not to die.