Just Be Normal About Things

On sleepmaxxing, beef-only diets, political hysteria, and the lost art of being reasonable

For all we’re obsessed with wellness, we’re not well, are we?

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.

I’ll grant it.

The sickness that concerns me is that everything has become so very totalizing.

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.

You can’t just go to bed earlier - you have to sleepmaxx.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

You have to turn it into a statement about the death of culture.

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.

Well, here’s my radical position:

Just be normal about things.

That’s it.

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.

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.

That’s what makes it all a life.

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.

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.

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.

And because we live inside these systems for hours a day, we keep confusing their idiotic, base incentives for reality.

But most people don’t need a biohacking protocol.

They need to stop scrolling in bed and get as many hours of sleep as their schedule allows.

Most people don’t need to become zealots about nutrition. They need protein, fiber, vegetables, water, fewer candy bars, and a less hysterical relationship with their lunch.

Most people don’t need a complete ideological conversion. They need to read more than one source, stop confusing vibes with facts, and admit that complicated problems are - in fact - complicated.

Most people don’t need to turn every social conflict into therapy language, legal language, war language, or liberation language. They need to talk like adults, apologize when they’re wrong, set boundaries without staging a press conference, and let small things be small things.

Most people don’t need to go “all in” on every trend, every cause, every discourse, every outrage, every self-improvement system, every productivity framework, every moral panic, every luxury, every fear.

They need a life with enough structure to support them and enough looseness to let them breathe.

The culture of extremity flatters us by telling us that intensity = virtue. If you care about your health, you must care in a way that consumes your personality. If you care about justice, you must be angry all the time. If you care about success, you must sacrifice rest, friendship, and dignity.If you care about the planet, you must perform guilt on command. If you care about your body, you must monitor it like a hostile asset. If you care about your mind, you must turn every feeling into an analytics dashboard.

There are many things worth caring about.

But the more something is worth caring about, the more dangerous extremism becomes.

Being weird about shit - extremism in all its forms - might burn hot, and it might perform well, but it always collapses.

Being normal about shit compounds.

Someone who eats normally for twenty years will likely do better than someone who cycles between puritanical restriction and indulgent rebellion. Someone who sleeps decently most nights will likely feel more rested than someone who turns sleep into a neurotic performance and then panics every time their watch gives them a bad score. Someone who reads widely, updates slowly, and resists political possession will likely understand the world better than someone who receives every event as ammunition for a pre-existing narrative. Someone who can have an ordinary disagreement without annihilating the other will likely have better relationships than someone who treats every conflict as evidence of abuse, betrayal, or ideological contamination.

Extremism might give you a feeling like control, but it’s usually a signal of possession. You think you’ve chosen a system, but pretty soon the system is choosing for you. You no longer ask, “What do I think?” You ask, “What does someone like me think?” You no longer ask, “What does this situation need?” You ask, “How do I perform my allegiance?” You no longer notice reality, so much as you complain when reality either fails to confirm, or threatens your identity.

This is how people are made ridiculous.

The seed oil wanker can’t eat dinner at a friend’s house without making everyone aware of their purity hierarchy. The political obsessive can’t watch a natural disaster unfold without immediately sorting victims and responders into ideological categories. The productivity extremist can’t enjoy a walk unless it’s contributing to a measurable objective. The social media addict can’t experience a private emotion without imagining its public framing. The wellness convert can’t be tired without interpreting it as a hormonal, spiritual, dietary, environmental, or civilizational crisis.

Sometimes tired just means tired.

Sometimes hungry just means hungry.

Sometimes disagreement just means disagreement.

Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day.

Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake.

Sometimes a preference is just a preference.

Sometimes a joke is just a joke, and sometimes it’s just bad.

Sometimes a person is annoying without being an existential threat to Western Values.

Sometimes the news is upsetting without you becoming catatonic for the rest of the day.

Sometimes your body is asking for a ham sandwich, not a new ideology.

Proportion is the ability to respond to things at the right scale. Not everything deserves your whole nervous system, and not everything deserves a boycott, a confession, a thread, a pivot, a diagnosis, a feud, a rebrand, a protocol, a purge, or a ten-year plan.

Some things deserve a shrug.

Some things deserve a nap.

Some things deserve a private conversation.

Some things deserve a week of thought before you speak up.

Some things deserve attention, but not obsession.

