💯 Luxury experiences really don't exist anymore, at least not in the West It's become a fake roleplay of paying insane amounts of money for expensive food that's heated up in microwaves, $1000/night luxury hotels that are measurably worse than $100/night basic hotels and luxury products made in China for $100 and sold for $10,000 Some luxury still exists (especially good hotels and restaurants) in the Middle East and Asia but even there you have to really put effort to find them these days!

I want to build Longevity Hotels. 5 villas. Pitch black bedrooms, eight sleep mattresses, 0 noise. Reverse osmosis water filters. Air filters. Ergonomic desks. There's a restaurant with a chef cooking @bryan_johnson's approved meals. Ingredients from local organic shops. There's also a gym with a coach and a few classes a day. Sauna. Cold bath. The complex is in nature. Quiet but not too far from a nearby city. Customers would be people who've built online businesses and are looking for a place to focus for a few weeks. That's my dream place to stay. I don't know anything about physical business and real estate, but I want to make this real.

“It’s just that all of these Caribbean resorts look exactly the same to me. It’s just a random beach.” “Oh I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You sit at your laptop, and you select… I don’t know, that all-inclusive resort for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what cookie-cutter consumerist hotel your parents made you go to. But what you don’t know is that hotel isn’t just all-inclusive, it’s not Ixtapa, it’s not Zihuatanejo. It’s actually Cancún. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in the late 60s, Mexico ran a huge trade deficit with the US. They were industrializing rapidly, importing machinery and materials that had to be paid for in dollars. Then I believe it was INFRATUR, wasn’t it, that actually spent months building a computer model, feeding data to an IBM 360 to analyze Mexico’s entire coastline, evaluating climate, beach quality, accessibility, and development costs. Then they identified Cancún as a strategic tourism development zone, deliberately modeled on postwar Mediterranean resort economies. By the mid-1990s, major U.S. and European hotel chains standardized the all-inclusive resort model there. That model was then replicated, refined, and exported across the Caribbean. Eventually, that choice filtered down through Expedia algorithms, airline bundle deals, and trickled on down into some TikTok’s influencer video which you no doubt watched in bed doom scrolling. However, Cancún represents billions of dollars in coordinated state planning, private capital, labor arbitrage, and tourism dependency. Tens of thousands of jobs. Entire regional supply chains. And it’s sort of comical that you think you simply picked "a random beach" when in fact you’re sipping a piña colada at a resort selected for you by the Mexican federal government’s years-long optimization process… from a bunch of random beaches.”

Everyone wants to live within a walkable distance to a place like this, with a bakery, a butcher, a tailor, a bookstore, a barber, a cafe and various other businesses within walking distance. A farmer's market every weekend. Safe and free of criminals. Church bells. Schoolhouse. Trustworthy neighbours. A mayor who is a good person and wears a top hat. Is this too much to ask for?

Imagine you finally get all the power, control and wealth you dream of. You then buy all the stuff that you salivate over. Toys, homes, experiences. All of it. Okay. Tough Question: Now what? Seriously. After the party gets old: Now what?

Jony Ive once said: "Who here would actually want to spend time in a conference room? I can’t think of a more soulless and depressing place.” In their heyday, Apple’s design team used to meet in a team member’s living room once per week. Looking back on it, I swear you can feel the fruits of that ritual in the products Apple released. Think of the click-wheel on the original iPod, the sleek futurism of the original iPhone, or the theatrical elegance of opening up a new MacBook. I doubt that joy could’ve been dreamed up from under the fluorescent lighting of a sleek corporate boardroom. We know our spaces shape our thinking, but our actions betray this obvious truth. It’s a strange feature of our modern world that we doubt the mind-body connection between the spaces we inhabit and the thoughts we produce in those spaces. Take churches. We once built grand cathedrals with vaulted ceilings where light and sound reverberated in ways that awakened a divine connection with us. Now we build square boxes in strip malls. The ornamentation is gone. At some churches, you won’t even find a cross on the walls. Stained glass windows, too, have been replaced with LED screens of the sort you’d see at Coachella. Sometimes I wonder if God is dead because we killed him with bad architecture.

Podcaster Chris Williamson is battling the same chronic illness I faced in my 20s—a devastating combination of mold, Lyme disease, and other opportunistic infections that wrecked my health. I’m the only person I’ve heard of who fully recovered from this type of illness. It’s not a brag, it’s a sad statistic. Here’s what I learned: Like Chris, I spared no expense in my search for a cure, trying all sorts of cutting-edge (and sometimes wacky) treatments. As he points out in his video, there are so many symptoms and potential causes that it’s overwhelming. It’s easy to become what I call a “Professional Sick Person” (PSP)—someone whose illness dictates their entire life and becomes their identity. PSPs are always looking for the next miracle cure, always adding more to their treatment regimen. Here’s the danger of becoming a PSP: It’s self-fulfilling. I noticed over the years that PSPs never got better. Eventually, they accept bad health as their new normal. I wanted nothing to do with that. I was unwilling to become a PSP, so I stopped taking dozens of supplements and spending hours (and hundreds of dollars) each week on exotic treatments that weren't resulting in clear improvement. Instead, I focused on the basics: — Movement & Exercise: At my worst, walking around the block was a challenge. I’d be sick for days after any activity that caused me to break a sweat. But I powered through and inch-by-inch regained fitness. Exercise isn’t working out a few times a week—it’s a lifestyle. Humans need WAY more movement than most of us get. — Nature & Sunshine: Homo sapiens evolved over 300,000 years to live in harmony with nature, and only recently have we retreated indoors under artificial light. If you’re not spending time outside, getting sunlight and touching earth, you’re fighting biology. (Hint: You won’t win.) — Diet & Fasting: It’s not complicated, folks. Just eat clean, single-ingredient foods and avoid garbage (which increasingly means anything you don’t cook yourself). And NO ALCOHOL! — Joy & Love: Don’t roll your eyes—this might be the most important part. Toxic relationships and emotions (especially loneliness) manifest physically, but the good news is it works both ways. Renowned longevity doctor Vass Eliopoulos says, “joy is anti-inflammatory.” — Hormones: This type of chronic illness wreaks havoc on the endocrine system—adrenals, thyroid, and more. Hormones are foundational to metabolic health, and I believe it’s impossible to recover if you don’t correct imbalances. For men, the master hormone is testosterone—you simply can’t be healthy with low T (and I’m not just saying this because I own a T optimization company.) When sick people get their hormones into the optimal range, it’s like a rising tide that lifts all boats—seemingly unrelated symptoms disappear because their metabolic health improves. — Oxygen Therapies: The one thing I found that absolutely works is oxygen treatments such as ozone infusion and hyperbaric oxygen. These therapies help with detox, kill infections, and heal the body. I have a home ozone setup. When you’re struck with a chronic illness, there’s no easy way out. It takes years of disciplined effort to recover. But if you focus on the things I listed, you won’t live like a sick person along the way. And here’s the best part: I eventually realized that not only could I recover from my illness—I could become healthier than before. Now, at 54, I’m feeling and performing better than ever. I wish the same for you! PS: 1) If you found this post valuable, would you please like, comment, and repost? The algorithm hates this type of content. 2) There’s a link to a mega-thread with more details on my journey in the comments below. cc: @ChrisWillx