On Miracle Drugs Redux
In 2018 I wrote this post advocating for miracle drugs – at the time, I was referring to anabolic steroids for weight loss and muscle gain. Almost a decade later, we’ve actually mainstreamed magical miracle weight loss drugs. Not steroids, though – I’m referring to the class of GLP-1 agonists – Semaglutide, Tirzapetide, and Retatrutide. You may be more familiar with the brand names – Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro. I’m not going to get into the science behind how it works or the mechanics, because I also don’t know. All I know is, we’ve literally invented magic weight loss drugs. They may not be as straightforward as “Take this dose, lose X pounds”, but these are drugs proven to cut a percentage of your body weight if you use them for long enough. They’re not necessarily magic – they basically just curb your appetite and make you feel full longer, maybe reduce your cravings too. Not only that – they can potentially curb your other addictions.
There’s a lot of downstream implications of these type of weight loss drugs being widely disseminated to society, both good and bad. But what I find personally interesting is the acceleration of the future and how unevenly distributed it is. In many ways, the way in which we’re living is completely inconceivable to someone a hundred years ago – the concept of a digital nomad, for one – someone who can derive value and make a living independent from their location, solely due to the internet is pretty crazy. Magic weight loss drugs is also pretty crazy. Though to be fair, mass obesity would be equally crazy to people 100 years ago, probably. Computing technology is another thing that is absolutely incomprehensible from 100 years ago, not even getting the proliferations of smartphones and the extent which we’ve all become globally interconnected. Of course, I would be remiss to leave out the current darling of the technological age – AI. If we dropped this technology back a century, people would think we had unlocked some form of demon summoning – communicating with being through the aether. It’s actually insane to think about how revolutionary this technology would be even dropping it 20 years in the past.
With each new revolutionary technology being dropped in society’s lap, we’re increasingly facing these great filters that are separating us into various underclasses vs those who derive a great boon from these technologies. Living a modern life requires one to become increasingly wary and considerate of how we incorporate technology in our lives, instead of passively letting it run roughshod over us.