Derek Thompson on Abundance's political traction, self-optimization culture, and the CEO of the self

Abundance politics, the CEO of the self

Derek Thompson sees Abundance as a political idea with real but uneven traction. The term has achieved what he calls "mimetic success" — people across the political spectrum understand what an "abundance liberal" means — but the movement still lacks an elected champion that everyone in the coalition would name unprompted. Gavin Newsom signed a law he literally named after the book, making it easier to build housing near transit and streamline clean energy permitting. Kathy Hochul is pushing similar ideas in New York, if quietly. Thompson says he's spoken directly with Zohran Mamdani and knows people on his housing council, and has met with the mayor of Seattle's circle too. His read: abundance is winning arguments behind closed doors even when the elected faces carry democratic socialist branding. The old Cuomo line — campaign in poetry, govern in prose — may be doing real work here.

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“There's ways in which sometimes these technologies, this sort of biometric dashboard we can build for ourselves, replaces the hard question of how should I live with the easy question of what should I optimize that is observable... biometric capitalism creates the need for individuals to essentially serve as the chief executive of the self.”

The CEO of the self

The more original part of the conversation is Thompson's analysis of America's self-optimization moment. Gym membership is at an all-time high. Time spent working out is at its highest recorded level. TRT is surging, preventative Botox is skewing younger, and GLP-1 drugs are set to expand further when Eli Lilly's third-generation retrutide hits the market. Thompson's argument is that these trends aren't just about health — they're restructuring how people relate to their own bodies and time.

His framing draws on the historian Alfred Chandler, who argued that the telegraph and railroad created such a flood of information in the nineteenth century that corporations had to invent a new role — the middle manager — just to process it. Biometric data does the same thing to individuals. The Oura Ring, the VO2 max score, the HRV dashboard: they cast the wearer as the manager of a system, optimizing inputs and outputs. Thompson calls this the "CEO of the self."

The trap he identifies is specific. His Oura Ring has improved his sleep and fitness. But it only captures what's measurable. A late night with a friend registers as degraded HRV, not as something worth having. The dashboard, he argues, substitutes the easy question — what can I optimize that is observable — for the harder one: how should I live.

He borrows a distinction from philosopher C. T. Nguyen: in a board game, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. Winning without fun is something you regret. The biometric optimization game has legible goals and no mechanism for purpose.

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The anti-human edge case

Thompson is not dismissive of the health movement. Both his parents died of cancer while he was in his twenties, before they met his wife or attended his sister's wedding. He's clear that premature death is the real tragedy, not the people trying to prevent it.

But he draws a sharp distinction between this generation's individualized health obsession and earlier American health movements. Prohibition, the temperance movement, muscular Christianity in Victorian Britain — those were attempts to change the world. Optimizing your Oura score is a game played entirely for yourself.

The sharpest version of his critique is the childbirth thought experiment. New parents sleep badly, eat poorly, see friends less, and face elevated risks of depression and postpartum psychosis. A strict make-the-number-go-up philosophy would conclude that having children is catastrophic for human health. But psychologist Darby Saxby's research, which Thompson cites, finds that while new-parent brains show trauma at birth, they tend to have richer neural connections decades later. Northwestern research on "super agers" — people in their eighties and nineties with the memory of someone thirty years younger — finds that the strongest predictor of that cognitive resilience is social connection, not any biometric score.

The practical upshot: if you're going to science your way toward a theory of how to live, the dashboard on your phone is capturing a fraction of the relevant data.