Freed From Desire
Ozempic & The War Against Pleasure
There’s no such thing as a miracle drug, apart from Ozempic
It might be the name on everyone’s lips and hips right now, but let’s call this wonder medicine by its less catchy classification: GLP-1s.
Whatever you call them, it’s fair to say that GLP-1s have proved to be something of a hit. It’s hard to overstate how massive their impact is, and it’s still growing. In just a few years, these drugs have gone mainstream: as of this year, around 20-25 million Americans were taking them for weight-loss, and the effects aren’t only weight-dropping, they’re jaw-dropping1.
If you go on any of the associated Reddit threads, they’re littered with people whom the drug has helped lose large amounts of weight. Households with at least one GLP-1 user reduced spending on food by 5.5% within six months - mostly due to falls in purchases of calorie-dense, processed items, including an 11% decline in savoury snacks. They also saw an 8.6% decline in spending at fast-food chains, coffee shops, and limited-service restaurants2.
When you start totting all that belt-tightening, it rolls up into eye-popping cumulative numbers. Assuming a 10% GLP-1 usage rate among overweight adults and a 20% usage rate among obese Americans, one estimate3 suggested this could lead to 20 billion fewer calories of food consumed per day and about $1.2 billion less spent per week.4
Financially, there are people out there growing fat off all those shrinking waistlines. Last year the revenue from selling GLP-1s was so significant for Ozempic’s parent company, Novo Nordisk, that it single-handedly kept Denmark out of recession5.
People might be talking about AI more, but the world that these drugs will create is not in some long distant future, it’s right here, right now. The implications of such a drug are already being played out6, and might conceivably include falling returns for junk food retailers, reduced alcohol consumption, far fewer morbidly overweight people, increased productivity from a fitter and healthier population, and a large-scale redefinition of what indulgence means.
Of course, there are plenty of wrinkles to this wondrous bargain beyond Ozempic Face and its saggy companion Ozempic Arse: it’s worth dwelling on the fact that we’ve invented a drug to stop people eating too much whilst millions around the world are still dying of starvation. We’re also starting to find out what happens when people come off these drugs because they’re no longer subsidised, AKA The Ozempocalypse. Recent research suggests that when people stop taking it, they swiftly put the weight back on7.
But all of the above is only looking at GLP-1s as a means for dramatic weight-loss. This is a drug that it appears will also help with strokes, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, sleep apnea, and drug and alcohol addiction. In addition, there’s evidence that it may also impact psychotic disorders, clotting, infectious illness, and several respiratory conditions8.
Beyond its effects for weight-loss and cosmetic purposes, usage of GLP-1s is likely to be a significant upfront investment in reducing multiple negative health problems that costs society billions a year, and I don’t wish to criticise that. It’s perhaps too much to hope for that it might allow some reallocation of food resources, or a reduction of the vast climate footprint from food waste in the west.
Put bluntly: it would be churlish indeed to whinge about a class of drugs that are going to have such a wide-ranging set of benefits for so many people.
But as someone who doesn’t take them and would prefer never to do so, I find myself thinking not just about what they can do or the impact they’re already having, but what they say about the society we’re living in.
They work by activating receptors in the brain’s appetite centers (e.g. hypothalamus) to reducing hunger and food cravings while increasing the sensation of fullness. But taking GLP-1s doesn’t just stop people wanting to eat: users have reported that it suppresses the desire to eat, and also to drink alcohol and shop. Viewed at an angle, these are temperance drugs, or desire suppressants.
Humans appear, at last, to have invented a tool for artificially conquering that age-old and most troublesome of overlords: our own appetites.
Freed from Desire?
We’ve all seen Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but human wants and needs run along a spectrum, at the lower end of which might sit addiction, running up through appetite all the way along to aspiration and yearning.
Huge swathes of modern commerce in the era of mobile internet has been built on dramatically collapsing the time between the arousal of cravings and their swift satisfaction. When you look at categories like quick service restaurants, gambling, and fast fashion, it's hard to argue that the industry of desire stimulation and fulfilment is a positive thing for human beings or the planet. George Orwell quaintly referred to advertising as ‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket9’ summoning the piggies to dinner, but for at least a decade the rattling stick has become rolling thunder.
