Howdy friend! You’ll notice the new “official” name and header for this essay above.
If you’ve been reading me awhile, the name won’t surprise you. I’ve been writing about “leveling up” for the past 17 years. I just wanted to give us a bit of a rallying cry and direction around how I help people with my writing.
I’m going to start with a history lesson, and then I’ll share where we’re headed as a community in 2026 (including the worst kept secret in the history of secrets).
Let’s do this.
Level up your life
Nineteen years ago (holy crap), while I was working a soul-sucking sales job (that I sucked at), I googled “nerd + fitness” and came up empty.
Nobody was writing about nerds getting fit. I knew there had to be other people out there like me: nerds who loved science and Tolkien and Nintendo, but also wanted to get stronger and feel better about themselves.
So, I bought the domain “NerdFitness.com,” even though I wasn’t sure what to do with it. After changing jobs, getting certified as a trainer, and using 20 seconds of courage, I set up a blog and just started writing.
The blogging software I used had a spot for me to add a tagline to my website, so I came up with one that represented how I hoped to help people:
“Level up your life, every single day.”
Okay, fine. According to my 2008 posts, apparently my first tagline was slightly more cringe:
“Leveling up your life: because nerds can look good too!”
Also, I admire my naive optimism of trying to put on 10 pounds of muscle in a month. Oh, sweet child.
I wasn’t a great writer, but I enjoyed writing and kept at it.
Although I wrote articles about beginner nutrition and exercise, the essays that really brought me to life were more complex: diving in psychology and philosophy, the lessons we can learn from video games, and how we can be better citizens of planet earth.
Over time, more and more people stumbled across my work and joined the “Nerd Fitness Rebellion.” After eighteen months of writing part-time, I took the plunge and turned Nerd Fitness into my full time job (despite not making any money yet).
I had a few months of savings and hope. And as we all know…
Six months later, after selling enough ebooks to survive for a few more months, I had an opportunity to do something crazy.
I took the concept of “level up your life” and turned my life into a video game:
- I sold everything and booked an around the world plane ticket for $418.
- I got invited to give a TEDx talk about resetting the game of life.
- I put out a video, exercising around the world, that went semi viral.
After a year of adventure travel, I started writing more about gamifying life through the hero’s journey.
And in 2016, I published my first book: Level Up Your Life. I still remember walking into the Barnes & Noble in Union Square in New York City and seeing my book on the shelf. Books were the reason I started writing Nerd Fitness, so it was pretty surreal to see something I had written in an actual bookstore. This was a life-leveled-up moment.
It’s now been a decade since I’ve published Level Up Your Life. That book’s publisher was acquired, so I just reacquired my publishing rights (hence it being unavailable to buy). I hope to put out a 10-year anniversary at the end of this year!
A lot has changed since that book came out.
Nerd Fitness somehow turned into a real company with lots of employees and team members. I discovered I am not a good boss and demoted myself twice. The internet and the world have changed dramatically. My professional life and interests have changed too.
A few years back, I realized I had stopped doing the thing that got me to start Nerd Fitness in the first place: writing with curiosity about life and things that caught my attention.
I had so much more to explore than just exercise and nutrition, but I had nowhere to put it.
This past year has been that experiment. Let’s keep it going.
“Level Up with Steve Kamb”
The tagline is “Level Up with Steve Kamb” because we’re doing this together.
I’m not a guru with all the answers.
I am a flawed weirdo full of insecurities, who has made lots of mistakes on my quest to be a better, more leveled-up human. I get to share all of the failures and challenges I’ve navigated in hopes it might help others.
I’ve given myself permission to be Maximum Steve, and focus on what it means to live a good , leveled-up life.
And as I was finally deciding what to call this newsletter, reflecting on my year of writing, I stumbled across a 1960 interview with psychologist Carl Jung about happiness.
From Jung’s perspective, there are “five pillars of happiness”:
- Good physical and mental health.
- Good personal and intimate relationships: marriage, family, and friendships.
- The faculty for perceiving beauty in art and nature.
- Reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work.
- A philosophic or religious point of view capable of coping successfully with the vicissitudes of life.
That’s when it hit me: nearly all of my writing at SteveKamb.com already fell into these five categories.
I want to not only share how we can help ourselves create situations for happiness, but how we can help create the same opportunities for the people in our lives.
Let’s take a look at those five categories and some thoughts on how we’ll improve in these five areas together.
Pillar #1: Good physical and mental health
I’ve written about physical health over at Nerd Fitness for 15 years. From push-ups to healthy eating to GLP-1 medicines, I’ve tried my best to cover every topic one could have with their physical fitness. I think I wrote probably 1,0000 articles about physical fitness. Google “[fitness question” + Nerd Fitness” and I probably wrote about it.
Over here on Steve Kamb, I’ve spent a lot of the past year writing about my personal mental health journey and resources. Specifically the benefits of therapy (and my own journey with therapy), why self-compassion helps, and the importance of changing how we talk to ourselves.
We’ll continue to look at health, but a lot of it will include really challenging “inner work” of asking ourselves tough questions, and finding ways to create hope when hope feels at an all time low.
Pillar #2: Good personal and intimate relationships
The more life I live, the more I realize how relationships are the most important aspect of creating happiness opportunities.
Studies show that social fitness is just as important as physical fitness when it comes to a healthy life, no matter our age. And unfortunately, studies are also showing we’re socializing less, spending less time than ever with friends, and less time out in society.
