Ozempicians Need Not Apply

If a picture is worth a thousand words, an anecdote is worth a thousand stats.

And if this anecdote is true, it could kill the GLP-1 surge without the need for a team of plaintiff attorneys to sift through 5,000 banker boxes ten years from now to assess the damage.

They say hedge funds are banning their traders from using GLP-1s because the drugs obliterate their desire to make money.

When I read that, I was like, "Ozempic cripples greed?!" Can we lace the water supplies of NYC, DC, and Silicon Valley with the stuff before they destroy the world with AI? Can we drop it into the HVAC systems at the Pentagon, Lockheed, and Halliburton? And heck, while we're at it, maybe we can slip Wegovy to the masturbators so they take an interest in chicks again."

The seven deadly sins, gone. Those ancient virtues of detachment and apatheia that take years of asceticism and meditation to attain: just one oblique injection away, like Aldous Huxley attaining a pure vision of existence after taking just four-tenths of a gram of mescalin.

The world can then turn its attention to service and love. We'll build a golden age on a mountain of those syringes.

But there's a problem.

When the first GLP-1 results trickled in, podcasts like All-In slobbered praise. The drug doesn't just help people lose weight, they said. It helps on many fronts: compulsive eating, compulsive shopping, compulsive gambling. If something compels you, Ozempic puts it in a headlock.

But there's a rub, and not just from the guys who decline to take Wegovy to stop their onanism: The GLP-1s don't just stop harmful desire. They eliminate all desire.

The jerk-off isn't going to pick up a syringe, put down his sword, and bed a babe. He's gonna do the first two but not the third. Two out of three ain't bad, says Meat Loaf, but when number three is "engage life," it's a problem.

GLP-1 (man, I hope there's not a 2, 3, and 4) is merely the latest in a parade of left-hemispheric solutions. The LH isolates a problem and then autistically focuses on eliminating it. It's like that nightmare AI hypothetical: you tell AI to rust-proof equipment, then it proceeds to remove all the oxygen from the Earth's atmosphere.

The LH saw a problem: a shload of overweight people crippling our health care industry, clogging Disney World with motorized scooters, squishing passengers on airplanes, and killing everyone's sexual appetite. The solution: get the fat people to eat less.

Eliminating the 'food noise' is how Oprah phrases it.

The problem is, many users have become entirely deaf.

Instead of taking Ozempic, Dostoyevsky wrote (and wrote and wrote) to pay off his gambling debts. One of his short pieces, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, is about a man who travels to another solar system and encounters people just like us, but not tainted by Original Sin. The people don't even know what vice and virtue are, much less have names for them.

The Ridiculous Man changes that. He infects them with sin. And then the people start categorizing. They invent morality because there is now immorality. They invent honor because there is dishonor. They know justice because they experience injustice. They invent brotherhood because there is now a thing called "hatred."

That water buffalo-riding eccentric Lao-Tzu knew all this. If something is good, then something else is bad . . . and vice versa. The better course, says the Taoist: don't categorize anything and sure as hell don't judge anything. You'll attain ataraxia, the existential suspension of all judgment, and thereby enter into a kind of earthly nirvana.

There's a lot to this. We could all use a larger measure of such detachment from our opinions and screeds (though you wouldn't know it from reading my blog).

They Went on Ozempic—and Gave Up on Life

Weight-loss drugs kill your desire to eat—but can they also stop you from wanting to do anything at all? Evan Gardner spoke to GLP-1 users to find out.

The Free PressEvan Gardner

Unfortunately, that Taoist/Zen insight is, as McGilchrist observes in his books, highly right-hemispheric, and the modern world, especially its technological/medicinal/pharmaceutical/bastardal elements, appreciates the right hemisphere about as much as a bar owner appreciates a Baptist preacher at his bar on Friday night.

We aren't the unstained people on the Ridiculous Man's planet. We need categories to survive. We need to distinguish monsters from angels. The left hemisphere does a great job with this.

But it needs the right hemisphere to temper it, to moderate it, to introduce a measure of, "Okay, I hear ya, now settle the f' down and let's assess this a bit more without all the adrenaline."

The right hemisphere injects measure and patience, plus a wallop of humility that urges caution and detachment that fits the matter into the grand scheme of things.

The left hemisphere wants none of that. It's balls to the wall until our scrotums pop.

And now there's a segment of our population that doesn't even care much when their scrotalia explode.