The pursuit is performative and pretentious, in much the same way as body culture on Instagram. It’s about collecting achievements in an imaginary social game, and then bragging about it, while insisting that it’s not like that at all but some modern pathway to enlightenment.

To be clear, I’m not saying that people don’t genuinely achieve many of these things; they do. Many Instagram models also genuinely have spectacular bodies. It’s not about whether, but about why they are doing this, and the culture surrounding all of it.