The Beautiful Ones

Have you heard of the beautiful ones? It is a concept from a fascinating experiment from the 1960s and 70s. This is one of the most unsettling studies in the history of behavioural science, and it wasn’t even conducted on humans. It was conducted on mice. But the reason it lingers, and the reason it still gets discussed fifty years later, is that it describes a pattern of behaviour so recognisable in modern life that you’d almost think the researcher had access to TikTok.

In 1968, an American ethologist named John B. Calhoun built a paradise for mice at the National Institute of Mental Health. Unlimited food. Unlimited water. No predators, no disease, comfortable temperature, and abundant nesting material. Everything a mouse could want. He then introduced four breeding pairs and watched what happened as the population grew. What he observed was a slow-motion civilisational collapse that ended in total extinction, despite every physical need being met the entire time.

The most haunting detail wasn’t the violence or the social breakdown, though those were disturbing enough. It was a specific group of mice that emerged during the decline: males who had withdrawn completely from social life, who didn’t fight, didn’t mate, didn’t parent, didn’t establish territory, didn’t do anything except eat, sleep, and obsessively groom themselves. Calhoun called them the beautiful ones.

I think about the beautiful ones a lot, because I see echoes of them everywhere in modern health and fitness, and self-improvement culture. There are limitations to Calhoun’s work, and this is definitely not a precise scientific parallel; we are not mice after all. But this is a good allegory for something that’s happening right now: the rise of obsessive self-optimisation as a substitute for actually engaging with life.

This article is about that pattern. It’s about Calhoun’s experiment and what it actually showed, about the modern phenomena of looksmaxxing and health-maxxing and the relentless quantification of the self, about declining birth rates and rising loneliness, and about a question that the self-improvement industry almost never asks: what is all of this actually for?

TL;DR

In 1968, researcher John B. Calhoun built a paradise for mice: unlimited food, no predators, no disease. The population collapsed into extinction anyway. The most striking group were “the beautiful ones,” mice who withdrew from all social behaviour and spent their time eating, sleeping, and obsessively grooming themselves. They looked perfect. They were functionally dead. 

Modern self-optimisation and beauty culture, from looksmaxxing to biohacking to five-hour daily health and beauty routines, mirrors this pattern in uncomfortable ways. 

The internet creates the feeling of an overcrowded world where all the good roles are taken, even though fertility rates are collapsing and loneliness is at epidemic levels. 

The result is a growing retreat into individual self-improvement at the expense of relationships, community, and generativity. Health and fitness practices are supposed to enhance your life, not become your life. 

The question you must ask is, “What is all of this optimisation actually for?” If the answer doesn’t involve other people, and engagement with the world, you might be building a cage, not a foundation.

Universe 25 and the Architecture of Paradise

To understand why the beautiful ones matter, you need to understand the experiment that produced them.

Calhoun had been studying rodent populations since the late 1940s, working against the backdrop of intense post-war anxiety about overpopulation. This was the era that produced Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling The Population Bomb and films like Soylent Green that imagined a world suffocating under the weight of its own numbers. Calhoun’s approach was empirical: he built enclosed environments for rodents where every physical need was met, introduced breeding pairs, and documented what unfolded as populations grew.

He ran this experiment twenty-five times. The results were remarkably consistent, and the twenty-fifth iteration became the one that entered public consciousness.

Universe 25 was a metal enclosure roughly 101 inches square, with walls 54 inches high. The lower portion of the walls was structured with mesh tunnels and nesting boxes to maximise usable space. Each wall held sixteen vertical mesh tunnels, and from each tunnel branched four horizontal corridors leading to four nesting boxes. That’s 256 nesting boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. The theoretical maximum capacity was somewhere around 3,840 mice. Food and water were unlimited. Nesting material was plentiful. It was, by any measure, a rodent paradise.

Four breeding pairs of genetically superior, disease-free mice were introduced on day one. Calhoun and his team then settled into a loft above the enclosure and watched, for hours every day, for more than three years. Each mouse was marked with a unique colour combination so individual behaviour could be tracked.

What happened unfolded in four distinct phases.

The first phase was colonisation. For the first 104 days, the mice familiarised themselves with their new world, exploring, establishing territory, and settling in. Then came the golden age. The mice began breeding enthusiastically, the population doubling every fifty-five days. Territory was established, social hierarchies formed, and pups were born and raised successfully. This was mouse society functioning as it should: complex, competitive, but fundamentally coherent.

The third phase was stagnation, and this is where things began to unravel. Around day 315, with more than six hundred mice in the enclosure, population growth slowed dramatically. The enclosure wasn’t physically full, not even close to its theoretical maximum. But something had shifted. Young mice born into an increasingly crowded world found themselves entering a society where all the meaningful social roles appeared to be taken. Males faced mounting competition for territory and mates, and many simply gave up. The stress wasn’t about resources, which remained abundant. It was about status and social role. There weren’t enough meaningful positions in mouse society for the number of mice trying to fill them.