When my life took a left turn in 2024, I doubled down on friendships and family. That’s the only way I got through the most challenging period of my life.
As the internet becomes increasingly dictated by algorithms and AI slop, the more we need to lean into our humanity, go touch grass, prioritize time with other people in real life, and enact policies and create opportunities to help and bring people together in an increasingly disconnected world.
I’m excited to also dive into how to develop good personal relationships, how to make friends, how to be more social, and so on.
The only way we’re getting through all of this is together.
Pillar #3: Perceiving beauty in art and nature
We live in a society in which everything has become commoditized, we can gamble on everything, and the beauty/weirdness of the world has become flattened into “sameness:”
- Why bother reading a book when we can read the summary?
- Why hand-draw animation when computers can do the tough parts?
- Why watch long movies when we can watch 15-second videos for hours?
- Why bother painting or going to a museum when AI can spit out similar art?
I know our community here is different. I don’t want AI-written books, I want books in which somebody thoughtfully placed each individual word. I don’t want AI-crafted movies and shows and video games tailored to me. I want Sinners and Train Dreams and Andor and Elden Ring, created with vision by a team who are exploring their perspective on life and humanity, flaws and all.
As AI takes over more and more of our digital lives, hand-crafted, imperfect beauty is going to only increase in value.
It can feel silly or guilty to focus on art or share beautiful things when it feels like our shared sense of human values are being eroded daily and five companies erode our online experiences daily. For precisely these reasons, we need these things more than ever.
Author C.S. Lewis was talking about atomic bombs, but I think we can swap out bombs for “AI and Algorithm overlords taking everything”:
“The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”
I hope I can encourage more people to make stuff. Make bad art, play bad music, draw ugly pictures, and sing off-key. These things can remind us life is worth living. Art is restorative. Beauty keeps us going.
Pillar #4: Reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work.
This pillar is one I’ve written the least about, but something I’m thinking about constantly.
I’ve written the problems that arise from a hyper-individualized society that tells us “hard work is salvation” and “believe in yourself and things work out.” We’ve turned workaholism into a virtue, when it certainly doesn’t solve all of our problems.
The result: a workforce (myself included) of insecure overachievers.
I’m fortunate that I have found meaningful work, but it’s been a journey. I have written about the “Glass Cannon” strategy of leaning into one’s strengths for work. I know this advice won’t solve late-stage capitalism nor change the foundation of our optimization-obsessed economy. I know satisfactory work is tough to come by, and that will only become more true as companies look to replace employees with artificial intelligence. I don’t love it.
However, as our little community here develops, I hope there can be some opportunities to help each other with our work, and help each other navigate our modern economy as it becomes more dominated by algorithms, gig-work, and financial nihilism.
Outside of work, I believe volunteering, donating to charitable causes, and helping others (or animals or the planet) can create meaning in one’s life too, especially if our job doesn’t provide meaning.
Pillar #5: A philosophical point of view that builds resilience.
This is an area that’s evolving and improving for myself too.
I constantly reflect on the values I try to embody every day. I ask myself if my behavior is consistent with those values, and how I can be better. I try to view current events with a zoomed out lens, because it’s so easy to get distracted and outraged and become ineffective by being stretched too thin.
As I navigated a few challenging years both personally and professionally, I leaned pretty heavily on the concept of Wabi-sabi as a governing philosophy. It’s helped remind me, repeatedly, that life is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. And that’s what gives life meaning.
I wrote a story last year about creating our own “code of honor” that we must try to live by. If it’s a good enough strategy for knights, samurai, and the Mob, maybe it’s good enough for us.
I have done a lot of work with acceptance, and ”Yes, and” philosophy. I’ve written a lot about the problem with “toxic positivity” and performative self-care, and how we can instead develop resilience in an increasingly chaotic world.
Together, we’ll come up with our own toolkit/operating system, so that when the next challenge comes our way, we’ll have a foundation that we can fall back on. To paraphrase the lady Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring, our values can be “a light to [us] in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
Where we’re going in 2026
I’m excited to continue writing about leveling up our lives.
I have approximately one bazillion ideas on topics that can help us live better. Okay, maybe not a bazillion. But at least one million. If I run out of ideas, I’ll let you know.
Together, we’re going to level up.
We are not going to worry about failing, but rather learn to respawn after failure like a video game character. We won’t chase a perfect morning routine or extreme human optimization, but rather learn how to live slightly better while still being awesome and weird. We’re not just going to focus on ourselves, but also lean into helping others so that we leave this planet better than when we found it.
How do we do this? By making hope a practice.
As Sam Gamgee tells Frodo:
“They kept going because they were holding on to something.
That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
I would love for you to join me on this ride.
I promise lots of fun, some thought provoking essays, and plenty of corny jokes.
Oh, there’s one more big thing I can promise this year.
I’ve been joking about a “book-shaped project I can’t talk about just yet.”
Next week, I can finally talk about it!
It’s the most personal and challenging thing I’ve ever written, and also the thing I’m most proud of.
My first book, Level Up Your Life, was about picking challenges to conquer in life.
This next book is what to do when life picks the challenges for us.
I’m both excited and scared, which means I’m probably doing what I’m meant to be doing.
I can’t wait to share this with you, and I will need your help and your support.
If all goes according to plan (famous last words!), I’ll tell you all about it next Monday, so keep an eye out for this newsletter then.
Forever leveling up,
-Steve
PS: No really, I can finally talk about my secret project next week!