A few months ago, I saw this tweet about the World Sauna Championships and how men will literally push themselves to the brink of death to win them, despite there being no tangible rewards. As the author of the tweet noted:
It was interesting to me because it’s another piece of evidence that as soon as you create a ruleset…no matter how ridiculous it is, no matter how small the group of participants, no matter the extreme chance of death, and no matter a total lack of prizes. There will always be men willing to compete to the point of actually killing themselves…
It’s kind of like a hijacking of the programming evolutionary mind, where no incentive makes sense but it happens anyway. You can find a million examples of this for every male interest on the planet. Just the simple act of starting down a path confers it meaning to the person, and the more they are surrounded by other men who care about the same thing, the more they learn and compete, the more entranced by it they are, until their identity is fully subsumed by it and stuff like these sauna deaths happen.
They’re right, but these kinds of dangerous status games aren’t exclusive to men. Competitive female freedivers like Audrey Mestre and Natalia Molchanova both passed away pursuing a sport with little financial reward or media coverage. What they were chasing was status.
When we look at competitive freediving or the World Sauna Championships, it’s easy to see why such competitions seem so irrational. Both have a negatively asymmetric payoff—the upside is trivial and the downside is everything.
But what about those status games where the payoffs aren’t so obvious? Where the upsides are there, but the downsides are unknown ahead of time?
I’ve thought about this a lot since becoming a father a few months ago. Until that point, my primary sense of fulfillment came from my writing and my career. Everything was focused on more content and more followers. Rinse and repeat.
But helping to raise my daughter has been a joy unlike anything I’ve experienced before. I’ve been so fulfilled by it that it made me question whether the game I was playing for the past 10 years still makes sense.
You have to understand that, for an online content creator, the ultimate sign of success is a huge platform. People like Tim Ferriss, Andrew Huberman, and Chris Williamson are examples of those who have won the game. These are the creators we look up to. They’re supposed to help us live better lives with their accumulated knowledge and wisdom.
Yet, as far as I can tell, all of these men are unmarried and childless. I understand that not everyone wants to be married or have children, but now that I have both, I feel a bit deceived.
Because the online environment I’ve operated in for most of my career has been glorifying a lot of people playing the wrong game. It’s put some on a pedestal who are missing arguably the most important part of life—a family. And there’s no amount of money, success, or influence that can convince me otherwise.
For the record, I’m not talking about people who wanted a family and, for reasons outside their control, never got one. I understand that life doesn’t always cooperate. My issue is with a system that holds up work-obsessed influencers as the blueprint for a life well-lived while ignoring family altogether.
Don’t just take my word for it. Consider what famed investor Paul Tudor Jones said on the topic in a recent episode of Invest Like the Best:
My significance is not gonna be from being a trader…My significance is going to be, first and foremost, my family…
If I think about the end of my life and I look back, I’m not gonna be thinking about the ’87 crash or Bitcoin. I’m gonna be thinking about who I loved and who loved me.
Jones is arguably more successful than any influencer on the planet and publicly recognizes the centrality of family to living a great life.
So why isn’t this message more widespread among content creators? There’s no shortage of intricate morning routines, optimized supplement stacks, and must-read book lists. But where’s “settle down and start a family”?
It’s a message I don’t often hear. Yes, there are some big-name creators who put family at the center of their content. But they’re the exception, not the rule. For every post about being a parent, there are ten on productivity and sleep hacks. Why is this the case?
Because we are encouraged to focus so much on ourselves. Men are told to “lock in” and women are told to “girl boss” it up. And there’s nothing wrong with these messages by themselves. But when you listen to them for too long you can end up missing out on one of the most meaningful parts of human existence.
I know because it was almost me. For many years I was a workaholic bachelor in NYC. Going to parties. Meeting new people. Dating all the time. Creating content. Tweeting constantly. It was addictive in every way. My focus was on having fun and building my brand.
The issue wasn’t my lifestyle, but the belief that this lifestyle was the ideal. I truly thought that any other path would have made me worse off. I now know that’s false.
But I only know this because I met my wife and was fortunate enough to experience the joys of fatherhood. As a result, it’s completely changed how I use my time. For example, I spend far less time on social media than I used to. Why argue with strangers on the internet when I can make memories with my daughter? It can’t compare.
I got lucky though. Because I easily could’ve been the perpetual bachelor in NYC continuing down the “influencer” path. That’s not a bad life, but I now understand that it’s missing something.
The problem with being ultra-focused on your career/content is that the upsides are clear: money, success, and influence. But the downsides aren’t readily apparent. Every year I spent focused on myself was a year less with my future family. This was the unintended consequence of maximizing one variable while overlooking others.
In that sense, the creators who spend years maximizing their platforms at the expense of everything else are more like the sauna competitors than they realize. They don’t know what winning costs them until it’s too late. But I do.
Because if you focus on yourself too long, the only thing you’ll have in the end is…you.
Thank you for reading.
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This is post 523. Any code I have related to this post can be found here with the same numbering: https://github.com/nmaggiulli/of-dollars-and-data