What followed was a cascade of social collapse. Males who couldn’t secure territory congregated in large, listless groups in the centre of the enclosure, their passive withdrawal occasionally interrupted by eruptions of directionless violence. Nursing females, left unprotected by males who had abandoned their territorial roles, became aggressive toward their own young. Infant mortality in some compartments exceeded ninety per cent. Pups that survived were raised in increasingly dysfunctional conditions, never properly socialised, and never learning the complex behaviours that constitute the full repertoire of what it means to be a functioning mouse: courtship, parenting, territorial negotiation, and social bonding.

And then the beautiful ones appeared. 

These mice had disengaged entirely from mouse society. They didn’t fight for territory. They didn’t court females. They didn’t mate. They didn’t parent. They showed no interest in any complex social behaviour whatsoever. They retreated to protected, uncrowded spaces and spent their time doing three things: eating, sleeping, and grooming themselves. Their fur was immaculate, pristine, unblemished by the scars and bite marks that decorated every other mouse in the enclosure, because they never fought, never competed, never engaged.

They were the most physically perfect specimens in Universe 25. And they were, in every functional sense, broken.

The fourth phase was death. By day 560, the population peaked at approximately 2,200 mice, well below the enclosure’s capacity, and then began to decline. Birth rates collapsed. The few females who still conceived often abandoned their litters. Infant mortality approached one hundred per cent. The last conception in Universe 25 occurred around day 920. The final mouse died on the 23rd of May, 1973, four years and ten months after colonisation.

When the Spirit Dies Before the Body

Calhoun was given to dramatic language. His most famous paper was titled “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population,” and it opened with quotations from the Book of Revelation. But beneath the theatricality was an insight worth taking seriously.

He argued that Universe 25’s population didn’t die once. It died twice.

The first death was what he called the death of the spirit. This was the point at which mice ceased to engage in the complex behaviours that defined their species: mating, parenting, territory defence, social bonding, and hierarchical negotiation. When all they did was eat, sleep, and groom, they had stopped being mice in any meaningful sense. Their bodies were alive, but the animating purpose that gave those bodies direction had gone.

The second death was physical, the literal end of the organism. And Calhoun’s argument was that the second death was merely a formality. Once the first death had occurred, once the spirit had gone out of a population, extinction was inevitable. It was just a matter of running down the clock.

What makes this distinction particularly haunting is what happened when Calhoun tried to reverse it. Before Universe 25 collapsed entirely, he removed some of the beautiful ones and placed them in fresh, empty environments: conditions identical to those that had greeted the original four breeding pairs. Abundant space, unlimited resources, no overcrowding, no competition. Every reason, in theory, to start over.

They didn’t. The relocated mice showed no signs of changed behaviour. They continued to eat, sleep, and groom. They didn’t mate. They didn’t socialise. They didn’t establish territory. The social competences they had never developed, or had lost, didn’t reappear when the external conditions improved. The damage was internal and, as far as anyone could tell, irreversible. The capacity for complexity, once gone, didn’t come back.

Calhoun drew a direct parallel with human beings, arguing that mice and people both thrive on a sense of identity and purpose within a larger social world. Tension, stress, competition, the need to navigate complexity: these aren’t obstacles to a good life. They’re ingredients of one. When every need is provided for and no challenge exists, when comfort is total and effort is optional, the act of living gets stripped to its barest physiological essentials. And something essential quietly dies.

He put it this way: when all sense of necessity is stripped from an individual’s life, life ceases to have purpose. The individual dies in spirit.

The Animal Without a Telos

The ancient Greeks had a concept called telos, meaning purpose or ultimate aim. For Aristotle, everything in nature had a telos. The telos of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a mouse, you might say, is to do mouse things: mate, parent, defend territory, navigate social hierarchies, and propagate the species. When Calhoun’s mice stopped doing these things, they had failed to fulfil their telos. The first death was the death of purpose, and for a mouse, purpose is built in. It’s encoded in instinct and driven by biology. A mouse doesn’t have to decide what its life is for. It just has to be allowed to live it.

Humans are different, and this difference is both our greatest advantage and our most dangerous vulnerability. We don’t have a built-in telos. There is no biological program that tells you what your life is for, no instinctive script that, if followed faithfully, guarantees a meaningful existence. Sartre captured this with his famous declaration that existence precedes essence: you exist first, and then you must create your own meaning through the choices you make. You are not an acorn with a predetermined destination. You are something far stranger: a creature that must choose what to become, with no instruction manual and no guarantee that you’ll choose well.