It has always been hard to identify where in life your wants are innate and where they have been given or forced upon you - and it’s especially challenging in a modern media environment where almost everything can be a potential source of influence. A new GLP-1 Era of Temperance Drugs is going to make it much harder for unscrupulous actors to manipulate people into consuming beyond their needs or the point where it’s healthy.
They, are, in many ways, the perfect invention to combat the ill effects of a world that has become too adept at manipulating human appetites.
But they are also the ideal drug for an age where those setting the tenor of our culture view the human body as little more than a machine.
Stay with me, things are about to take a turn for the weird.
Injectable willpower for the human machine
The very wealthy have always shaped what is viewed as healthy or desirable in the human body, but in 2025 we’re a long way from Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII as a fat gouty cunt majestically sturdy monarch. Self-denial is a high-status behaviour now.
It often seems to be the case that The Brahmin Caste of Silicon Valley biohackers loathes eating, valorises willpower, and views pleasure as weakness. It’s telling that Mark Zuckerberg listed ‘eliminating desire’ as one of his main interests on his Facebook page. Stoicism’s popularity in the tech world is not a coincidence: as a philosophy it teaches patience, self-control, and temperance, all as means to achieve a more enlightened self. Enjoying food is no longer high-status, because treating it purely like fuel is a sign of self-mastery.
But neither Silicon Valley nor Stoicism have a monopoly on the idea of conquering your appetites as a route to a higher self: it’s a recurrent idea in various strains of religious thought.
Conquering desires has long been a means of releasing the mind and body from lower needs to create vacant space that might be filled by higher things. Monks temper their appetites to be closer to heaven, Buddhism teaches that we must untether ourselves from our desires to reach enlightenment , and of course the likes of Lent and Ramadan are examples of religious and cultural practices where self-denial is a means of cleansing body and soul and moving closer to God/Allah.
“Desire makes slaves out of kings, while patience makes kings out of slaves.” - Imam Al-Ghazali
But at least Lent and Ramadan both culminate with slap-up meals: biohackers have now extracted the pleasure and the troublesome deities from this strain of religious thought and kept nothing but the joyless self-denial. The adoption of a quasi-religious attitude to food and appetite is easy to satirise - even before you imagine the annoyance of people who’ve spent their lives cultivating self-denial waking up to find out that it’s now available from a local pharmacist as an injection for a few hundred dollars.
In principle, there’s nothing wrong with temperance becoming a status signal: a culture that harnesses the power of the human will is more likely to accomplish difficult things, face challenges and co-ordinate around long-term goals rather than just the most enticing ones. But of course, like any ideal or value, doubling down on it to the detriment of everything else is where things start to get a little strange. Particularly when you swallow religious desire repression as an ethos for living but abandon the belief in a higher power.
Although many of these people are rigidly rationalist and self-identified atheists, their behaviour is a modern descendant of an inherently religious school of thought: Gnosticism.
All Pleasure is Weakness
Gnosticism is a strange sub-branch of early Christianity which stated that humans were beings trapped in a flawed world created by a senile or mad god, and that the only escape was through a special category of knowledge that only the enlightened could seek and find. The material world, in the Gnostic creed10, was a fallen and evil one that only knowledge could help us escape.
“Many people today hold a Gnostic view of things without realising the fact. Believing that human beings can be fully understood in the terms of scientific materialism, they reject any idea of free will. But they cannot give up hope of being masters of their own destiny. So they have come to believe that science will somehow enable the human mind to escape the limitations that shape its natural condition. Throughout much of the world, and particularly in Western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion…..At present, Gnosticism is the faith of people who believe themselves to be machines.” - John Gray, The Soul of The Marionette
The Neo-Gnosticism of Silicon Valley is easily discernible in the cult of biohacking’s instrumental view of the human body, the way that it treats a marvellous organism developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as nothing more than a malfunctioning machine that our minds happen to be trapped in.
When we find people in raptures about the coming singularity with Artificial General Intelligence, that is pop-Gnosticism rearing its head. It’s this worldview followed to its absolute limit that leads to Huel, blood plasma infusions, hyperbaric chambers, and yes, Bryan Johnson injecting Botox into his cock.
