My rule is freedom per effort. Get more freedom for less grinding. Money, place, time, and a quiet head. It sounds like a business plan. It is also a body plan, because every one of those freedoms costs energy to build, and energy comes from a body that works.
So I started looking at men's hormones, and I did not like what I found. Testosterone in men has been falling for decades. Most of us were never told. Plenty of people make money selling the symptoms back to us.
This is the bigger story behind my raw carrot post. The carrot is small. This is not.
The number that is moving
Start with the hard numbers. The Massachusetts Male Aging Study tracked Boston-area men from 1987 to 2004. Men aged 65 to 69 averaged 503 ng/dL of total testosterone in 1988 and 423 in 2003. Same age, fifteen years apart. The drop was not explained by obesity or smoking, and the trend ran about 1.2 percent lower per year. A later look at the same group found that even men whose weight held steady or dropped saw their average fall 19 percent over twenty years.
It is not only older men. A study of 4,045 men aged 15 to 39 in the national NHANES survey found lower testosterone in 2011 to 2016 than in 1999 and 2000, from an average near 605 ng/dL to about 451. That is roughly a quarter. Among men at a normal weight it fell from about 665 to about 529. The survey changed lab methods along the way. The authors checked and judged the results comparable, but keep that in mind.
This July, a team that includes Hagai Levine of Hebrew University presented a larger analysis at a European fertility meeting. It pooled 118,593 men from 1972 to 2019 and found total and free testosterone falling, with the pace speeding up after 2000. News outlets ran with a 54 percent drop. Be careful with that number. It came from a conference presentation, the pooled studies did not fully adjust for body weight, one outlet says the 54 percent figure is not in the abstract itself, and I could not find a published paper. The direction matches the older studies. The size is still unsettled.
Why is it happening? Nobody knows for sure. Obesity and diabetes explain a real share, and a review of weight-loss trials found that testosterone rose as men lost weight. But the drop shows up in lean men too. Researchers point to inactivity, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, air pollution, and other exposures, and none of those is proven. There is one more twist. The lead author of the young-men study warned that normal ranges come from today's young men, so a falling population risks making low levels look normal.
What testosterone does, and what it does not
Testosterone helps keep bone and muscle. Low levels are linked with diabetes and low libido, and the authors of that July analysis note an association with higher mortality. Men peak in their late twenties and drift down from about thirty. That normal slope is what these studies say we are bending.
The popular picture says testosterone makes men aggressive and selfish. One of the best tests I know of says otherwise. In a Nature experiment, about 120 women got either a single dose of testosterone or a placebo, then played a money-splitting game. The testosterone group made fairer offers and had less conflict. The women who only believed they had gotten testosterone acted more unfairly. The authors read it as the hormone raising sensitivity to status, and in a complex society status usually comes from dealing fairly. One game, one dose, one lab. I would not build a philosophy on it. It does warn us against building one on the cartoon.
Freedom is a physical condition
There is a Tom MacDonald song called The System that I keep coming back to. The way I hear it, the song says media, politics, money, and consumer culture shape ordinary people into divided, distracted, dependent people who still think they are free. You can disagree with his politics, and plenty of people do, and still recognize the feeling. I do not need a villain to explain it. Incentives are enough. Food made to be overeaten. A phone made to be scrolled. A workday built around a chair. A clinic on every corner ready to sell the fix. None of that takes a conspiracy. It only takes a market for tired men.
Freedom is cheap to talk about. A man who wakes up foggy, sleeps six hours, carries weight he cannot shake, and drinks to come down at night can still vote and still post. He is not free in any way that counts. He cannot walk away from a bad job because he has no reserves. He does not start the business because he has no drive. He cannot have the hard talk at home because by seven there is nothing left.
Every freedom I am chasing costs energy to build.