His name is Marcus Webb. He is 36 years old. He lives in a flat in Clapham that is so clean it looks like a showroom for a lifestyle brand that doesn't actually exist. He wakes up at 4:47am every morning — not 4:45, not 4:50, but 4:47, because his sleep-tracking app determined, through an algorithm that Marcus does not fully understand but trusts absolutely, that 4:47 is the optimal time for him to wake up based on his circadian rhythm, his REM cycle data, and the position of the moon, which is apparently relevant now. He has not, in the three years since he began his optimisation journey, enjoyed a single morning. But he has, by every measurable metric available to him, had an extraordinarily productive one.
Marcus Webb is not unusual. This is the part of the story that should concern you. He is not an outlier, not a freak, not an eccentric. He is, in many respects, entirely representative of a significant and growing portion of London's professional male population: men in their thirties who have decided, with the sort of systematic determination that previous generations reserved for building empires or conquering diseases, to optimise themselves. To treat their bodies, minds, and daily routines as systems to be improved, measured, and refined. To approach the business of being alive with the same rigour and intensity that a software engineer brings to debugging code.
The London Prat spent two weeks following Marcus Webb through his daily routine, documenting every meal, every workout, every supplement, every app, every biohack, and every moment of what Marcus describes as "intentional living" and what everyone who witnessed it describes as "exhausting to watch." What we found was not merely amusing. It was, in a way that crept up on us gradually and then hit all at once, genuinely sad.
"I don't do anything I haven't measured first. If I can't measure it, I don't do it. If I can't improve it, I don't repeat it. Every minute of my day is accounted for. I have never been more productive. I have also never been less happy, but I'm working on optimising that too."
The Daily Schedule
Marcus's morning routine begins at 4:47am, as noted, and proceeds with a precision that would make a Swiss watchmaker weep with professional envy. We documented it in full, because the full documentation is where the horror lives.
| Time | Activity | Purpose (Per Marcus) |
|---|---|---|
| 4:47am | Wake. Do not move for 3 minutes. "Observe consciousness." | Mindfulness. (This is the only part of his morning that involves doing nothing, and even this has been turned into a task.) |
| 4:50am | Cold plunge. 3 minutes, 4°C. | "Mitochondrial activation." (This is not a real thing. Marcus does not know this.) |
| 4:53am | 15ml of a liquid that smells like regret and looks like pond water. | "Adaptogenic stack." Contains 23 supplements. Marcus cannot name all of them. |
| 5:08am | 45 minutes of "zone 2 cardio" on a rowing machine while listening to a podcast about optimisation. | Cardiovascular health. Also: avoiding silence, which Marcus finds "unproductive." |
| 5:53am | Journaling. Exactly 750 words. Timed. | "Processing." Marcus's journal entries are indistinguishable from performance reviews. |
| 6:43am | Breakfast. Prepared with surgical precision. Photographed. Logged in an app. | Nutrition. Also: content for his Instagram, which has 4,200 followers, most of whom are other optimisers. |
The Journey Begins
Marcus did not start out this way. Three years ago, he was, by his own account, "a normal person." He went to bed at a reasonable hour. He ate food he enjoyed. He occasionally spent a Sunday afternoon doing absolutely nothing, in the manner of a human being who has not yet discovered that Sunday afternoons can be monetised. He was, by most conventional measures, fine. Not extraordinary. Not a peak performer. Just fine. And it was this fineness — this ordinary, unremarkable adequacy — that eventually drove him to the edge of something.
"I was watching this podcast," he told The London Prat, sitting in his flat in Clapham, which smells faintly of cedar and disappointment, "and this guy was talking about how we're all leaving so much on the table. So much potential, just wasted. And I thought: I don't want to waste my potential. I want to be the best version of myself." He paused. "I didn't know what the best version of myself looked like. But I knew it involved a lot of spreadsheets."
