The Great Health Progress Challenge
Health is a major problem in many countries. Obesity is disturbingly common in the US, especially. There is an eternal debate about how to reform healthcare in the US. It’s a terribly complicated mess in the US, but there is much room for improvement around the world. How can we make it better?
In the US, people tend to fixate on political solutions, maybe because healthcare is one of our never-ending, nasty, partisan battles. But after decades of fighting about it, how much progress has been made? It is a very hard area to make progress in due to polarization. Besides, the framing is wrong. We are focusing on the wrong area.
What is called healthcare is better described as sick care. By the time you get to the hospital, except for unforeseeable emergencies and accidents, the game is already lost. You have made thousands of bad decisions over decades, and now the bill has come due all at once. You ask for a miracle from the healthcare system to undo the decades of damage you’ve done to your body.
The problem is a simple lack of information. Feedback loops are often not tight. If you got fat as you ate a whole pizza, you would stop eating whole pizzas. The good thing is that we live in an age of rapid advances in collecting, analyzing, and displaying information. Sensors get smaller and cheaper, and software gets smarter.
Soon we will be able to monitor our health in an automatic, unobtrusive way, with AI-powered intelligent assistants to help us make sense of the information. This combination has enabled optimization in other areas and has begun to help in health.
Smartwatches, Apple Health, and Google Fit have made it easy for people to have a clear picture of some basic daily health metrics. “Getting my steps in” is now a common phrase. Sharing sleep statistics is starting to get more common among some fitness enthusiasts
This is a more decentralized approach to improving wellness that is better suited to this era when digital innovation is most rapid. It especially plays to the strengths of an innovative but politically gridlocked country like the US.
It also has the benefit of allowing an innovation that comes from any corner of the planet to become available everywhere immediately. The iPhone app Vital, which is like a more social and well-rounded Strava, is developed by a team distributed around Europe and the Middle East, with users mostly in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. A few people had a good idea, and now people all over the world can benefit from it in their everyday lives.
An app like Vital feels like a game. You check in every day and compete and share your wins and struggles with others. It’s fun and easy but has real long-term positive effects on your life. It offers a convenient, game-like way to take charge of your health. Health goes from a tiresome, often-forgotten obligation to an infinite game. It is just more fun and empowering to make optimizing your health a game you continually improve at than to make it something you attend to now and when the guilt becomes too much.
So health optimization is progressing at the individual and niche community levels. At the global level, this can be a grand project for humanity to undertake in the coming decades. In 2050, why shouldn’t the average person be as jacked as a health optimization enthusiast like Bryan Johnson is today?
We just need to continue to develop health optimization tools and use them more and more broadly. Using your Apple Watch, Strava, or Vital every day can be thought of as doing your part in this grand, positive project. The little 30-day running challenge you do in Strava or Vital is nested in the 30-year challenge of radically leveling up human thriving. From the individual to the global level, the gains are in front of us. Let’s go get them!