I always had a lot of drive. I used to joke that I would wake up standing because I jumped out of bed. It was not really a joke. It was the truth. For such a long part of my life, I woke up with tremendous energy. That energy would keep up pretty much during the day but would start to fade in the evening. But even that was relative. My low point was probably equal to most people’s high point.
Now that energy is fading. It probably has something to do with being 81 years old, but there may be other factors. I am really speaking about my physical energy. The opposite seems to be happening with respect to my mind. It seems to be on fire, lit by a match called AI.
Unfortunately there’s sort of a mismatch between my mind and my body. It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this. I used to joke that my body was just a socket for my brain because I had a pretty big disconnect between my mental self and my physical self. Then when I was 40 I was able to integrate the two parts of who I am. That happened when I started working out regularly at the gym, doing yoga, and then later doing Pilates.
I still am physically active, but I’m starting to feel a decline in my energy level. I don’t have the same drive, but I have the same desire to do things. In fact, while my body may be declining some, my brain seems to be going the other way, particularly as it has been stimulated by AI. There are so many things I want to do every day, so many things I want to write, so many things I want to learn. I want to play piano more. I want to study Italian more. I am still helping to start companies and continuing my work in medical science. I have all these desires but I can’t keep up with it. At a certain point I just don’t have the energy, and this is really a new experience. I’m grappling with it and I worry that the schism will increase. What’s worse, perhaps I will want to do more and more and I will be able to do less and less.
Thinking about this takes me back to my childhood, a time when severe asthma ruled my life. It was a curse and a blessing. Without it, I doubt that I would have developed the creative abilities that have played such an important role in my life. Back then, we did not have “devices,” so my device was my mind. I am in no way comparing myself to the great physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffered from ALS from the age of 21. By the time he was in his 30s he could no longer write by hand. He lost the ability to speak with his own voice at the age of 43, 33 years before his death. I have been interested in how he handled this transition, including the tools he used and in particular the skills he developed to work on complex problems just in his head.
Perhaps my decline in energy is related to taking a small dose of GLP-1 every week or two to maintain my weight at a very healthy level and derive additional and significant health benefits (my labs are amazing). Another possibility is it’s my diet. I have been on an intermittent fasting diet for more than 6 years. I eat between 12 pm and 8 pm, although sometimes I eat a little bit later than that. I’m wondering if taking GLP-1 and intermittent fasting have reduced my energy level. It could be. This is something I could experiment with and get some more information. Another possibility is just really changing my diet. Also, for the longest time I was on a very low-carb diet, but that’s virtually impossible here in Italy. Everything is carbs and you just end up in situations where you’re eating a lot more carbohydrates than you used to, which also means I’m eating less protein.
Many of the hours of my day are spent standing in front of my computer (I don’t have a chair), writing or reading or watching. I’ve been using a standing desk for probably 15 years. I don’t know if that contributes to the lack of energy, but I don’t like to sit and I actually think sitting is not a good thing. I either stand or lie down and read.
I am starting to use tools like Wispr to help me dictate. This blog post was dictated using Wispr, for instance. I love that I can now write just using my voice. This has freed me up to work on my writing while I am also taking a walk. I also do a lot of work with ChatGPT or Claude just using voice. So my dependency on being in front of a screen and some kind of keyboard is declining.
It has also occurred to me that I might actually be working harder than I have been in the last several years, and that’s one of the causes of the sense of losing energy.
What do you think?
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