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There was a viral tweet (26M views!) this past week talking about Stephen Bartlett “ruining 3 days of his life” by having a few glasses of wine.

I get his main point. Alcohol wrecks sleep, spikes anxiety for a lot of people, and makes training harder. If your life is better without it, cutting it out completely makes a lot of sense.

But we’ve lost the plot when a couple drinks turns into a moral failure and a three-day recovery story. It’s the same energy as the “as a full-grown man I need a 45-minute bed-time routine so my sleep score doesn’t dip below 90%” crowd. A life designed around avoiding anything that might create discomfort.

Twitter, as usual, came out with torches and pitchforks for poor Stephen (the reaction was a bit much, honestly). But a lot of people made a great point: Stephen is about to become a parent. If a few glasses of wine cost three days of productivity, just wait until there’s a newborn.

We’ll probably remember the 2020s as the pendulum decade. Pro-vaccines to anti-vax. Liberal politics to conservative. Social media being harmless to it being a plague on society. One of these other swings is from the YOLO mindset of the 2010s to bubble boy longevity culture.

To be clear, I’m all for people taking care of themselves. But a lot of the health maximalist movement isn’t creating healthier people. It’s creating anxious people who live inside a constant internal risk calculator.

It’s building a life that’s:

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather be 90 having lived a full life than 105 because I avoided the sun, never traveled, and turned every decision into a spreadsheet. More than anything, it’s an argument for building personal resilience. Because you can’t live in a bubble, and we’ve literally seen what happens when people try.

COVID was the world’s biggest bubble experiment, and the mental health consequences were brutal. Human beings need friction, exposure, and a little chaos. Not because chaos is good, but because you’re supposed to be strong enough to handle it.

That’s the founder version of health. Not perfect inputs, and not a sterile life where every meal is macro-optimized and every choice is fear-based. It’s being able to show up on a random Tuesday after a late dinner, a glass of wine, and a short night of sleep, and still do the work.

Founder Fitness, for me, has always been about building that capacity and balance. The streak matters more than perfection because the goal isn’t to never drift. The goal is to return to center quickly and keep moving.

A full life requires risk: (safe) exposure to the sun, the occasional late night, traveling the world. In my opinion, sharing the odd bottle of wine with friends & family will do more for your soul than it costs your long-term health, and if you build real resilience, you get to enjoy it all without falling apart the next day.

The question isn’t “will this hurt my sleep score?” It’s “does this help me live a more fulfilling life?”

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12-minute AMRAP:

Strength + conditioning. 4 rounds:

Rest 90 seconds between rounds.

genius 😂 😂

every second counts