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This story appears in our Fall 2026 issue featuring cover star Charli XCX, on newsstands September 28th. Want us to come to your place? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your door.
Way back in 2003, when I was a freshman in college, I went into Rite Aid and shoplifted a fat-burning supplement called Stacker 2, a bottle of which cost more than I often had in my checking account. My reasons for doing so weren’t all that complicated: That one Fight Club poster of a shirtless Brad Pitt with his V-lines was hanging everywhere in the dorms, and I reasoned that if I were in possession of ab muscles that improbable, girls might also want to sleep with me.
Not only did that not turn out to be the case, but the supplement made my heart palpitate with the staccato rhythm of a hummingbird’s heartbeat, thus requiring me to lie down instead of, you know, hitting the gym. I’d soon learn that the “secret” ingredient in Stacker 2 was ephedra, plus a metric fuckton of caffeine, 400 milligrams, or roughly the equivalent of four cups of coffee per pill.
The brand name should have been instructive. The pill was not, as my teenage brain reasoned, a magic wand that would nuke fat and conjure a six-pack, but a component of a larger gym tool kit that bodybuilders had been using for decades. It was something designed to work alongside other supplements (creatine, vitamin D, the ground-up horn of a functionally extinct northern white rhino), which I could not afford.
That was my first encounter with the concept of the “stack,” which has, in the decades since, ascended beyond gymbro culture and permeated the male zeitgeist. The linguistic lineage of stack traces back to the Old Norse word stakkr, which referred to large piles of hay. But in today’s vernacular, the word functions as a dudely shorthand: A stack is simply whatever you’re taking (or doing) to build a better version of yourself, from supplements to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, with peptides emerging as the newest (and perhaps most consequential) addition.
Build, of course, is the operative verb that I failed to understand initially, and the term today is legible to both nerds and jocks, if such a distinction even exists anymore. While it’s unclear who exactly coined the term, the word stack as it is currently deployed seems to have emerged from the sweaty primordial goop of the bodybuilding boom of the 1970s, coinciding with the rise of its most famous figure, Arnold Schwarzenegger. In his 1977 autobiography, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, he writes that part of the reason he even came to America in the first place was to train with the world’s best bodybuilders at Gold’s Gym, all in pursuit of getting absolutely massive. As he says, “I taught myself discipline, the strictest kind of discipline. How to be totally in control of my body.”
That discipline at one point included 15 milligrams of oral Dianabol, a steroid that helps rapidly build muscle. (Today, you can purchase Arnold’s Ultimate Stack, which includes creatine monohydrate powder, whey protein, and a prebiotic fiber blend, from the supplement brand Momentous.) It’s about control, as Arnold argues, or at least an attempt at exercising it over oneself. And, really, who could blame us? The American healthcare system today is a Boschian nightmare to navigate. Small surprise that the attendant wellness industry that emerged from the system’s failures is an all-encompassing, come-as-you-are spectrum with Goopy tradwives and carnivores on one end and techno-utopian biohackers, like Bryan Johnson, on the other. The stack might be a symptom of America’s failings: Guys are taking their health into their own hands as a preventive measure, effectively becoming their own doctors, pharmacists, trainers, and designers.
Tech’s embrace of stack is one of the more useful vectors for understanding the term’s popularity among young men. A “full-stack” engineer is someone admired because they can sorta do everything, from the glitzy front-end stuff like the user interface to the back-end doldrums like database management. The phrase was popularized in part by a 2010 blog post by a software engineer named Carlos Bueno, who expounded on the value of a full-stack engineer to a start-up: “People who develop broad skills also tend to develop a good mental model of how different layers of a system behave. … No one can know everything about everything, but you should be able to visualize what happens up and down the stack as an application does its thing.”
Today, the full-stack engineer is almost fetishized for their ability to be in total control of whatever they’re creating. In mechanical terms, the stack tends to operate on a last-in, first-out basis: The most recent element added is the first to be removed should problems arise, not unlike a pile of Fisher-Price plastic rings arranged in the wrong order. Which is also, in theory, how you’re supposed to test a stack: one variable at a time. Nobody does.
Stack, in a sense, is imbued with optimism. It’s about seeing the big picture. Imagination. You’re building an idealized and healthy version of you because (1) death is scary and (2) a surprise $13,000 hospital bill that your insurer declined to cover is even scarier. Is it a cheat code? A flimsy crutch we’re using to prop up our mortality? All of the above? Whatever the case, the stack is mostly about agency, the ability to dream up something better for yourself. For some of us, that includes Tyler Durden V-line obliques that become visible only at 6 percent body fat.