Beyond Self-quantifying & Self-hacking
Kaspars Vendelis
Optimizing for self, for performance and for any kind of improvement is only one half of the biohacking equation. Leaving out the social aspect may negatively affect the human longevity and everyday well-being. How to biohack and build up the smallest community form (i.e. family) as well as the larger social structure (biohacking community). This all as part of the bigger vision – in order to lead the whole nation to become the happiest nation in Europe.
Kaspars Vendelis explores how deep human connection and community are essential for well-
I would treat the connection to other people and hugs as the supplements to your well-being. These are the things that are beyond biohacking and the quantified self; I would call it the connectified self.
Summary
- Moving "Beyond Self-quantifying & Self-hacking" requires a shift from the "quantified self" to the "connectified self," prioritizing deep human connection alongside biological metrics.
- Loneliness is a primary driver of mortality and mental illness, whereas longevity in "blue zones" is linked to having a strong sense of purpose, community belonging, and social worth.
- The polyvagal theory explains that the nervous system can enter a "shutdown" mode during chronic stress; social safety signals like high-frequency sounds and music help regulate this state.
- Biological triggers such as deep breathing, skin-to-skin contact, and six-second hugs serve as essential "supplements" for well-being by releasing oxytocin and fostering a sense of security.
- Overcoming shared hardships and pursuing collective goals releases vasopressin, a neurotransmitter that fosters deep social bonding, communal resilience, and a sense of mission.
Article
Beyond Self-Quantifying And Self-Hacking
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Tallinn, Kaspars Vendelis Argued That The Missing Variable In Wellness Was Not Data, But Human Connection
The modern biohacking movement was built on numbers. Sleep scores, ketone readings, heart rate variability, lab panels, cold exposure, performance tracking, supplements stacked with military precision. But at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Tallinn**, held in **Tallinn, Estonia, on 15 September 2018**, **Kaspars Vendelis** stepped onto the stage with a provocation that cut through the culture of metrics: the future of longevity might depend less on self-optimisation than on whether we know how to belong.
His presentation, **Beyond Self-Quantifying & Self-Hacking**, unfolded as both confession and manifesto. Vendelis did not dismiss biohacking’s tools. He embraced them. Yet he insisted they captured only half the equation. The other half, more fragile and more difficult to quantify, lay in attachment, touch, community, shared purpose and the biology of safety. He gave it a name that lingered long after the talk ended: the **“connectified self.”**
The Loneliness Hidden Beneath Hyperconnection
Vendelis began not with theory but with memory. He recalled studying in Switzerland in the years before cheap airlines, instant messaging and omnipresent social platforms made distance appear manageable. Communication with home came by handwritten letter. Each envelope on the stairs delivered a rush of anticipation. Each silence deepened the ache.
The technology of that era was slower, but the emotional truth, he suggested, had not changed. Today’s notifications offered a similar chemical flicker, but often without the deeper nourishment of presence. The illusion of contact could still leave a person stranded.
Later, while living in Dubai and separated from his family for months, he found that Skype calls, digital celebrations and constant messaging did not solve the problem. They disguised it. The old loneliness returned in a shinier form.
His warning was direct. “**Social networks that are supposed to be social actually create a fake social activity. Studies show that loneliness can be a serious cause of mortality and bad health.**”
In a culture that often treated connectivity as abundance, Vendelis described it as a deficit economy. Signals multiplied while intimacy thinned out. The result, he argued, could be measured not only in sadness but in declining public health, rising anxiety and the quiet corrosion of resilience.
Presence, Not Possessions
Some of the most affecting moments of the talk came when Vendelis spoke of children. Parents knew the look, he said, when a child wanted sweets or toys. But there was another look, more unsettling, when a parent reached for shoes and a child asked whether they were leaving again.
The distinction mattered. Desire for things was easy to read. Need for presence was deeper, and too often ignored.
“**Children ask for stuff, but all they need is for us to be present and share love with them. This presence and connection is what truly matters most for our well-being.**”
That line landed because it challenged one of the central assumptions of optimisation culture: that better living was achieved primarily through better inputs. Vendelis suggested instead that the most powerful intervention might be attention itself. Not a device, not a protocol, not a wearable, but the ancient discipline of staying with one another.
The Blue Zones Lesson: Purpose As A Survival Tool
Vendelis anchored his argument in the familiar research surrounding the world’s so-called Blue Zones, places associated with unusually high concentrations of long-lived people. Their habits, he noted, were often interpreted through food, movement and environment. But he urged the audience to look again at the social architecture beneath them.
Longevity-rich communities tended to share a common pattern: belonging, routine fellowship, shared meals, mutual value and a strong sense that one’s life remained useful to others.