This is an extraordinary situation. Every other animal on earth has its purpose more or less hardwired. Humans have to figure it out for themselves, which means they can get it spectacularly wrong. A mouse in a healthy environment will naturally do mouse things, because those behaviours are instinctive. A human in a comfortable environment can just as easily drift into purposelessness, because nothing in our biology compels us toward meaning. We have to actively construct it.

For most of human history, this problem was largely solved by external structures. Religion provided a telos: you were here to serve God, to follow the commandments, to earn salvation, to participate in a cosmic story larger than yourself. Whether you believed literally or not, the framework gave life a direction and a set of obligations that extended beyond the self. Community provided roles: you were a parent, a neighbour, a tradesperson, a member of a parish or a village, embedded in a web of mutual obligation that gave your daily actions significance. You didn’t have to decide what your life was for, because the structures around you answered that question before you thought to ask it.

Nietzsche saw, perhaps more clearly than anyone, what would happen when those structures weakened. His declaration that “God is dead” wasn’t a celebration. It was a diagnosis and a warning. He understood that the decline of religious and communal frameworks wouldn’t simply free people to create their own meaning. It would leave many of them stranded, without the organising function that had given human life direction for millennia. The God-shaped hole, as Pascal had described it centuries earlier, wouldn’t simply close over. It would ache. And people would try to fill it with all sorts of inadequate substitutes.

Aldous Huxley also saw this coming with remarkable clarity. His Brave New World, published in 1932, imagined a society where suffering had been eliminated, where pleasure was instantly available, where every physical need was met, and where people were kept docile not through force but through comfort, entertainment, and the drug soma. Huxley understood something that Orwell, with his vision of totalitarianism through pain, perhaps didn’t: that the greater threat to human freedom wasn’t the boot on the neck but the cushion under the backside. You don’t need to oppress people if you can make them comfortable enough that they never bother to ask what their lives are for. The citizens of Huxley’s World State weren’t unhappy. They were perfectly content, perfectly entertained, perfectly medicated, and perfectly empty. They had, in Calhoun’s terms, undergone the first death without noticing. The parallels to a culture saturated with on-demand dopamine, algorithmic entertainment, and the endless minor pleasures of consumer self-improvement are not subtle.

Nietzsche’s proposed solution was the Übermensch, the individual who would create their own values, impose their own meaning on a meaningless universe, and transcend the need for external frameworks entirely through sheer force of will and self-overcoming. It’s an electrifying vision. It’s also, I think, incomplete. Because Nietzsche’s Übermensch is, at heart, a solitary figure. The meaning he creates is his own. The values he forges are personal. The self-overcoming is an individual project. And this is precisely the trap that modern self-optimisation culture has fallen into: the belief that meaning can be manufactured through individual excellence alone, without reference to community, relationship, or contribution to something beyond the self.

The looksmaxxer perfecting his jawline, the biohacker optimising his biomarkers, the gym devotee sculpting a physique that nobody touches or that isn’t functional: each of them is, in their own way, attempting a Nietzschean project. Creating value through self-overcoming. Forging meaning through individual mastery. And each of them is discovering, or will discover, what Nietzsche perhaps couldn’t fully see: that meaning created in isolation tends to collapse under its own weight. It doesn’t connect to anything larger. It’s a bridge that starts from one bank and reaches toward nothing on the other side.

Aristotle was closer to the truth. For Aristotle, eudaimonia (human flourishing) was inherently communal. The good life was not something you could achieve alone in your room, no matter how disciplined your routine. It required participation in the polis, in community, in the shared project of living well together. It required relationships of mutual care, contribution to the common good, the exercise of virtues that only make sense in a social context: justice, generosity, friendship, and courage on behalf of others. You develop your capacities in order to contribute, and the contribution itself is a large part of what makes life worth living.

This is what makes humans more vulnerable to the beautiful ones pattern than mice are, in a sense. A mouse in a functioning environment will naturally engage in complex social behaviour, because its telos is instinctive. A human in a comfortable environment, stripped of the external structures that once provided direction, with a God-shaped hole where communal meaning used to be, and armed with an internet that tells them the answer is more self-improvement, can drift into purposelessness without ever realising it. The drift doesn’t feel like drift. It feels like progress. It feels like discipline. It feels like optimisation. And that’s exactly why it’s so dangerous.

Calhoun’s mice underwent the first death because their environment made complex behaviour unnecessary. Humans are undergoing something more subtle: an environment that makes complex social behaviour feel unnecessary, whilst simultaneously providing an endless supply of individual self-improvement projects that create the illusion of purpose without the substance of it. The beautiful ones groomed themselves because there was nothing else to do. Modern beautiful ones optimise because optimisation has been sold to them as the meaning itself, rather than as a tool in service of meaning that can only be found elsewhere: in relationships, in contribution, in the demanding, unglamorous, irreplaceable work of building something with and for other people.