Despite Blueprint Bloke’s obsession with the strength of his erections, it’s fair to say that these Gnostic Biohackers aren’t big on the embodied life or the pleasures of the flesh. Through this worldview, human desires are secondary to the will to knowledge, and true enlightenment is found in entirely transcending our weak body and its unruly wants.
But the uncomfortable fact remains that borrowing the notion of asceticism as a route to eternal life from religion may help you live longer, but you still have to give people a reason to live. If you’re taking so many pills, transfusions and treatments that your existence is nothing but a prolonged life-extension programme, what exactly are you staying alive to enjoy?
Quelling lower appetites could, in theory, leave more time and space to pursue the higher ones, such as art, beauty and love and religion and philosophy, or at least leisure and sex. But I don’t get the impression that many of the people espousing this worldview are using all that extra life to savour the world’s smaller or higher joys, as the below from one of its most famous godheads admits11.
One of my friends has a theory that the rest of the country tolerates Silicon Valley because people there just don’t have that much sex….They’re not having that much fun - Peter Thiel
As for their attitude to sex, so for other pleasures of the flesh too. And the question posed by this worldview is a simple one: what exactly is the value of desire and appetite, especially if now many of us can choose not to feel them at all?
All fast, no feast, no Falstaff
This is worth asking because of some of the reported side-effects of GLP-1s amongst a sub-set of users: along with reduced appetite, those taking them have reported a feeling of listlessness and lack of pleasure in other areas of their lives as well. Intuitively, such a side-effect seems like an inevitable tax on desire suppression, but it’s still troubling.
In dampening our ability to feel appetite, these drugs may also be curtailing our ability to savour, and to enjoy. They become just another means of not existing in meatspace, of curtailing our emotional engagement with the world, and of making ourselves a smaller target for the sensations, suffering and vulnerabilities that are part of being alive. Consider, if you will, how many of the greatest pleasures in life are inherently sensorial, embodied, or physical. Even for people who relish the life of the mind, an existence without bodily pleasures sounds like pretty thin gruel.
There was a reason that the Ancient Greeks, in all their wisdom, worshipped both Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo was the God of order, control, harmony, and reason; Dionysus brought chaos, instinct, emotion, revelry and wine to the party.
These were not meant to be binaries to choose from, but two forces that were forever intertwined in any healthy life and society. But we risk becoming a culture that worships Apollo and forsakes Dionysus. Who wants to live in a world that’s all fast, and no feast?
I’m probably not alone in finding people with no visible appetites suspicious, and not only because of some lingering cultural programming that makes me thinks that wants, desires and appetites are part of being human (it’s also visible in the occasional inverted-moral panics from older generations about the fact that Gen-Z are drinking, partying less and displaying a less hedonistic streak).
But as may be clear by now, I want to make a case for sensorial pleasures, and their importance to culture and to life. Apollo and Dionysus were meant to be both poles of human experience, and also forces that combined to form the wellspring of great art. In many landmark works of art there is a clear link between appetite and vitality, not least in one of the most iconic and loved characters in all of literature:
It’s fair to say that Shakespeare was not worried about fat-shaming when he created Sir John Falstaff, perhaps the most vibrant and alive character he ever wrote: The Fat Knight was characterised not only by being obese, but also by his gargantuan appetites for booze and food. Falstaff’s bulk and vitality were part of his symbolic, almost mythic power.
The suggestion that Falstaff represents a physical, self-centred enjoyment of existence identifies him with popular archetypes such as the Lord of Misrule or the embodiment of carnival - Emma Smith, This Is Shakespeare
The great Shakespeare critic Harold Bloom said simply that ‘Falstaff is life! Falstaff is the blessing’, and as a character he was so popular that Shakespeare had to write The Merry Wives of Windsor featuring him just to please Queen Elizabeth. Audiences of the era (and now) warm to Falstaff more than Hamlet perhaps because we identify with weakness more than strength: The Prince of Denmark is all intellect and Falstaff is all appetite.
We know how it ends, of course: the young Prince Hal abandons his old drinking buddy to ascend to the throne of England and become Henry V, the ruthless and Machiavellian battle-winner and dynasty-builder. You might, if you squint hard enough, see Hal’s abandonment of his gluttonous friend as the narrative prototype of the ambitious young person in a hurry forsaking the pleasures of the flesh in favour of mastery, control and power.
