On February 24, 2025, IPK Fellow Maya Vinokour penned an opinion piece for The Nation titled “Vampire Weekend.” Read the excerpt below, then click for the full article.

This techno-solutionist approach to health and wellness epitomizes what Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer, writing in the 1940s, called “instrumental rationality,” a form of reason that never asks “why” but only “how.” Instrumental rationality searches for the most efficient means to a given end without questioning whether that end is even worthwhile. This narrowly defined rationality requires a rigid compartmentalization of a type I recognize in Johnson’s descriptions of himself as a collection of warring personae. During the day’s first lecture, for example, he recounts how during his “wind-down time” from 7:30 to 8:30 pm, Ambitious Bryan torments a beleaguered Sleep Bryan, who must already contend with Dad Bryan and Debaucherous Bryan. Johnson clearly prefers following inflexible instructions to actually wrestling with these demons—much less wondering whether they might have something useful to tell him after all.

For Horkheimer, instrumental rationality, in its myopic quest for optimal methodologies, allows humans to let themselves off the hook even for genocide. If you restrict your attention to the steps of your algorithm, each individual decision may seem sensible and value-neutral. But in the aggregate, these micro-decisions can lead to monstrous results—up to and including the Holocaust, the postwar Frankfurt School’s central example of modernity run amok. On the surface, Johnson appears to be asking age-old questions about how to find “the good life.” But in practice, his activities boil down to Horkheimer’s instrumental rationality, a meaningless striving toward longevity that never wonders whether an inhumanly long life is even worth pursuing.

Read the full article here.

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