Limitations 

Now, it is important to keep in mind that Calhoun’s experiments have never been successfully replicated by other researchers. His rodent colonies didn’t behave the way wild colonies do, which raises questions about how much of what he observed was a product of the artificial environment rather than a universal law. He rarely published in mainstream peer-reviewed journals, reportedly saying that his concerns were too pressing to wait for peer review, which is not the mark of rigorous science. And there are legitimate hygiene concerns: Universe 25 was reportedly cleaned only every six to eight weeks, meaning that disease and parasitism may have contributed to the collapse Calhoun attributed to overcrowding alone.

Humans are not mice. Follow-up studies by psychologist Jonathan Freedman, using human subjects in crowded conditions, found that density didn’t necessarily produce stress, aggression, or social breakdown. We have language, culture, abstract reasoning, institutional knowledge, and the ability to consciously restructure our environments in ways that mice cannot.

There’s also a more nuanced reading of what happened in Universe 25. Some researchers have argued that the core problem wasn’t overcrowding per se, but the enclosure’s design, which allowed aggressive mice to monopolise prime territory and access points, creating artificial inequality. The mice weren’t running out of space, the enclosure was never close to physical capacity, but the social architecture of the space meant that meaningful roles were distributed in a way that shut most mice out. Universe 25 didn’t have a population problem, it had a distribution problem.

These qualifications do matter. But even with all of them, the experiment remains useful as a metaphor. It is not a prediction about human civilisation, or a scientific proof that we’re doomed, but it is a good lens for examining certain patterns in modern life that are difficult to explain away. Because when you describe the beautiful ones, creatures who withdrew from social complexity, abandoned reproduction, lost interest in courtship and bonding, and spent their time in obsessive self-maintenance while their society crumbled around them, it’s hard not to see something familiar in the modern world.

Why the Internet Makes the World Feel Like Universe 25

We live in an era of collapsing population growth, while also feeling like we live in an overcrowded world. The fertility numbers are staggering and accelerating. Globally, the total fertility rate has fallen from 4.9 children per woman in the 1950s to approximately 2.3 in 2023, hovering right at the replacement level of 2.1 needed to sustain a population. But that global average masks enormous variation. Europe’s fertility rate sits at 1.4. The United States is at 1.6. South Korea has plummeted to 0.7 children per woman, the lowest national rate ever recorded anywhere. China is at 1.0. A Lancet study published in 2024 projected that by 2050, more than three-quarters of all countries will be below replacement fertility, and by 2100, that figure rises to 97 per cent.

We are not in the grip of a population explosion. We are in the early stages of what may be the most significant demographic contraction in human history.

And yet. Log onto social media and you’re immediately plunged into conditions that resemble Universe 25 on day 400. Constant social density. Relentless status competition. The algorithmically amplified feeling that every niche is filled, every territory claimed, every role occupied by someone more attractive, more successful, more optimised than you. Your feed is an infinite scroll of people who appear to have already won, in fitness, in career, in relationships, in aesthetics, and the implicit message is that there’s no space left for you.

This is the psychological architecture of the behavioural sink, recreated digitally. The World Health Organisation reported in 2025 that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, linked to an estimated 871,000 deaths annually. The global prevalence of social isolation increased by over 13 per cent between 2009 and 2024, with the entire increase concentrated after 2019. In the United States, over half of adults report feeling isolated, left out, or lacking companionship. And the loneliest demographic isn’t the elderly. It’s young adults aged 18 to 34, the generation most immersed in digital social environments.

We are surrounded by more people, more of the time, through more channels, than any humans in history. And we have never felt more alone.

The mice in Universe 25 weren’t short of neighbours either. They were drowning in them. The problem was never the number of bodies in the space, it was the collapse of meaningful social roles and the erosion of the competences needed to fill them.

The internet doesn’t cause overcrowding in the physical sense. But it creates the perception of a saturated social landscape, one where all the good positions are taken, all the attractive mates spoken for, and your only viable strategy is to withdraw into a protected corner and focus on the one thing you can control: yourself. Your appearance. Your body. Your metrics. Your optimisation.

Which brings us to the modern beautiful ones.

Looksmaxxing, Health-Maxxing, and the Retreat Into Self

The term “looksmaxxing,” the practice of maximising one’s physical attractiveness through any available means, supposedly originated in the online incel community in the early 2010s. It was, initially, a marginal phenomenon. It is no longer marginal.