The internet hates proportion because proportion slows the machine down. A proportionate person is harder to manipulate. They don’t instantly buy the supplement, join the mob, share the outrage, adopt the label, or panic at the headline. They have a buffer between stimulus and response. They can say, “Maybe,” “Not enough information,” “This seems overstated,” “I’m not convinced,” “I don’t need to have a take on this,” and, most dangerously of all, “I’m going to log off.”

A lot of what passes for conviction is poor emotional regulation. A lot of what passes for discipline is anxiety. A lot of what passes for moral clarity is group belonging. A lot of what passes for being informed is being repeatedly agitated by people who profit from repeated agitation.

If the house is on fire, go right ahead and scream. But if every room you enter feels like it’s on fire, check whether you’ve just trained yourself to smell smoke everywhere.

The point is to stop living as though maximum intensity is the same as maximum truth.

A normal person can still have principles. In fact, they probably have better principles, because theirs aren’t constantly being rewritten by adrenaline. They can oppose cruelty without becoming cruel, and they can pursue excellence without despising rest. They can care about food without fearing either dinner, dessert or the noble tradition of the cold pizza midnight snack. They can care about politics without surrendering their entire personality to politics. They can be ambitious without turning every hour into a transaction. They can be online without letting the timeline assign them a worldview.

It sounds modest, but it’s hard. We are constantly bombarded with a thousand and one tiny invitations to madness. The invitation to escalate; the invitation to simplify; the invitation to belong through hatred; the invitation to turn insecurity into doctrine; the invitation to convert ordinary discomfort into emergency; the invitation to treat your own life as content; and the invitation to substitute intensity for depth.

Eventually, you have to draw a line in the sand and start saying no to the dopamine hit you get from going too far.

You’ll likely disappoint the folks who want you to be more extreme - because your extremism would validate theirs. The zealot wants company, and the obsessive wants a mirror.

The algorithm wants fresh meat.

The mob wants your voice added to the chant.

The brand wants you to feel deficient.

The guru wants your uncertainty. .

To be normal about things is to preserve a private center that doesn’t get annexed by every passing demand. I can care about this without becoming it. I can improve this without worshiping it. I can be concerned without being consumed. I can participate without surrendering judgment. I can change my mind without staging a conversion narrative. I can be imperfect without making imperfection my brand. I can be serious without being unbearable.

A normal life has room for contradiction.

You can care about nutrition and eat cake at a birthday party. You can care about sleep and stay up late sometimes. You can care about politics and have friends who don’t share your every worldview. You can care about your work and still close your laptop when your kid wants you to play Uno. You can be spiritually curious and still be skeptical of people selling enlightenment subscriptions. You can be disciplined and still be fun. You can be principled and still be kind.

This shouldn’t sound radical. None of it should sound radical. It only does because our culture has become so stupidly binary.

We keep building identities out of overcorrections. One group is reckless about health, so another becomes hysterical about purity. One group ignores politics, so another makes politics metabolize every human interaction. One group glorifies workaholism, so another insists ambition is inherently pathological. One group pathologizes every emotion, another denies emotions matter at all. Back and forth, forever, everyone reacting to the worst version of everyone else.

Stop letting the most annoying person in the opposite camp design your life.

You don’t have to become the inverse of someone else’s stupidity.

You can just be normal about things. You can live a life where you don’t need to make every decision under the pressure of symbolic meaning.

It puts the bar where a human being can reach it repeatedly without becoming deranged.

Refusing to be yanked around by every discourse preserves dignity. Refusing to overfit your life to trends preserves intelligence. Habits that don’t require witnesses build strength. Letting some things pass without turning them into proof of your worldview is maturity.

Just be normal about things.

Eat food that makes you feel decent. Sleep enough. Move your body. Read things that challenge your priors. Be kind to people in real life. Don’t outsource your politics to the angriest person on your feed. Don’t make your body a battleground for someone else’s theory. Don’t confuse self-improvement with self-surveillance. Don’t confuse certainty with wisdom. Don’t confuse being a dick with courage.

Have beliefs. Have standards. Have ambition. Have taste. Have boundaries. Have causes. Have things you refuse to tolerate.

But don’t give every part of yourself to every fight.

Most things need attention, not obsession.

Care, but keep your head.

Rest, but don’t turn it into a competitive sport.

Eat, but don’t join a cult.

Think, but don’t let politics eat your entire personality.

React, but not to everything, and not at full volume.

Learn what deserves your whole self and what deserves a normal, proportionate, adult response.

At the very least - at the bare minimum - it might make us all less annoying on Twitter.