Huberman and the limits of self improvement
Huberman and the limits of self improvement
How Huberman self-improved himself to 5 girlfriends. And what lies beyond.
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So Andrew Huberman, the top health podcast advice giver, has been caught cheating with 5 women simultaneously. And is supremely flaky to his friends.
The profile that exposed this information has split folks. Some are mad at the state of cancel-culture. Some are mad at the state men lying repeatedly to women. I don’t have anything new to add to cancel culture or fuckboi issues. But I do want to talk about how the situation arose in the first place.
Specifically this question: “How did a 48 year old man dedicated to self-improvement cheat with 5 different women whilst treating his friends so poorly.”
Huberman has dedicated his life to the idea of self improvement. He frequently talks about physical health and his own dedication to therapy. He’s easily got over 100 protocols to improve performance, and he seemed to practice the vast majority of them. I can’t think of a public figure, on paper, who embodied the concept of “self improvement” more than Andrew Huberman.
One answer to my question is that Huberman’s pursuit of doing what he wanted conflicted with his view of himself as a “good guy,” leading to lies and avoidant behavior. I talk more about “good guy syndrome” here.
Another answer is that he’s the product of the “manosphere” - a digital network of advice giving men who prioritize muscles and money over people.
A third answer is something that’s been brewing on the fringes of wellness culture for some time - that the paradigm of self improvement is fundamentally fucked. This answer is the focus of this newsletter.
The limits of self improvement
Since the dawn of Benjamin Franklin, the guy who made working hard seem cool, America has dug self-improvement. I stan Benjamin Franklin, but self-improvement has two big blind spots:
It is about self. And it tends to be learned by oneself through podcasts, books, therapists, and coaches. There is no community. Without community, there is far less accountability.
It is about improvement. It implies that there’s always a deficit to be addressed and something more that can be done. This kind of thinking for men tends to focus on health and wealth, often at the expense of living authentically.
Self-improvement is as hard wired into the American psyche as any concept can be. It’s not going anywhere, but there’s room for growth. To help us lead more fulfilling lives, I see the shift from individual to community and the shift from improvement to exploration as necessary.
The shift to community and accountability
Simply put, we all need homies that understand both the parts we’re proud of and the parts we’re shameful of. Otherwise we hide or act avoidant instead of dealing with our shit. In a world that’s becoming digital first, this is tough because we lead with a public image that’s scrubbed of negativity. If we convert those digital friends into real life friends, there is pressure to keep those parts hidden.
And the more autonomy society gives us (working from home, living wherever we want, cultivating digital selves etc) - the more this unveiling of our full selves becomes a conscious decision as opposed to something that organically happens. We must choose to show people what we’re struggling with. This requires a cultural shift.
The time tested way to deal with this head on is marrying someone. Significant others are famously good at holding up a mirror to bullshit. But that puts a lot of pressure on one person, and there’s plenty of folks who are too young or untethered to rely on that.
Another solution I see, particularly for men, is support groups. This can look like Alcoholics Anonymous, a men’s group, or just a group of friends who regularly meet up. For this to be effective in fostering growth, there needs to be explicit encouragement to state feelings - especially tension. It is a not-so-secret secret that successful folks in business - especially in tech - belong to Mastermind groups. Mastermind groups are where business leaders meet to share their toughest problems and get feedback. Increasingly, this approach is being applied to matters of the soul, with transparency being the key to making it work.
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The shift to exploration
My favorite analysis of what’s wrong with the “self-improvement” paradigm comes from Steve March. Steve is the founder of a new and increasingly popular style of coaching called Aletheia that addresses head-on the limitation of focusing on “improvement” in modern times. He talks at length about it in this interview here, and to sum it up the self improvement lens views the self and others as technology. Increasing our capacity to “deliver” becomes the goal. For example, I view the cashier as a piece of technology who has a certain capacity to scan groceries. The cashier views me as a piece of technology to make money.
Steve March calls this “technological attunement” - a phrase he gets from philosopher Martin Heidegger who documented cultural shifts during the Second Industrial Revolution. Technological attunement is the dominant lens of our time. It is focused on improvement and results. It’s a useful lens, but a soulless one. If we fully embrace it, we treat each other as machines and kill both humanity and the natural world.
The counterbalancing attunement is what Heidegger and March call “poetic attunement. ” This lens is viewing the self as a living act of poetry, or feeling and experiencing things for the sake of feeling and experiencing them. This attunement is fading. Between school and jobs - most of life is spent in technological attunement. To reclaim humanity, we need to bring poetic attunement back in the mix.
To get back into poetic attunement, we replace the belief that we can be more with the belief that we’re already complete. We replace the pursuit of what we want with the exploration of who we already are. “Growth” comes from staying curious about what unfolds from there.
Time for poetry
Honestly, poetry has never done it for me. Maybe it’s my technological attunement. But balancing both beliefs - that I can be more and that I’m already complete - feels healthy. In the same interview I mentioned earlier, the host Daniel Thorson states that the only attunement that’s problematic is the one we’re stuck in.
We’ve been rather stuck in wanting more for a few hundred years, and it might be time to switch things up. So here’s a little (parody) poetry to that end:
Launch of Men’s Work 101
Curious about men’s work? Want to turn your friend group into something that goes a deeper?
I’m assembling the next cohort for a two week Mens Work 101 course launching late spring. Cohorts are kept small to facilitate emotional connection. Sign up here and be the first to know when the course launches.
The course gives you the toolkit to be the type of guy who:
Holds space for someone when they’re angry/sad/fearful/shameful
Proactively deals with long standing tension
Is in deep contact with his own emotions
Leverages his friends for accountability and support