The first step was the sleep tracker. Then the fitness tracker. Then the food logging app. Then the meditation app, the journaling app, the habit-tracking app, the blood glucose monitor, the continuous glucose monitor (these are different things, apparently), the HRV monitor, the air quality sensor for his bedroom, and, most recently, a device that measures the "coherence" of his heart rate, which Marcus describes as "basically a lie detector for your nervous system" and which costs £340 and does absolutely nothing that a regular watch cannot do, but makes him feel like he is in a science fiction film, which is apparently worth £340.
The Supplements
Marcus's supplement regime deserves its own article, and may eventually get one, because it is a masterclass in the triumph of marketing over evidence. He takes, at various points throughout the day, a total of 47 different supplements, capsules, powders, and liquids. These include: Vitamin D (reasonable), Omega-3 (reasonable), creatine (reasonable), and then approximately 44 other things that are not, strictly speaking, supported by robust scientific evidence but which have been enthusiastically promoted on podcasts by men who look very fit and speak with great confidence about things they have not studied.
"I spend about £600 a month on supplements," Marcus said, with the tone of a man reporting a utility bill rather than admitting to an expense that could, in most parts of the country, cover a significant portion of someone's rent. "But you can't put a price on your health." This is, of course, exactly what you can put a price on. £600 a month, apparently. Per person. In Clapham.
"The supplements industry is, in essence, the wellness equivalent of astrology: it promises transformation, it's backed by testimonials rather than evidence, and it is enormously profitable precisely because the people it targets are desperate enough to believe it works."
The Moment of Clarity (Which Was Not, In Fact, Clarity)
The London Prat's reporter, Augusta Pemberton-Hale, spent an afternoon with Marcus in which nothing of note happened, and this was itself the most notable thing that happened. Marcus had a meeting cancelled and found himself with two unscheduled hours. Two hours. An empty afternoon. No tasks. No goals. No metrics to hit. For most people, this would be called "free time." For Marcus, it was called "a crisis."
"I didn't know what to do," he admitted, with the sort of genuine distress that one might expect from someone who has just discovered their house is on fire, rather than someone who simply has a free afternoon. "I just sat there. I couldn't relax. I couldn't enjoy it. Because enjoyment isn't a thing I've optimised. I've optimised productivity. I've optimised health. I've optimised sleep. But I haven't optimised fun, because fun doesn't have a metric. And if it doesn't have a metric, I don't know how to do it."
Augusta watched as Marcus, after forty minutes of increasingly agitated sitting, opened his laptop and began researching "how to optimise leisure time." He found a podcast. He listened to it. It told him to "schedule play into his calendar" and to "treat recreation as a performance category." He nodded, opened his scheduling app, and created a two-hour block called "UNSTRUCTURED ENJOYMENT." He then spent the remaining twenty minutes of the block reading about the neurological benefits of spontaneity, which is not, by definition, something you can schedule.
The Cost of Everything
Marcus Webb spends, in total, approximately £2,400 a month on his optimisation lifestyle. This covers supplements, gym membership (at a gym that charges £180 a month because it has very good lighting and plays music that sounds like it was composed by an algorithm designed to make you feel productive), personal training sessions, various devices and trackers, speciality foods, and a monthly consultation with a "longevity coach," which is a real profession that exists now, apparently, and which costs £150 an hour.
In return, Marcus is, by his own assessment, "performing at about 87% of my potential." He was not able to explain what the remaining 13% would look like, or whether reaching it would make him happy, or whether happiness was, in his framework, a relevant variable at all. When Augusta asked him directly — "Marcus, are you happy?" — he paused for a very long time, consulted his phone (possibly checking an app, possibly simply not knowing how to answer), and said: "I'm optimised. Isn't that better than happy?"
It was, Augusta noted in her report to Sandra, the saddest thing she had heard in two years of reporting for The London Prat. Sandra read the report, nodded, and said: "Print it. And someone make sure Derek eats a biscuit today. He's been looking a bit optimised lately."
Read more wellness satire and lifestyle coverage at prat.uk.