I’m taking a bath.
Stop laughing. No, I am not an 8-year-old, and yes, I enjoy piping hot baths with epsom salt before bed. It relaxes me and washes away the filth of the day.
Anyway, I’m in the bath watching a basketball game on my iPad when a commercial comes on for Hims pills. I’m half-paying attention when I start to listen to the supposed health benefits of the product.
According to the ad, Hims pills can help with all sorts of maladies, including erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation (those must be different pills) and hair loss. The voice (who is actually an actor in a white lab coat) tells me that I don’t have to go anywhere. With a few clicks of a button, they connect me with their “licensed medical providers,” and if I get the greenlight, they send me my pills to fix me. They can even send me pills for my anxiety.
What in the actual fuck? Are we in a science fiction movie?!
Hims appears to be a legit, public company. The active ingredients in their boner pills are the same as those in Viagra. Their differentiating factor is that going to a doctor for ED and hair loss can be embarrassing, so Hims removes that step and ships the antidote to your problems directly to you without the hassle of seeing an actual person who sat for the MCAT, passed biochemistry and took the Hippocratic Oath. Hims did $527,000,000 in revenue in 2022, so obviously there are a lot of dudes out there looking for a quick fix and that’s my point.
Too many of us are looking for just that: a panacea, a silver bullet. A pill we can take, an injection we can receive or even a diagnosis that will solve all our problems.
And it’s not just the fellas. Baby Botox is on the rise. That’s the idea of 20-year-olds getting preventative injections in their face to ward off wrinkles and aging (and all our Zooms are apparently making people even more self-conscious).
I want to clarify that I am not categorically pro or anti any of these things. Fairness is an illusion. Life is not fair.
It’s not fair that a 35-year-old woman at the peak of her powers has to keep an eye on her biological clock if she wants to have kids (female fertility falls off a statistical cliff around that age - don’t @ me with anecdotal evidence and take a stats class). It’s not fair that gray hair makes men look “sophisticated” while women are expected to look like their 25-year-old selves for decades.
However, acknowledging the unfairness of life is step one. Step two is picking yourself up by your Comme des Garçons Chucks and doing something about it.
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
All those crypto zealots in 2021 who gave their profile pics glowing red eyes and told us how dumb we were for not investing in Bitcoin, Etherium or Dogecoin were looking for the financial equivalent of Hims or Baby Botox. They even yelled at us to “buy the dip” when crypto started to fall (at the beginning of 2022, “the collective market cap of cryptocurrencies worldwide stood at $2.2 trillion. [At the end of the year], that figure [stood] at just below $800 billion”). Crypto investors wanted a quick fix to wealth. Well, I got one for the rest of us. It’s not quick, but it works. Here it goes:
You max your 401(k) ($22,500/year) and invest in the S&P 500 (+10% return over the previous 40 years; the real number is actually closer to +12%, but let’s be conservative) for 40 years (assume you start at 25 and stop at 65). At 65 years old, you’ll have about $10,000,000.
Forty years seems like an eternity away—I get it. But this get-rich-slow scheme is almost guaranteed to work. And $10 mil is $10 mil. Oh, and if you live another 30 years, never add a dime to your 401(k), and just leave it invested in the S&P 500, that $10 mil will be worth $175,000,000.
That’s Drake money. That’s generational wealth money. All because you had a job and maxed your 401(k).
(This is an aside, but I like how Boomers point to avocado toast as this extravagant expense. As in, the reason the younger generation cannot buy homes is because they are eating a nutritionally dense super food served on locally made multigrain instead of processed meat on Wonder Bread. I’d argue eating avocado toast in your 20s and 30s will save on medical expenses in your 70s.)
A couple things I want to point out: This assumes you can max your 401(k), which is a big ask with student loans, housing costs and healthcare. This also assumes you live to 95, which is another big ask, but maybe you’ll get there if, in your 20s, you snarf avocado toast and don’t inject things into your beautiful face or take pills to increase the already-shockingly-high number of erections you get. This also assumes you don’t touch the money for emergency needs like health crises. I acknowledge all those flaws.
Does this seem too good to be true? Not really. I am talking about a 70-year investment timeframe and have a few assumptions built into the model.
But I don’t think your skepticism is your fault. It’s pickleball’s.
Pickleball is one of the most popular sports in terms of growth. Thirty-six million people played pickleball in 2022. That’s more than 10% of the country (330 million) and includes all humans from newborns to octogenarians. It’s a derivative of tennis involving paddles and a wiffle ball. And if you play pickleball, it’s the opposite of Fight Club—you must talk about pickleball.
This is somewhat of a hot take and 100% my own opinion with zero statistical backup, but here it goes: People like pickleball because it’s easier than tennis.
Tennis is hard. It involves a giant court with an incredibly bouncy ball (there are few things more beautiful than the greenish-yellow felt of a tennis ball). You have to hit a fast ball after it bounces (Andre Agassi was known for taking the ball on the rise to increase the speed of his return, using the strength of his adversary against him) and direct it away from your opponent. It’s rightfully been compared to boxing. It involves strategy, anaerobic endurance and skill. Like I said, it’s hard.
Pickleball, on the other hand, involves standing (mostly) and covering an area the size of a beach towel. The ball floats (it has holes in it to reduce speed), and your paddle has no strings, so you just hit it. That’s it. Hit it like a 4-year-old. Pop. Pop. Pop.
It goes without saying that any exercise is good exercise, and people being active playing pickleball is better than sitting on their couch. I’m saying that tennis is harder than pickleball, better for you physically and mentally, and would boost self-esteem more than pickleball (only 23.6 million people played tennis in 2022).
But it’s not just pickleball. We look for the easy way out all the time. Would “I Will Always Love You” hit the same if Whitney Houston had access to auto tune?
The marathon (26.2 miles) was the ultimate measure of endurance. It was inspired by the Greek man Philippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens to inform everyone of victory. He supposedly died right after. (There are a lot of other factors in this story, and I’m not going to pretend to fact-check a legend from 3,000 years ago, but if the first guy who ran a marathon died, one could conclude it’s a beast of a distance.)
Yet again, we decided it was too hard for us, so we cut it in half and created the half-marathon (13.1 miles). The race is half as long and twice as popular as the full. People can feel accomplished without having to train for a year (or more) to complete the full 26.2.
If you’re in moderate shape, you can roll off the couch and shuffle through 13.1 miles. There is no way a casual person can get through 26.2 without experiencing hell on earth.
I've completed 12 full marathons. My first two were disasters. I didn’t train correctly. I didn’t have the right nutrition. I went out way too fast. My muscles cramped and spasmed, and every fiber of my existence told me to stop. But I gutted it out, and the pain taught me something: I don’t want to go through this again. I adjusted my training, fuel and race day plan. I learned from my mistakes. That is what we miss when we take the easy way out.
Half of talk therapy for me is driving to therapy. I have to sit in my car and burn calories getting across town. It’s an investment—both time and money—in myself. Making therapy as easy as Postmates does it a disservice.
Don’t get me wrong, I love half-marathons (and Postmates) and am secretly relieved when my therapist cancels on me. (It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.) They are way more manageable and fun than full marathons, but that’s not the point. We took something that was hard and made it easier. That’s probably a good thing because it increases access to running races, but it also lets us off the hook. We can complete a race with the word “marathon” in it that isn’t close to 26.2 miles. How would Philippides feel about that?
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