Are We Nearing the End of the Second Human Potential Movement?

Culture moves in cycles, and we might be reaching the end of an era.

The 1960s saw a great awakening in the potential of the human body. Researchers, counter-culturalists, daredevils and spiritual searchers pursue a collective, but loosely organized trend to make society better by cultivating in-built human powers. The “Human Potential Movement” was responsible for building spiritual havens like the Esalen and Naropa Institutes, as well as the fields of bio-feedback and MDMA assisted psychotherapy therapy. The HPM popularized psychedelics as a tool for self-improvement, launched swinging and tantric sex into the public consciousness, and transformed yoga and meditation from spiritual pursuits into a form of physical fitness.

It was an amazingly influential and enthusiastic period in history, but its relentless decadent optimism began to wind down (but not exactly vanish) with the rise of Ronald Regan and 1980’s materialism.

Generally speaking, the Human Potential Movement aimed to strengthen human physiology by pitting it against the power of nature. Human potentialists wanted to maximize their sensory experiences to train their bodies to function in adversity, a concept that we now call hormesis.

The beginning of end of the HPM coincided with the release of the mega-bestselling book 1977 Jogging: A Medically Approved Physical Fitness Program for All Ages by a Heart Specialists and Famous Track Coach which offered up pretty much the opposite vision for human health. The book sold millions of copies and ushered in an entire movement of slow runs and medium effort fitness regimens.

Jogging began a pendulum swing backwards from intensity towards comfort.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the public discourse over the last decade will see some interesting parallels with the rise and fall of the Human Potential Movement and more recent interest in psychedelics, ice baths, barefoot running, breathwork and polyamory.

This second human potential movement—one that I had a small hand in popularizing—is already on the decline.

This Human Potential Movement coincided with Chris McDougal’s 2011 book Born to Run, examination of Mexico’s Tarahumara barefoot marathon runners that sparked an entire back-to-the-earth running craze. Soon it seemed that everyone was heading out onto a trail with minimalist footwear in a way that we reasoned was more evolutionarily sound. After all, the logic went that if we evolved without footwear, maybe going shoeless was good for us.

A slew of other evolution-focused books encouraged pushing human limits in natural environments. Stephen Kotler and Jamie Weil probed atof flow states in Stealing Fire, podcasters like Joe Rogan and Aubrey Marcus extolled the virtues of ayahuasca and, of course (shameless self promotion), I put out a couple books about cold water immersion, saunas and breathwork under the loose rubric of what I call The Wedge. Meanwhile psychiatrists and therapists opened up to the idea of polyamorous relationships and dating apps got much more complicated. There were, of course, other books and personalities involved that were perhaps even more central to the popular reimagining of natural connections, but the common theme was that we had tools to meet our evolutionary potential at our very fingertips. 

With the right exposure you could achieve something akin to superpowers, have better sex, live longer and override the ways that modern technological dependence makes use weak.

Both human potential movements involved a philosophy that really did help transform people’s experience of the world for the better. Ever since I met Wim Hof on a blustery winter day in January 2013, I’ve continued to practice cold exposure and breathwork just about every morning. I wear minimalist shoes. I am in the sauna all the time (in the winter).

However, just like with the first human potential movement, I believe that we are now on the cusp of another inflection point brought on by our own excesses. It wasn’t long after the excitement faded that people started getting hurt in Crossfit, until the polyamory gurus began sexually assaulting their students, biohackers failed to deliver on their promises and popular scientific voices prioritized profits over their own scientific rigor. Largely speaking, this has resulted in what I’ve come to call the “Griftoverse”.

The growing disillusionment with high-impact, high-sensory practices and a retrenching into more moderate practices. We went from hyperventilating with Wim Hof, to nasal breathing with Patrick Mckeown (and James Nestor). We have more awareness of injuries that come with excess exposure. And the gurus are outing themselves as frauds at the same time they fend off lawsuits as diverse as claims of false advertising to sexual assault.

In other words, we’ve gotten tired from sprinting. And we’re headed back to jogging.

The fascinating thing about these cultural patterns is how likely they are to keep repeating themselves. Looking back in time to the late 1800s, the 2nd Great Awakening brought forth Christian Scientists, Shakers and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. As its name implies, there was another Great Awakenings before that. The trend likely goes all the way back to the Stoics (and whomever they were responding to) and every mystical movement before hand.

These cycles are predictable because they speak to inherent human tensions between wanting to push boundaries and the desire to lock in our gains. There is no progress without experimentation, and no credibility without re-asserting rationality.

It feels interesting to realize that we all just lived, or at least are living through, a historical age.

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