Soylent guy gives literally zero shits.
At 25, Silicon Valley programmer Rob Rhinehart is already a curiosity for “hacking” food with his proprietary drink powder creepily called Soylent. It’s a marvel of asceticism and chemistry and lots of people talked about it for a while.
But now, in accepting a challenge from a friend to conserve water by consuming (drinking, washing with, etc.) no more than four liters of the stuff a day, Rhinehart has gone further than too far.
Especially during California’s drought, his efforts are noble, but his means are… highly off-putting. I’m not a “doctor,” but it seems to me that he basically constipated himself to keep from flushing the toilet.
“Given that a single toilet flush takes over 6L of water, and the cotton in a pair of jeans takes about 7000L to grow, some changes to my life were clearly in order,” he wrote in a weirdo blog post.
Oh yeah, first he pissed in the sink: “I brush my teeth without water and put on dry deodorant. Relieving myself in the toilet is not an option. For a moment I consider following Clinton’s advice: ‘if it’s yellow let it mellow,’ but decide to go full Bukowski instead: ‘sometimes you just have to piss in the sink.’ Hint hint!”
And now for the real showstopper:
“Flush toilets use enormous quantities of water so I needed a way to make it unnecessary. Feces are almost entirely deceased gut bacteria and water. I massacred my gut bacteria the day before by consuming a DIY Soylent version with no fiber and taking 500mg of Rifaximin, an antibiotic with poor bioavailability, meaning it stays in your gut and kills bacteria. Soylent’s microbiome consultant advised that this is a terrible idea so I do not recommend it. However, it worked. Throughout the challenge I did not defecate.”
Thanks for sharing, Rhinehart! But the body, and the bodily, are to celebrated, not “massacred.” In fact, it’s been shown that successful people don’t deny themselves a power-poop at work, either. To get way too personal, it sounds like your mom should have spent more time reading to you from Everybody Poops and less time patting you on your butt which is not special or different from other boys’ and girls’.
Yes, Rhinehart probably isn’t worth this kind of vitriol, and I know his intentions are good. I also know that most people don’t want to live in his poop-free, food-free dystopia, a vision of human existence that is programmatically sterile and yucky. They won’t have to, though maybe some will choose to, and good for them for helping out. Anyway, it looks like most people are going to end up flushing their Soylent down the toilet.
[H/t: New York magazine]
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