By 2023, looksmaxxing had gone mainstream on TikTok, with creators accumulating billions of views promoting everything from skincare routines and jaw-strengthening exercises to more extreme interventions: bone restructuring surgery, limb-lengthening procedures, anabolic steroids, and deliberate self-starvation. A 2025 survey of active looksmaxxing forum members found that over 58 per cent were under eighteen years old, nearly half were considering cosmetic surgery, and 69 per cent believed surgical procedures were a legitimate part of self-improvement. The men’s grooming market in the United States topped $7.1 billion in 2025, and the global market is projected to exceed $85 billion by 2032.

But looksmaxxing is just the most visible expression of the retreat inward. The retreat into self-optimisation as a substitute for the messy, demanding, unpredictable work of engaging with other people and the world.

And before anyone reads this as a critique aimed exclusively at young men on looksmaxxing forums, it’s worth pointing out that the same pattern has been normalised across the entire culture for much longer. The average woman with a twelve-step skincare routine, a carefully curated supplement shelf, lip filler, “preventative botox”, and a morning routine that takes ninety minutes before she’s spoken to another human being, is closer to Patrick Bateman than she’d probably like to believe. 

That famous morning routine scene in American Psycho was supposed to be satire: a portrait of narcissistic emptiness disguised as discipline, of a man so hollowed out that self-maintenance had become his entire interior life. It’s become, without much apparent irony, an aspirational template. We now have 11-year-old girls following “influencers”, feeling like they need to have the latest make up and skincare routines. The underlying pattern is the same. And safe to say, when grooming rituals become the most structured, most invested-in part of your day, something has gone wrong, regardless of your gender.

Consider the parallel in health and fitness culture, which I obviously know more about. Supplement stacks, cold plunges, red light therapy, peptide protocols, sauna exposure, sleep optimisation, continuous glucose monitors, VO2 max testing, heart rate variability tracking, and on and on. The sheer volume of self-monitoring technology and biohacking content available in 2026 is extraordinary. Much of it is genuinely useful. Some of it is evidence-based. But there’s a version of it, and it’s certainly not a rare version, that has crossed the line from tool into identity. From means into end. From building capacity for life into becoming the meaning of life itself.

I say to my clients regularly that all of this health and fitness stuff is supposed to enhance your life, not become your life. Unfortunately, this is not how many people engage with this stuff. It becomes all-consuming. 

The gym is a wonderful place. Training is one of the most powerful tools we have for building physical and psychological resilience. Good nutrition is foundational. Sleep hygiene matters. I teach all of this for a living, and I believe in it deeply. But when your training program is four hours of your day, when your social life has been subordinated to your meal prep schedule, when you’ve optimised your way out of spontaneity, community, intimacy, and adventure, you haven’t built a foundation for flourishing. You’ve built a very comfortable cage.

And here is where the parallel to Calhoun’s beautiful ones becomes hard to dismiss. Those mice didn’t look sick. They looked perfect. Their fur was immaculate, unblemished, gleaming, because they never fought, never mated, never engaged in anything that might leave a mark. They were the most physically flawless specimens in the entire colony. And they were completely disconnected from everything that makes a mouse a mouse.

I see this concretely, repeatedly, in coaching conversations. Clients in their late thirties and early forties who have spent fifteen or twenty years perfecting their bodies, their careers, their lifestyle design, and who now, with a dawning sense of urgency, realise they want a family, a community, meaningful relationships. But they’ve spent so long in the mode of individual optimisation that the relational capacities required for partnership and parenthood have atrophied. They don’t know how to compromise. They’ve never subordinated their schedule to someone else’s needs. They’ve been so busy becoming beautiful ones that they forgot what all that self-improvement was supposed to be for.

Looksmaxxing culture has been described as “essentially an erosion of the sense of self.” The goal is to become maximally attractive. The irony is that the process often makes genuine human connection less likely rather than more, because the obsessive self-focus required actively erodes the relational capacities that intimacy demands.

The Difference Between Building Capacity and Building a Cage

Now, this is not an argument against self-improvement. It’s an argument about the direction of self-improvement, about what it’s ultimately in service of.

There’s a meaningful distinction between health practices that expand your capacity for engagement with life and health practices that become substitutes for engagement with life. The same activity, whether that’s training, nutrition, or sleep optimisation, can serve either function depending on how it fits into the larger architecture of your life.

When you train because it makes you more resilient for the demands of your work/hobbies, more energetic for your relationships, more capable of the physical adventures that make life vivid, you’re building capacity. You’re investing in the instrument through which you engage with the world. But when you train because the gym is the only place you feel competent, when your nutrition protocols have become so rigid that you can’t share a meal with friends without anxiety, when your optimisation routine has crowded out the very activities it was supposed to support, you’ve crossed a line. You’re no longer building capacity for life. You’re building an increasingly elaborate alternative to it.

