Heavies

"In terms of the practice, you don’t force anything. It’s more of an approach where we have to remove the interference of what’s causing a body to not heal by itself." When Yukiya Takahashi moved to Australia from Japan at age 13 to learn English, his host family always had a massage table present.

Last year on Valentine’s Day morning, I hiked on up to this anonymous apartment on the east side of Manhattan to meet with a lawyer and startup founder named Aron D’Souza.

As president of the New York Society of Seasonal Allergy Sufferers, my breath is something that I only became nominally aware of in adulthood. I blissfully grew up near the beach in California, so my lungs were always kissed by clean ocean air, and it was only when I moved to New York in 2008 and was subjected to the crush of pollen-spewing male trees that I became a mucus goblin, every spring, without fail.

If you were to start training martial arts, there’s a strong possibility that one of the first accounts you’ll come across is fightTIPS by Shane Fazen (YouTube follower count: 3.41 million). A former competitor himself, he’s been posting instructionals and tutorials on YouTube since 2008, and is one of the most vital voices in the online coaching space. He’s a real OG, with a deep well of knowledge—his stretching routine fixed parts of me I never knew needed fixing.

When we first adopted Hank he immediately glommed onto me. It was to the point that whenever I left the apartment, he would cry nonstop (except his bulldog cry was more like the low-register screech of a baby dinosaur). My mere presence seemed to soothe him, made him feel moored. He was the moon and I was his Earth. This was around 2019, shortly after my wife and I got married. It took a while for us to figure out why Hank took to me so quickly.

These last few months I’ve been immersed in peptide/steroid land for an upcoming project, and in hopes of better understanding that world I’ve been occasionally injecting myself in the belly with NAD+, this coenzyme that’s important for helping our cells stay energized. It helps with energy, repair, brain fog, and more.

Recently the good folks at i-D asked me to contribute a list of Ins and Outs for 2026. Scrolling, somewhat predictably, was one of my outs, and judging from everyone’s predictions/forecasts for the upcoming year—including my own on SSENSE—it certainly feels like we’ve hit a mass psychosis in terms of Internet fatigue. We grouchy bro.

Last summer, I made it to the final round of interviews for the top editor role at a popular website that deploys affiliate links — which I think would’ve been a fun and interesting job — but I ended up bricking the final interview with TK IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE INDUSTRY when I doubled down on my argument that good taste isn’t intrinsic, and can in fact be learned. That, and my face probably performed some weird contortion when I was asked about my enthusiasm for Amazon Prime Day.

Welcome to the HEAVIES Feelgood Routine, a series that talks to cool, interesting, and creative people about how they design their busy schedules to accommodate good habits.

Welcome to the HEAVIES Feelgood Routine, a series that talks to cool, interesting, and creative people about how they design their busy schedules to accommodate good habits. I spent a lot of my high school years in SoCal ditching school and surfing, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that the hobby re-entered my life.