A society that is all fast and no feast will not create Falstaff. But in The GLP-1 Era, we are all the young Prince Hal, being offered the way of the flesh and its earthly pleasures on one hand, and the promise of power via temperance on the other - available as an injection for a few hundred pounds a month.
Why would anyone choose desire?
If you remove our desires, what will be left of us?
The GLP-1 Genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and even if I had the power to stop it, I wouldn’t. These drugs are already changing people and society in a range of hugely beneficial ways. I can only imagine that for anyone who wants to lose weight and has long struggled to do so, they are indeed a miracle drug and a blessing. But perhaps all of this is little more than a plea to those who don’t need to take such things for any medically necessary reason, and are toying with them for purely cosmetic purposes.
Human cravings are an engine for accomplishment. Many brilliant people are simply those who have yoked their fleshy appetites to higher ones - art, music, religion, power etc. And they are also the fuel for character definition: it’s partly through our needs, desires and appetites that we discover who we are.
Around the time that usage of GLP-1s started to ramp up, I read Asako Yuzuki's Butter, a novel about society’s expectations of women in Japan, the pressures they endure, and the level to which those things are tied up with the suppression of womens’ pleasures and appetites. The main character becomes entangled with a suspected murderer and gastronome and ends up swallowing a fair amount of her worldview along with the various forms of butter-based cooking she adores. The protagonist’s discovery of her appetites in the face of a society that proscribes womens’ pleasure is a quest for liberation. Butter is a story about how learning about your true desires can set you free.
‘Eating what you want when you want it makes your senses come alive’ - Butter, Asako Yuzuki
The frightening and inspiring thing about appetites, at least when experienced as something other than addiction, is that they are untamed - they arise out of some place that we can neither identify nor name, a force we can feel but never possess. In succumbing to any form of them - gastronomic, aspirational, sexual, romantic - we are exposing ourselves. We are afraid of appetites because we are afraid to want, and of what what we want says about who we are.
But it is precisely in making us this vulnerable that appetites are valuable. If you conquer all your desires, want nothing, savour nothing, then you might seem invulnerable. But as aspirational as many neo-Gnostics and biohackers seem to find eternal life as a immaterial spirit that has conquered all cravings, on balance I would prefer the life of the body, with all of its weaknesses, wants and frailties.
If invited to imagine what a life well lived looks like, we may well dream of the things that we might achieve and accomplish - and certainly, tempering your cravings and leashing your wants will help - but a good life is also composed of tastes savoured and experiences enjoyed.
When we are on our deathbeds, will we want to remember the swallowing of a million pills and a succession of allotted hours devoid of any sensorial pleasures beyond the thrill of believing that we have conquered the very needs that make us human? Or will we savour the memory of that feast in fine company, the taste of those first few mouthfuls of dessert, or that first pint in the sunshine after a long hike?
Yes, it's healthy for humans not to be slaves to wants that contribute to our immiseration, but I for one would rather not pay to have them flattened chemically for good. Don’t suppress your pleasures too far, or you may find there is little else left of you either.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
🎵Freed from Desire/Mind and senses purified🎵
Based on 6-8% range of the total population of American adults of 258 million, as calculated by Perplexity from KLF data from May 2024
https://www.choicesmagazine.org/choices-magazine/submitted-articles/food-demand-in-a-post-ozempic-world
Kalaitzandonakes, M., B. Ellison, T. Malone and J. Coppess. "Consumers’ Expectations about GLP-1 Drugs Economic Impact on Food System Players." farmdoc daily (15):49, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March 14, 2025.
https://fortune.com/europe/2024/03/05/novo-nordisks-wegovy-and-ozempic-boom-saved-denmarks-gdp-from-a-no-growth-2023/
Azeem Azhar, Exponential View, ‘Today’s Most Important Technology’, August 2024
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/14/people-who-stop-weight-loss-drugs-return-to-original-weight-within-year-analysis-finds
Yan Xie, Taeyoung Choi, Ziyad Al-Aly: “Mapping the effectiveness and risks of GLP-1 receptor agonists”, Nature Medicine, January 2025
George Orwell - Keep The Apidistra Flying
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
