A Bird Never Flew on One Wing: The Problem with Perfect Living
My grandfather was fond of a Guinness. If you asked him whether he fancied a pint, the answer was steadfastly yes, followed by the inevitable caveat: “A bird never flew on one wing.”
In other words, one pint was rarely going to be the end of it. In his latter years, the sweet spot was somewhere between three and four slow pints over good conversation, in the company of family and friends. There was no great philosophy to it. Simply an instinctive and ritualistic understanding that some parts of life were there to be enjoyed — as they were.
Stephen Bartlett took a fair bit of heat recently for saying that three glasses of wine nearly ruined his life for a few days. Three glasses of, no doubt, biodynamic, organic, handcrafted, fit-for-a-CEO plonk, and the man was derailed. Poor sleep, no gym and sub-optimal podcasting followed.
It is an easy thing to laugh at. And I did. Modern wellness culture eating itself across social media.
I also understood it more than I might like to admit.
Somewhere between my grandfather’s “a bird never flew on one wing” and Bartlett’s three-glass existential crisis sits a very modern tension: how do we look after ourselves and perform well, without slowly removing the joy, looseness and humanity that make life worth living in the first place?
I work in the world of performance. In business and sport. I am an advocate for the idea that a better life equates to better performance. For the last 1,584 days straight, I have worn a Whoop band. That’s roughly four and a half years on my wrist. It only comes off in airports and for the occasional wash. Sleep, recovery and strain tracked consecutively and religiously over that time. I’ll advocate for just how powerful a tool I find it.
I like technology. I enjoy having my own performance standards. It works for me.
I like, and often preach, the idea that small behaviours, repeated consistently, can change how you feel, how you think and how you perform. I find tracking, maintaining and tweaking those behaviours enjoyable. More importantly, I can see and feel the outputs.
I also believe success — whatever your definition — is often a by-product of your wellbeing. When I train well, sleep well, eat well and recover well, I feel better. I think more clearly. I have more patience. I am a better version of myself in life, work and everything in between.
All that said — I also like a pint or three from time to time. These days I probably think about it more than I care to admit, or at least more than I used to — when I couldn’t see my heart rate spiking to 79 and my HRV fall through the floor.
So I’ll freely admit to living closer to the Steven Bartlett end of the life optimisation scale than perhaps my grandfather’s end. I have my routines, my supplements, my training habits and my recovery rituals. It definitely works for me but it doesn’t define me. Optimisation is useful when it helps you live with more energy, clarity, purpose and connection.
It becomes a problem when it turns life into one long audit of your own behaviours. I am acutely aware that the pursuit of better living is only valuable if it keeps making life bigger, not smaller.
Wellness culture is supposed to free you — but there is a point where it can begin to do the opposite. You start measuring your life, and then slowly your life starts organising itself around the measurement. The behaviours that were supposed to support your life start to narrow it. The tools that were supposed to give you insight start to create tension and anxiety. The habits that were supposed to help you feel better start to make normal human messiness feel like failure.
A bad sleep score suddenly feels like a personal weakness. A missed workout feels like a collapse in standards. A few glasses of wine feels like a life out of control.
For me, that version of optimisation is brittle and anxiety ridden. It creates an illusion of control. It makes you believe that if you can just manage every input properly, you can avoid discomfort, tiredness, inconsistency, stress, low mood, poor performance and regret.
I know life doesn’t work like that. You can do everything right and still have a bad day. You can sleep eight hours and still feel flat. You can train, hydrate, supplement, meditate, sauna, cold plunge, journal, eat a bag of raw carrots — and still be impatient with your kids or partner, distracted in work, or low on energy.
And sometimes you can have the pints, stay up late, laugh for hours, sleep badly and still wake up feeling like your life is fuller because of it.
I understand that my Whoop can never show me that. It can tell me what happened to my recovery score. It can’t tell me what happened to my spirit. It can show me the cost of the night out — physiologically. It can’t measure the laughs and the craic.
Perhaps that’s where the conversation needs more nuance. If optimisation makes you more capable, more present, more grounded and more generous, then it’s working. If it makes you more anxious, more rigid, more self-absorbed and less able to enjoy ordinary life, then perhaps something has gone wrong — ironically pulling you away from the very things that help you perform well over time: connection, enjoyment, play, laughter, perspective and a sense of being fully alive.
Better life and better performance should not be in conflict. Better performance gives you the confidence and capacity to live more fully. When performance becomes too narrow, it starts to rob life of texture. Everything becomes input and output, cause and effect, and everything becomes a data point in an app.
Sometimes the thing that makes the recovery score worse actually makes life better.
Sometimes the optimal thing is the early night, the home-cooked meal, the 5k up the road, and the green recovery score in the morning. And sometimes the optimal thing is the glass of wine, the long conversation, the bit of laughter, the late night and the slightly rougher morning. There is a skill in knowing the difference — and a danger in forgetting there is a difference.
My grandfather would not have known his HRV from his elbow. He certainly would not have reviewed a few creamy pints through the lens of downstream performance implications. But he understood something that all the modern wellness data in the world can sometimes miss:
Life is to be lived.
So yes, use the data. Build the habits. Take the supplements if they help. Train hard. Sleep well. Look after yourself. Pay attention to the things that help you feel and perform better. Drink or don’t drink.
But don’t let the pursuit of a better life rob you of the life you are trying to make better.