“**One of the most important factors for longevity is having a purpose for living. When you belong to a community, your self-worth is attached to a lifestyle that keeps you alive and healthy.**”
He drew a painful line between this insight and the collapse many experience after retirement, when work has monopolised identity and usefulness appears to end with employment. For Vendelis, poor ageing was not merely a medical problem. It was also a crisis of social placement. To lose one’s role was, in many cases, to lose one’s reason to keep going.
Polyvagal Theory And The Biology Of Safety
What made Vendelis’s talk more than a plea for kindness was the scientific frame he wrapped around it. Drawing on **polyvagal theory**, associated with **Stephen Porges**, he described the nervous system not as a simple switch between stress and relaxation, but as a layered survival apparatus.
Beyond the familiar opposition of sympathetic and parasympathetic states, he emphasised a more ancient response: shutdown, or freeze. In this condition, the organism conserves itself when threat appears inescapable. In animals, that may look like playing dead. In humans, Vendelis suggested, it often resembles depression, numbness, emotional flattening and the baffling inability to do what one knows would help.
This, in his telling, was where many people now lived for long stretches, not because a predator stood before them, but because modern life delivered chronic low-grade danger signals faster than the body could process. Noise, pressure, overwork, social fragmentation and digital overstimulation all fed a system that increasingly forgot how to feel safe.
His answer was strikingly physical. Safety, he argued, was not an abstraction. It was communicated through cues the body could recognise.
Hugs, Breath And High-Pitched Voices As Biological Supplements
Vendelis offered what he called low-hanging fruit, simple practices capable of shifting physiology before ideology ever entered the room. Deep breathing was one. Touch was another. Long hugs, skin-to-skin contact, communal presence and even vocal tone mattered because the nervous system interpreted them as signs that danger had passed.
He spoke, too, about the mammalian ear and the way high-frequency sounds could be associated with safety. This, he suggested, helped explain why soothing music, gentle vocalisation and the exaggerated tones adults often use with babies could have a regulating effect.
His reframing of these behaviours was classic biohacker rhetoric, but with an unusual tenderness. If pills and devices were accepted as legitimate tools of optimisation, then human closeness should be treated no less seriously.
“**By doing a few simple things to connect with others, we can improve our health and well-being to the highest height and address increasing rates of depression and anxiety.**”
For an audience accustomed to discussing supplements and interventions, this was a subtle but radical proposition: hugs as supplementation, presence as protocol, relationship as preventive medicine.
Why Discomfort Can Restore Connection To Life
Vendelis also linked social wellbeing to another biohacking obsession: deliberate discomfort. Cold water, intense physical challenge, breathwork, endurance tests and hardship all had a role, he said, in teaching the nervous system that stress could be survived without collapse.
“**Being comfortable with discomfort gives new stimuli to your nervous system. If you combine that with deep breathing, you can create new neuronal pathways to get yourself out of a shutdown mode.**”
Yet even here, the message was not about heroic individualism. Shared hardship, he suggested, often forged stronger bonds than comfort ever could. Collective challenge released not only adrenaline, but attachment. It reminded people that survival had always been social.
He invoked the chemistry of bonding, including oxytocin and vasopressin, to explain why families, teams and even nations were often most tightly knit when facing adversity together. Community was not merely morally desirable. It was written into the body’s survival code.
From Personal Optimisation To National Happiness
The most ambitious part of Vendelis’s address came near the end, when he widened the frame from family and friendship to society itself. In Latvia, he said, he and his wider biohacking community had adopted a bold objective: to help make the country the happiest in Europe by **2035**.
This was more than branding. It was an attempt to redirect the energies of biohacking away from private advantage and toward civic repair. Conferences, meetups and communities, in that vision, became instruments not just of self-improvement but of social reconstruction.
It was a startling inversion of the usual wellness script. Instead of asking how a person might optimise within a fraying culture, Vendelis asked how a culture might be rebuilt so that fewer people needed rescuing by optimisation in the first place.
The Connectified Self
By the end of **Beyond Self-Quantifying & Self-Hacking**, the argument was clear. Data could sharpen awareness. Technology could support change. But neither could replace the nervous system’s oldest requirement: to feel safe with, seen by and meaningful to other human beings.
Vendelis’s talk at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Tallinn** did not reject the quantified self. It placed it in a larger, more human frame. The truly advanced model of health, he argued, would not end at the skin. It would include the family, the table, the embrace, the circle of friends, the shared mission, the community that tells the individual they still matter.
In an era obsessed with personal dashboards, his message was almost unfashionably simple. We do not survive by metrics alone. We survive, and perhaps even flourish, by connection.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Tallinn