The Celebration of Suffering Edition

Noah here. A post from Kyla Scanlon about the “Ozempicification” of society is making the rounds. Her argument: people feel the system has failed them, so they’re turning to individual optimization tools—drugs, prediction markets, biohacking, hustle culture—to simulate control. The title, of course, comes from the miracle weight-loss drug from Novo Nordisk:

One example of an individual optimization tool that really works is Ozempic. Some people need to be on it for medical reasons and others are self-admittedly doing it for aesthetics. To be clear, Ozempic is a wonderful technology that solves a very real problem for individuals but it leaves the collective problem like the food system and healthcare access untouched.

Why is this interesting?

Putting aside the core argument (and the implication that because we aren’t solving the food system and healthcare access, we shouldn’t work on obesity), this positioning of Ozempic drives me totally nuts. Although Scanlon’s piece is really about something bigger, the Ozempic framing is where I want to focus, because it signals something I think is an even bigger trend in society: the celebration of suffering. Or maybe more specifically, the gatekeeping of new technology in the name of suffering.

The implication that a miracle drug that solves one of the most serious health crises in America is an “aesthetic choice” gets to the core of the issue. There’s a sense that somehow using Ozempic and its compatriots is cheating: that weight loss should be hard, and if you’re not doing it the hard way, then you didn’t earn it.

We see the same conversation around AI and, I would argue, just about every other technology ever introduced. Plato argued that writing would destroy memory; the printing press would make knowledge dangerously accessible; and calculators were banned from classrooms for being used to cheat. There’s a sense that if it’s not hard, it’s not real—and I think that’s a much more sinister force in society than a move towards optimization. (And that’s without even factoring in the additional impacts these drugs are having outside weight loss, in diseases like addiction.)

In a piece about his own weight loss (sans drugs), writer and economist Noah Smith covered the topic well:

In general, I think technological solutions to human problems are severely underrated. Progressive writers love to declare that “tech won’t save us”, and decry the vile techbros who think a magic venture-funded gadget can overcome the eternal foibles of human nature. Instead, what most writers think we need are social solutions — we need to restructure our institutions, our politics, our mores, and our culture in order to balance out, or perhaps to better accommodate, our timeless flaws.

The thing about Ozempic is that it doesn’t just solve the most widespread pre-existing health issue in America; it also seems to be amazing at a bunch of other things, like addiction and inflammation. This is the kind of medicine we dream of, which is why there’s such a push to find more peptides. The same people who look around the country and wonder why there’s widespread vaccine skepticism are positioning this amazing new substance as “doing it for aesthetics,” and I guess I just think that sucks. (NRB)