Sartre’s concept of bad faith is a useful lens here. Bad faith is the pretence that you are constrained when you are actually choosing not to act. The retreat into self-optimisation as a way of avoiding the uncomfortable, unpredictable work of building relationships and contributing to community is a choice, even when it feels like discipline or required (“I have to work on myself before I am worthy of love or for people to want to work with me”). It’s a choice dressed up in the language of self-improvement, which makes it harder to recognise as what it often is: a sophisticated form of withdrawal.

Erikson’s developmental framework makes a similar point from the angle of the life cycle. His seventh stage, generativity versus stagnation, describes the choice between investing your energy in something beyond yourself and turning it inward into self-absorption. Generativity isn’t just about having children, though that’s the most visible form. It includes mentoring, creating, building institutions, contributing to community, and producing work that serves others. It’s the orientation of energy outward. Research consistently shows that generative adults score higher on conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness, while showing lower rates of depression and stronger cognitive function decades later. Stagnation, by contrast, is associated with isolation and the particular emptiness of a life that was technically successful but never gave anything.

I’m not saying everyone who takes their health seriously is a modern beautiful one. I’m saying the line between healthy habits as a foundation and health habits as a fortress is thinner than most people realise, and the people who’ve crossed it are often the last to notice.

What Are We Optimising For?

This brings us to the question that the self-optimisation culture rarely asks: what is all of this in service of?

The declining fertility rates across the developed world are not, on their own, evidence of civilisational collapse. Some of the decline reflects genuine and welcome progress: women’s education, reproductive autonomy, economic independence, and the ability to choose when and whether to have children. These are good things, and any honest analysis has to acknowledge that.

But there’s a component of the decline that doesn’t fit neatly into the narrative of empowerment. When young men and women report declining interest in relationships and sex, when surveys show growing numbers of people in their twenties and thirties who want children but keep deferring indefinitely, and when the language around family-building has shifted from “when” to “if” to a vague “maybe someday,” we have to ask whether some of this represents not a free choice but a retreat. A withdrawal from the demanding complexity of interdependent human life, dressed up as self-determination.

This isn’t a moralising argument about whether people should have children. It’s a question about generativity and the orientation of your energy toward something beyond yourself. Calhoun saw this dynamic clearly. He argued that the most complex behaviours, courtship, parenting, and social bonding, were the first to disappear when conditions turned hostile or, paradoxically, too comfortable. What remained was only the simplest functioning: eating, sleeping, and self-maintenance. The beautiful ones hadn’t just lost interest in reproduction. They’d lost the capacity for all complex social behaviour. Reproduction was simply the most visible symptom of a much deeper withdrawal.

When I look at modern self-optimisation culture, I don’t see reproduction declining as an isolated phenomenon. I see it as part of a broader retreat from complexity. From the demanding, unglamorous work of maintaining friendships, investing in community, navigating the compromises of partnership, and building something that requires you to be vulnerable, imperfect, and dependent on other people.

The Digital Pen and the Illusion of Overcrowding

In Universe 25, the behavioural sink was triggered by overcrowding. Too many mice competing for a limited number of meaningful social roles. But the enclosure was never physically full. At its peak of 2,200, Universe 25 was at roughly 57 per cent of theoretical capacity. The overcrowding wasn’t about physical space. It was about social space and feeling a sense of belonging. About the perception that all viable roles were occupied, all territories claimed, all pathways to meaningful participation blocked.

The internet recreates this with extraordinary efficiency. Social media algorithms are designed to surface the most successful, most attractive, most enviable examples of whatever you’re interested in (while also showing you all the other pathways that you might also be interested in). If you’re into fitness, your feed fills with elite physiques. If you’re into entrepreneurship, you see twenty-three-year-old millionaires. The effect isn’t to inspire, though that’s how it’s marketed, but to create the pervasive impression that the good niches are taken. That competition for meaningful roles is so intense that your only viable strategy is withdrawal into self-improvement.

But that impression is false. The enclosure is emptying out. The world doesn’t need fewer people engaging, connecting, and contributing. It needs more. The loneliness statistics alone tell you that: one in six people worldwide affected, young adults the hardest hit, and social isolation increasing year on year. This isn’t a world where all the roles are taken. It’s a world starving for meaningful and vigorous engagement with it. The algorithm just can’t show you that, because this doesn’t generate clicks and attention the way comparison does. If what they showed you things that made you close the app and engage with the world, that wouldn’t be good for business, would it?

This is the cruel trick of the digital age: it creates the subjective experience of the behavioural sink whilst the objective conditions move in the opposite direction. We need more people stepping into roles, building relationships, contributing to communities and aspiring to make a meaningful contribution to the world. And instead, we have more people retreating into the curated solitude of individual optimisation, mistaking grooming for living.

