Lifestyle Engineering vs. Manly Sacrifice
Choose one.
I read a tweet sometime last year in which a guy said that he couldn’t trust any man whose face didn’t show any signs of struggle. I can’t seem to find that tweet anywhere to link it, but his statement has stuck with me ever since.
What he meant was simple: life as a man, lived properly, will require suffering and sacrifice. If a man shows no signs of struggle on his face, that means he’s not lived a life devoted to service, and it’s a red flag pointing to narcissism and selfishness. Maybe his statement isn’t an exact science, but I still think he had a great point.
In a day and age when we are seeing a growing trend of “biohacking” and “lifestyle engineering”, it’s important to remember the value of struggle, and the reason why making it your life’s mission to optimize your environment and seek to extend your life at any cost is not only an insufficient purpose but a narcissistic and prideful one.
There’s thousands of lifestyle gurus and biohackers who’ve made their brands all about “living better and living longer”. These movements of lifestyle optimization are capturing millions of young men who, lacking better guidance, end up making them their unofficial religion.
Bryan Johnson (depicted above) might be an extreme example of this trend, but even without taking it as far as injecting yourself with your son’s blood (yikes), how many men do we see online whose entire existence is about “wellness”, “longevity”, or even “health”?
Not that health and wellness are bad in and of themselves, not at all.
But like any trend, movement, or ideology, they become deeply problematic when they become the center of your life.
Because the only thing that should be at the center of your life is Christ. And Christ doesn’t merely want you to be healthy and live happily, He wants you to serve, sacrifice, and expand His Kingdom.
So while you should 100% be intentional about building a better life, it’s not enough to just ask yourself daily “how can I make my life better?”
Because it shouldn’t be all about you.
You need to ask yourself other, more meaningful questions too.
Ask the Right Questions
As I said, I’m all up for being intentional and trying to build a wonderful life.
By all means, try to be healthy and happy. Try to find a job that you love. Find a place to live that you like. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, lifestyle engineering ignores some fundamental questions:
Where can I be more useful?
How can I put my talents to the service of others?
What is God calling me to do?
You see, the likelihood is that God’s will is not for you to retire at 30 and drink Margaritas on the beach for the rest of your life. That’s a fine vacation, but would it be a purposeful life? Would God create your soul and send it to earth for you to do nothing but serve your own interests?
No, what God wants from you is very often to give up your entire life in service to others. There’s a million different callings and a million different ways in which God uses us to do that, but they all involve some form of service, and none of them — I dare say—, are about you building a life in which you are protected from all harm, following a perfectly optimized routine, and making your well being the ultimate priority.
When you ask the right questions and ponder on them in introspection and prayer, you’ll start to notice that maybe some of the things that would make your own life “better” by worldly metrics need to be postponed or rejected.
Manly Sacrifice
You see, I too dream about a life free from struggle sometimes. I’m blessed to be in a position where I could actually take a plane tomorrow, move to a small town by the beach, and make it work financially and personally. God has blessed me with a business that would allow me to do that.
It’s tempting to just move out of the toxic city I’m in and live a slower life somewhere more remote, surrounded by nature and far away from the problems of modernity.
But God has also shown me that there are people in this city who need to hear His message. I’ve lived here my entire life, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that it is here where I could have a greater impact. I could move to the countryside or to a Caribbean beach somewhere and keep running my business from my laptop, but that would be a selfish choice.
God is calling me —and probably you too— to impact the real world, to be physically present in the lives of all the souls we could help.
If He’s blessed you with awareness, clarity, and courage, maybe He’s calling you to the frontlines, to put yourself out there and carry the banners of His message and His hope at a time that desperately needs men who step up and proudly declare Him as Our Lord in the midst of vice, sin, and demons running rampant.
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
— Matthew 16:25
Retreating is tempting. Thinking all is lost is tempting. I too look at the vice that consumes my city —and most other big cities—, and sometimes believe it is hopeless. But it isn’t, not as long as there’s men like you and me left, who choose to answer God’s calling and who choose to stay and fight.
Maybe I’ll breathe poisonous air, if what God wants from me is to bring His message into this vice-ridden city. Maybe I’ll let go of my dream of worldly peace in the countryside and stay and give my life right here, where God has placed me.
Maybe I won’t live to 100 years old and maybe my hair will fall out, my skin will be cracked and reddened and my bloodshot eyes will be a testament of the fact that I chose service over “wellness”.
I hope my face will carry the scars of sacrifice, and I hope my life becomes a reflection of the great offering of Our Lord.
Take me where men need your words,
Where hope is lacking, where joy is lacking, simply for not knowing about You.
Lead me to the land that thirsts for God.
— Lyrics from a popular Spanish Catholic song, “Alma Misionera” (Missionary Soul), translated to English.
The purpose of this life is not to rebuild it in your fancy and prolong it artificially, but to seek to align your will with God’s and to walk alongside Him. The purpose of this life is to lose it in service to Christ, to answer His calling and sacrifice all you have, understanding that this life is temporary, and our true life awaits us in eternity.
God calls you towards a life of service, one that will require sacrifice and self-denial, one in which very often you’ll have to choose between your own well-being, your dreams of peace, your perfectly optimized routine, and the sacrifice that virtue requires.
By all means, build a beautiful life. But remember that no earthly beauty will ever compare to the beauty that awaits after we’ve perished.
Remember too, that you are not at the center of it all, and that in the midst of this great spiritual war, God doesn’t need men who abandon the battlefield to live more comfortably, but men who stay and die for Him, men who carry the banners and lead the millions who are lost towards the great revival of our faith.
Once more into the fray
Into the last good fight I will ever know
Live and die on this day
Live and die on this day
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This is a needed call in our comfort-obsessed age. We weren’t made to engineer the perfect life for ourselves, but to spend it for Christ and those He loves. The scars of sacrifice are far more beautiful than the plasticity of self-preservation that ends as dust and ash as well. May we choose Christ, His work, and a sacrificial life, and let our lives bear the marks of service to the King.
Very well said. Life should be Christo-centric and follow the path laid out in Matthew 25: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick & lonely.