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It’s Been a Bad Few Days for Joyless Optimization Freaks

Between the Enhanced Games and the lightweight Steven Bartlett, I’m starting to think reducing life to a series of health and productivity metrics might be suboptimal.

By Adam Christopher Smith

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Believe it or not, it is now Wednesday. Are you still piecing your skull back together after a long weekend so lurid it’d make a WHOOP band blush?

If you’ve spent the last few days chasing down the mysterious, ineffable substance of life, the fizzing essence of existence that can’t be boiled down to any measurable productivity metric—or if you’ve simply had more than three glasses of wine—then chances are you are currently living through a hell even worse than that endured by the entrepreneur-podcaster Steven Bartlett a couple of years back.

The Diary of a CEO host has spent his Lost Weekend whining about the three full days of his life that were “ruined” after he took his hot-wired body on a Baudelairean dopamine joyride with 375 satanic ml of vino tinto sloshing around in his bloodstream.

Steven Bartlett says a few glasses of wine ruined the next 3 days of his life“It's one of those areas where you don't understand the hidden cost until you really give it up for a while. I stopped drinking at 30 years old. I'm now 33. When I was 31, I thought, I'll have a drink… pic.twitter.com/Q8Q6Zy69nq— Mikli (@CryptoMikli) May 23, 2026

Steven Bartlett says a few glasses of wine ruined the next 3 days of his life“It's one of those areas where you don't understand the hidden cost until you really give it up for a while. I stopped drinking at 30 years old. I'm now 33. When I was 31, I thought, I'll have a drink… pic.twitter.com/Q8Q6Zy69nq

For those of you who aren’t able to face watching the clip, it turns out that just a few units of alcohol were enough to mess up Bartlett’s sleep pattern, disrupt his diet plan, throw off his workout routine, and mess with his podcasting game. What a lightweight.

“I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever—the cortisol system—was........

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