What Calhoun Got Right, and What Matters Now

So where does this leave us? I like to believe it does not leave us in the grip of inevitable civilisational collapse. That kind of fatalism is as seductive as it is unhelpful, and it falls apart for the simple reason that humans have capacities mice don’t. We can recognise patterns. We can discuss them. We can consciously choose differently. The fact that you’re reading this article, engaging with these ideas, and reflecting on your own behaviour, is itself an exercise of the kind of complex cognition Calhoun’s mice never had access to.

But Calhoun got something profoundly right about the relationship between comfort, complexity, and purpose. His core insight was that when the environment removes all necessity for complex social behaviour, that behaviour atrophies. And once atrophied, it is extraordinarily difficult to restore.

This isn’t a law of physics. It’s a tendency. A gradient. A direction of drift. And we can see it drifting right now, across the world. This is not happening in a dramatic, apocalyptic fashion, but in the slow, incremental withdrawal of millions of people from the demanding richness of social life into the comfortable poverty of individual optimisation.

Calhoun himself was more optimistic than his reputation suggests. His later work focused on designing environments that encouraged creativity, innovation, and social engagement even under high density. He believed that humans could construct what he called “conceptual space”: networks of ideas, technologies, and social innovations that expand available roles far beyond what any physical environment could contain. He thought creativity was the antidote to the behavioural sink.

I’d like to believe he was right. But I’d add something he didn’t emphasise enough: creativity and social engagement don’t happen by default. They require effort. They require the willingness to tolerate discomfort, to enter situations where you’re not in control, to risk failure and rejection and the small indignities of being a social creature in a complex world. They require the opposite of what the beautiful ones chose.

Building a Life Worth Being Healthy For

If you’ve read this far and felt even a flicker of recognition, here’s what you can do. I will walk you through some ideas from the health side of things, because naturally, given the nature of my work, I know this better. But you can actually tackle this in a broader sense, using the same framework to examine your whole life. 

Start with the telos question. What is your health for? What becomes possible when you’re fitter, stronger, and more resilient? If you can’t answer that in terms of specific relationships, contributions, experiences, or engagements that matter to you, if the best you can offer is “to be healthier” or “to optimise my performance,” then you’re optimising a vehicle without a destination.

The answer doesn’t have to be grand. I want the stamina to play with my kids without getting winded. I want the energy to build this business I believe in. I want the physical confidence to travel adventurously in my sixties. I want to be capable and reliable for the people who depend on me. These are specific, outward-facing reasons for building health. They connect your physical practice to the larger project of living well.

Audit your time honestly. If you spend two hours a day training, one hour on meal prep, forty-five minutes on health content consumption, an hour on “beautification” routines, and thirty minutes on supplement and recovery protocols, that’s over five hours daily directed at self-optimisation. Now ask: how much time are you investing in relationships? In community? In pursuits that involve other people and that you can’t control the outcome of? If the ratio is dramatically skewed toward self-maintenance and away from social engagement, that’s not discipline. That’s withdrawal. 

(Note: there may be times when you do have to skew your attention inwards to really work on something, or prepare for something, but this comes back to the first question, and ultimately understanding your motivations better. If the end goal is vague, and you just have a sense that you have to do this stuff to be worth something or accomplish anything in the world, then you have to examine things more deeply.)

Do something that requires other people. Join a sports team, not just a gym. Take a class where you’ll be a beginner in front of others. Volunteer for something where your contribution isn’t about you. Start a regular gathering, a dinner club, a walking group, anything that builds the habit of showing up for people. The key is that it has to involve genuine interdependence: you need them, they need you, and the thing you’re building together is more than any individual could create alone. This is the muscle that atrophies in the self-optimisation bubble. Like any muscle, it responds to use.

Embrace mess. The beautiful ones were immaculate because they never engaged in anything that might leave a mark. Real life, real relationships, real contribution, real growth, is inherently messy. Your meals will be disrupted. Your training will be interrupted. Your routines will be upended by the unpredictable demands of people who need you. This is not a failure of optimisation. This is what living actually looks like. A life without marks is a life without engagement.

Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech he gave in Paris in 1910, argued that credit belongs not to the critic, not to the one who points out how the strong stumble, but to the person who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives and falls short and strives again. What matters, he said, is not the pristine spectator but the one who spends themselves in a worthy cause. And rallied against those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

He could have been describing the beautiful ones. No dust. No sweat. No blood. No scars. No evidence of having ever engaged with anything that might leave a mark. The beautiful ones knew neither victory nor defeat because they never entered the arena. They watched from a protected corner, immaculate and empty, whilst the world they refused to participate in collapsed around them. 

