Sleep: a practice for suckers. Human relationships: a distraction from the grind. Non-helicopter modes of transportation: too slow.
These are some of the many lessons on offer from Emil Barr, 22-year-old author of a sociopathic Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Monday, with the headline "'Work-Life Balance' Will Keep You Mediocre." The scare quotes should alert the reader that they're in for an extremely familiar genre of story, and Barr capably paints by numbers. He has built two companies, allegedly valued at more than $20 million, and all he sacrificed in the process was everything that makes life worth living:
During my first year working on Step Up Social, I averaged 3½ hours of sleep a night and had about 12½ hours every day to focus on business. The physical and mental toll was brutal: I gained 80 pounds, lived on Red Bull and struggled with anxiety.
This is not dissimilar from what you'd find on any Instagram grindset motivational page, though the special twist is that Barr did all this stuff while an undergrad at Miami University in Ohio. While everyone around him was busy figuring out how to become a person, young Emil looked in the mirror and thought, Now is the time to become a machine—to "optimize ruthlessly during your peak physical and cognitive years," as he puts it. This ruddy personification of LinkedIn boasts of orienting his every waking second toward business-success founder mode: having every meal delivered, only taking classes that allowed laptops, and all but eschewing human interaction.
As is always the case in these missives, there's a line that gives the author's class status away. "I’ve used helicopters to cut travel time between meetings," Barr writes. A helicopter is also what Barr's chest surely sounded like a couple of weeks into his lifestyle of Red Bull and no sleep.
The punchline here is that Barr is turning his organs into rocks in order to build some real dumb bullshit. His first company, Step Up Social, which merged with a larger competitor last year, makes inane marketing videos for businesses; its service, as Barr describes it, is "help[ing] companies grow on TikTok and Instagram Reels." How's that working out? Between Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, Step Up Social boasts approximately 400 total followers, a paltry audience tuning in for marketing videos about marketing videos, from a company self-evidently not good at marketing. You'd almost have to work not to amass more Twitter followers than the 20 which Step Up Social has accrued since it launched the account in 2021. For this, he's spurned the fellowship of living beings?
Barr's new company, Flashpass, is not even the first or second search result for "flashpass." It has inferior SEO to both a Six Flags premium ticket product and an obscure phone app for pilots whose website looks like it was made in five minutes in 2002. It has 280 followers on LinkedIn. Flashpass's business is to "help upskill employees and students to meet the needs of the 21st-century job market"; its CEO is microwaving himself to death for a level of market penetration you can get in 10 minutes just by following everybody in your high-school graduating class.
This tells you—more to the point, it probably should have told the Wall Street Journal's op-ed editors—that Barr's real business is not any of this fake B2B SaaS sludge, but rather promoting himself as a precocious avatar of business innovation. The WSJ op-ed is both the ends and the means for him: If his companies were actually making big money, he would not need to freelance "Sleep and Companionship Are For Suckers" columns for the newspaper whose editorial outlook can generously be described as "post-human." For all practical purposes, this dude used his Journal op-ed opportunity to apply for a job. "Hire Me, I Have No Self-Respect" would have been a better headline.
Ever the innovator, Barr has a plan for what's next:
I plan to become a billionaire by age 30. Then I will have the time and resources to tackle problems close to my heart like climate change, species extinction and economic inequality. The formula is simple: Sacrifices I make now are an investment in decades of choice later.
Buddy, if you keep pounding energy drinks around the clock to stay alive, there are going to be other problems much closer to your heart.
