Why This Matters

If you want to understand why I am completely obsessed with personal health, it’s because how you relate to your own body is as basic as things get. And because it is so fundamental, failing to take ownership of your own health is the ultimate gateway drug to losing control over the rest of your life. It is largely responsible for the tidal wave of cultural resentment, scapegoating, and finger-pointing dominating our public spaces. This national exhaustion isn't a political mystery; it's a behavioral one. The widespread trend of outsourcing our health has quietly eroded our collective confidence, proving that while personal wellness is deeply intimate, it carries massive societal stakes as well.

When you outsource control over your health, it alters far more than your waistline. It warps how you deal with setbacks on the entire road of life. Ordinary struggles stop being challenges that you want to overcome. Instead, they transform into massive barriers that you assume you cannot possibly face on your own. Once you swallow the idea that you are helpless when dealing with your own body, it’s a very short step to deciding you are completely helpless against the world. You embrace victimhood. You blame your problems on massive, invisible forces you cannot control, and when that feels too abstract, you project that frustration onto other people.

To see this exact psychological side effect out in the wild, look at a profound moment of culture shock my wife and I experienced about seven years ago. We were asked to explain our hydroponic farming business to a room full of elite New England prep school students. We went in expecting eager hands and curious questions about growing fresh food with water and light. Instead, we were met with a room full of teenagers who looked like they had just read the final chapter of a dystopian novel. They weren't just concerned about climate change; they were completely paralyzed by it. The general consensus among these kids was that the world was ending, nothing could be done, and their only remaining option was to despair performatively on social media.

This collective powerlessness is bleeding into everything. Look at the public commentary surrounding last week’s SpaceX IPO. I expected people to debate rocket engineering, satellite constellations, or orbital mechanics. Instead, an astonishing number of critics skipped the physics entirely and went straight to demanding that the government confiscate Elon Musk’s wealth to fund fixing everything wrong with society. Now, whether you love the guy or think he’s an eccentric space cadet is entirely beside the point. What struck me was the underlying vibe: a total, absolute lack of confidence that we, as individual human beings, can or should do something ourselves to effect positive change. If something is broken, the immediate cultural reflex is to find a villain, blame them, and wait for a third party to manage the outcome.

Let’s look at this through another angle. There are fundamentally two kinds of people in this world: those who would welcome winning an Olympic gold medal through cheating, and those who would welcome one only if they earned it through the grit of their own effort. Outsourcing your health turns you into a results-focused cheater. It conditions you to crave the shortcut—the quick-fix pill, the spreadsheet diagnostic, the automatic pass—without ever experiencing the deep satisfaction, the playability, and the self-reliance that comes from running your own training loops.

And when you become a results-focused cheater who no longer values your own physical effort, you stop valuing your own judgment entirely. This is exactly why internet influencers have suddenly become the supreme rulers of our cultural landscape. Think about it: why on earth would we outsource our daily buying habits to minor celebrities who aren't qualified to make an informed judgment about anything? Why does a single picture of a famous singer wearing a specific article of clothing launch an absolute feeding frenzy where thousands of adults sprint to buy the exact same outfit? It’s because we have abandoned faith in our own minds. We don't trust our choices, so we let a pop star do our thinking for us.

Society feels a bit fractured right now because we’ve been trained to drive our lives from the back seat, but we can begin fixing it right here at the workbench. Taking absolute ownership of your own health is the first step. Your frame was beautifully designed to default to health and grow stronger under positive stress, and changing your daily routines can actually be an incredibly fun, winnable game. That is what Itercycling offers. It’s time to stop outsourcing your health and remember what it feels like to trust your own judgment again. Together, let's take back the steering wheel.