Reframe discipline. True discipline isn’t the ability to maintain a rigid routine in the absence of competing demands. Anyone can do that. True discipline is the ability to hold your health practices lightly enough that they serve your life rather than governing it: to miss a session when a friend needs you, to share a meal that doesn’t fit your macros because the company is worth it, to train hard and show up fully for everything else. The Stoics understood this. Discipline isn’t rigidity. It’s the flexible strength to do what matters most in any given moment, including the moments when what matters most isn’t yourself.

Resist the algorithm’s framing. When you feel that the social landscape is saturated, that all the good partners are taken, all the good roles filled, recognise that feeling for what it is: the digital equivalent of the overcrowded pen. It’s a perceptual distortion, not an accurate map of reality. The world is not Universe 25. There is more space, more opportunity for meaningful connection and contribution, more need for people willing to engage, than your feed will ever show you. The algorithm profits from your sense of inadequacy. Your life profits from your willingness to step outside it.

Reconnect health to contribution. Instead of asking “how can I optimise my health?”, try asking “how can my health enable me to give more?” What would you do with more energy? Who would you serve with more strength? What would you build if you weren’t spending all your building energy on yourself? Health as a foundation for contribution is health with direction. Health as an end in itself is the beautiful ones, grooming endlessly in their protected corner.

How to Avoid the First Death and Becoming One of The Beautiful Ones

Calhoun’s concept of the first death, the death of the spirit, is perhaps the most important idea in this article, because it names something happening all around us that we’ve mostly failed to recognise.

The first death doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t feel like dying. It feels like optimising. Like taking control. Like being disciplined and focused and deliberate. It feels quite good, at least for a while, because it removes the uncertainty and vulnerability that social engagement inevitably involves. No one judges your macro split. No one rejects your supplement stack. Your training program never disappoints you, never lets you down, never asks you to compromise. It is a perfectly controlled environment. And that is precisely the problem.

The beautiful ones weren’t in pain. They weren’t suffering, at least not in any way they could have articulated. They were comfortable. Safe. Well-groomed. They had simply, quietly, and imperceptibly stopped being mice: stopped engaging in the full range of complex behaviours that gave their existence meaning and their species a future.

Heidegger distinguished between two modes of existence. There’s what he called thrownness: the fact that you find yourself in a particular set of circumstances you didn’t choose, a body, a culture, an era, a set of constraints. And there’s projection: the way you orient yourself toward future possibilities, toward what you might become and what you might build. We are all thrown. We didn’t choose our era or our starting conditions. But we all project. We aim ourselves at something. And the question is whether you’re projecting toward a life of engagement, complexity, and contribution, or retreating into the comfortable maintenance of a self that has nowhere to go.

The beautiful ones stopped projecting. They were thrown into Universe 25, and they responded by withdrawing into the smallest, safest version of existence available to them.

You have something they didn’t: the ability to see the pattern. The ability to recognise it in yourself, in your habits, and in the drift of your priorities. The ability to name the first death and choose against it. Not as some dramatic awakening, but daily, in the small decisions about where you direct your energy, your attention, and your time.

Sartre wrote that we are condemned to be free. The implication is actually the most hopeful thing in all of philosophy: you cannot not choose. Even withdrawal is an action. Even the person with the perfect physique and the empty life is, every single day, choosing this. And anything that is chosen can be chosen differently.

The mice couldn’t see the walls of Universe 25. We can. The question is whether, having seen them, we choose to step outside the pen.

Your health, your strength, your discipline: these are magnificent tools. They are the means by which you equip yourself for a life of meaning, contribution, adventure, and connection. They are the foundation on which flourishing is built. But the foundation is not the building. The instrument is not the music.

Thoreau wrote that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and that a stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. He could have been describing the beautiful ones. He could have been describing a culture that has turned self-optimisation into its primary amusement, mistaking the game of self-improvement for the work of living. The desperation is quiet because it doesn’t look like desperation. It looks like discipline. It looks like progress. It looks like a perfectly curated life. But underneath, the same question goes unasked and unanswered: what is all of this actually for?

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of those who die with all their music in them. That is the tragedy of the beautiful ones, and it’s the tragedy that awaits anyone who spends a lifetime building capacity they never direct outward. You can have the healthiest body, the most optimised biomarkers, the most disciplined routine, and still die with all your music in you, because you never stepped into the mess and uncertainty of actually playing it. For other people. With other people. In service of something that mattered more than your own reflection.

Build yourself up. And then go do something with it. Something difficult, something communal, something that requires you to be imperfect and dependent and vulnerable. Something that involves other people, their needs, their chaos, their beautiful, infuriating unpredictability.

Because the alternative, eating, sleeping, and grooming in a corner while the world empties out around you, has already been tried. In a barn in Maryland, in a metal box, by a colony of mice who had everything they needed to survive and nothing left to live for. They were the most beautiful specimens in the enclosure. But their spirits were the first to die.

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